Education: Development of Excellence

Lord Lingfield Excerpts

Thursday 18th October 2012 Lords Chamber

[Lord Lingfield]

My Lords, I, too, thank my noble friend Lady Perry for instigating this important debate. She has, of course, spent a considerable part of her life helping to improve education standards.

I want to talk about a sector of education which is too often the Cinderella of our education services—further education. I declare an interest in that I am currently chairing a government review into certain aspects of further education. Its initial report came out—not without controversy—earlier this year and I hope that the final report will come out by the end of this month. It would be wrong of me, therefore, to pre-empt the conclusions and aspirations of that report. However, there are a couple of important matters which struck me forcefully during our work which I want to mention today.

During the past nine months I have visited many outstanding further education institutions, both in the private and public sector. I have seen much to enthuse me and I have met many wonderful practitioners who are inspiring and work extraordinarily hard. I pay tribute to them. I pay tribute, too, to my honourable friend John Hayes, who was until recently the Minister of State for Further Education. He was much admired in that role and, of course, in his previous shadow role.

Further education has one extraordinarily important and worrying task. Colleges and other providers tell me that government statistics suggest that some 28% of young people who were 16 or 17 when they left school are functionally innumerate. This means that they have the arithmetical skills of the average nine year-old. Some 15% also are illiterate. This means that too often colleges of further education have to be the remedial department of their local primary and secondary schools. This is a shocking circumstance and FE has to pick up the pieces far too often. Too often also it diverts them from their primary task of equipping young people with the workplace skills which will enable them to found their careers.

This is not for one moment to denigrate the enormously important work which goes on in the teaching of basic skills in our further education colleges but merely to hope that the reforms which the Government are putting into place, and which my noble friend Lady Perry has described extraordinarily well, will in the end make it unnecessary for further education lecturers in further education colleges to teach what are basically kindergarten skills to 16 year-olds. We seriously need to improve upon that.

Schools have to play their part—and, as we have heard from my noble friend Lady Perry, some of them do not do very well at the moment—if we are to provide this country with the technically accomplished workforce which will enable it to outperform its competitors in a deep and difficult economic environment.