Institute for Apprenticeships and Technical Education (Transfer of Functions etc) Bill [HL]

Lord Lucas Excerpts

2nd reading
Tuesday 22nd October 2024 Lords Chamber

[Lord Lucas (Con)]

My Lords, I declare my interests in the Good Schools Guide and as a member of the council of City & Guilds.

It is good to see a skills Bill here so early on and being tackled with such impetus—it gives me great hope for what this Government might achieve—although I celebrate IfATE’s achievements and our own achievements, and I join the noble Baroness, Lady McGregor-Smith, and my noble friend Lord Effingham in what they have said about that. But this Government clearly think we must do better—a phrase I recognise from my school reports.

I hope that the Government will start by taking the advice of their own excellent Science Advisory Council and the Chief Scientific Adviser, Professor Viner, and establish from the outset of this change a set of metrics that will enable them to know how well they are doing and assemble the evidence of what works, understand where the gaps in that evidence are and what they are going to do about it, and fundamentally evaluate the process that they are setting out on, from the start, so that whatever happens we end up with a really good body of knowledge as to how to improve the skills system in this country.

I hope that the Government will work back through the conclusions they arrive at on skills in their schools policy. I have been gently disturbed recently by some of the cuts made in science spending in schools. I share with the noble Lord, Lord Hampton, the thought that there are some basic skills that we are not teaching in schools at the moment which are pretty fundamental to the subsequent skills agenda. At a time when we are reforming the Civil Service—the future fast stream will be 50% STEM rather than 10%, as it is at the moment—we need to look right back into our school system to see where these skills are going to be coming from. I hope too that the Government will take a critical look at our qualifications landscape. I like T-levels, but we need BTECs alongside them because we are not providing for anything but the brightest students if we insist on T-levels.

I hope we will look at university courses that say they are teaching skills. If you go back a few years, the Next Gen. report showed that 80% of the courses at universities which said that they were something to do with the computer games industry were rubbish and just using that in their titles as a way of seducing students. The same situation pertains. If you are looking—as doubtless many noble Lords have—to help your children choose a university course, the titles are there but there is no information as to what children go on to do afterwards. Is this a good course for getting into the industry that it says it is about? Is it actually teaching what those industries want? The information is not there. Given how much students are investing in their education, we really owe them better information on which to make those decisions.

At the other end of the scale, I hope the Government will pay attention to the developing world of micro- credentials. The idea that you can pick up someone, give them a relatively short bit of training and have them ready to go and be useful is the structure of training in a lot of industries—it certainly is in IT and a lot of the creative industries. We need to work out how to work with that. What IfATE has done to help bring the bigger qualifications up to speed more quickly is admirable, but the world is changing so fast—for instance, in artificial intelligence and cybersecurity—and we need to understand how to move at that pace and how to offer pastoral support to people whose careers start to be made up of an accumulation of bits and pieces that there happens to be a demand for at the time.

To pick up on what the noble Lord, Lord Ravensdale, said, I hope that we will see an emphasis on local skills, but somewhere in my town of Eastbourne there is a nuclear engineer, and that will never be picked up by a local skills policy. We need to understand the needs and talents of children and young people and not just the needs of the local industry, and make sure that we are offering the education that our children need, rather than just the education that their employers are after.

I turn to the abolition of IfATE. I very much support all that the noble Baroness, Lady McGregor-Smith, said about it. I saw the previous Government on several occasions do the exact opposite, but it is hugely important to preserve the network of relationships that has been built up by an institution which is being supplanted. It takes a long time for these personal relationships to subsist; they exist at not only the senior level but the junior level. Those relationships need to be preserved; you do not want to have to rebuild them from the base up. We also need to build a structure—which is not easy in the Civil Service—where such relationships can be maintained. We cannot have endlessly rotating civil servants responsible for maintaining long-term relationships with industry. A sense of career and institutional memory has to be built into this.

A last question for the Government is this: how does the Careers & Enterprise Company fit into this?