Skills: Importance for the UK Economy and Quality of Life

Lord Lucas Excerpts

Thursday 9th May 2024 Lords Chamber

[Lord Lucas (Con)]

My Lords, I thank the noble Lord, Lord Aberdare, for the chance to have this debate.

I work very closely with the Better Hiring Institute, an organisation I recommend to noble Lords. A trend that we are increasingly seeing is for skills-based hiring. That is where, rather than listing qualifications or CV items, a company gets down to the core of what skills it needs for a particular job and then goes looking for a match. As the noble Baroness, Lady Fairhead, said, skills change rapidly. Companies look for the skills that they need now. For example, if a new AI product comes out, they want their people to have command of it—if somebody is offering a course in it, that is what they want. This is therefore driving a real interest in micro-credentials: short courses that will bring someone up to speed in the area that an employer needs.

Together, these trends offer great opportunities to government, if government will take an interest and involve itself. First, if the Government will work with the recruitment industry, which is certainly prepared to work with them, there is the opportunity to gather data to get a grip on what skills are required and where, as well as on how the trends are developing. Secondly, on the other side, there is the opportunity to help the process of moving into micro-credentials by helping develop an underlying system for identifying which of these have quality—again, that is partly about processing data, but it is an area where you want a very reliable source, so we get back to the issue of individual learning accounts and all the scams that went with them. We need to integrate that sort of structure of learning with proper pastoral care and careers guidance and work that into the structure of apprenticeships and other larger qualifications. I hope that the Open University will take a close interest in that.

This comes back to what other noble Lords have said about the need for employers to take a very close interest in driving training. The noble Lord, Lord Marks of Hale, and the noble Baroness, Lady Lane-Fox of Soho, made that point in the context of LSIPs. To pick up on what my noble friend Lord Lilley said, we must allow no escape via immigration. We have to train our own people. We want to pay our own people more and to have a workforce with ever-rising skills, capability and pay. We must not allow that to be undermined by people going abroad to buy the skills in cheaply. We must focus people on training here. As my noble friend Lord Lingfield said, the links between good education organisations and industry, so that education is in tune with what industry needs, is a very important thing to see develop.

Turning to schools, noble Lords know that I am the proprietor of the Good Schools Guide. In the next few years, I suspect that we will have a real look at what we want a school leaver to know. I am sure that my noble friend Lord Baker will be at the forefront of that discussion. The Government have shown, through their interest in the ABS, the idea that they want school leavers to have a broader understanding of things than we are providing now. The direction is clearly there.

Micro-credentials will again have a strong role here. It used to be the case that the Open University provided courses that people could do as a supplement to A-levels, but that was driven out by universities being unconstructive in valuing them. Given that universities will now take qualifications from all over the world and from all kinds of backgrounds, they are being very unhelpful in so narrowly insisting on the qualifications they get out of the UK school system. I hope that they will become partners in broadening education—and, indeed, in broadening the education that they provide themselves. My degree in physics consisted of nuclear physics; it did not go beyond that, not even to understand how the weather works. My daughter’s education in the arts does not involve anything to do with economics or business. Why not? We are not educating people for the world that they will have to face outside, so we need to look at that.

That comes back to what many noble Lords have been saying about BTECs. T-levels are too massive and too specialised. If we are broadening people’s education, that is not the road to go down. We will learn something from them, but BTECs occupy a much more important place for many of our young people. We absolutely must guard that.

I will pick up on something that the noble Lord, Lord Hampton, said; Shakespeare, yes, but let us learn it the way it was written—which is to be performed and to be understood. My wife taught Shakespeare in prisons, and it went down a storm because they understood the stories and liked the bloodshed. To learn it as prose criticism is deadly. We want to get back to a shared culture; no country survives without a shared culture. Something like performing Shakespeare is a really important part of that.