Skills and Post-16 Education Bill [HL]
Lord Lucas ExcerptsMonday 19th July 2021
(3 years, 5 months ago)
Lords ChamberRead Full debate Skills and Post-16 Education Act 2022 View all Skills and Post-16 Education Act 2022 Debates Read Hansard Text Read Debate Ministerial Extracts Amendment Paper: HL Bill 5-IV(Rev) Fourth marshalled list for Committee - (19 Jul 2021)
Lord Lucas (Con) [V]
My Lords, it is always a pleasure to follow the noble Lord, Lord Adonis, in such fine form, but I am going to argue with his conclusion on degree apprenticeships and other higher apprenticeships. They have been a great boost to the quality of British management. We have needed for a long time to put more effort and skill into that level of business. We needed better management; we needed more and better managers. The money going in that direction has not been a waste—it is just that we needed rather more money in addition to go towards young people.
I am not sure whether the pattern of apprenticeship that we dreamed up, and now have some experience of, has really proved itself. If I understood the Minister aright on a previous day, we are going to make a serious attempt to provide apprenticeship-style funding and opportunities for people in the creative sector where the pattern of employment has so far precluded apprenticeships. We are going to look at, I believe, something much more akin to a series of shorter-term training opportunities, with something that glues it together into a career progression, such as a relationship with a learning provider or someone else independent of an employer.
That is a much better pattern for a lot of young people than an apprenticeship. They can get the skills they need to get into a job and to regularly have opportunities to upskill, not a year or three years at a time, but two or three months at a time. It is a pattern that has evolved quite successfully in the IT and creative industries. The lack of support and effective government funding has had some unfortunate socially exclusionary consequences—people have to be able to afford the training themselves rather than having support. I am delighted that the Government are coming into that area.
I do not think we should assume that, just because we dreamed up apprenticeships at levels 2 and 3, in a lot of cases they have proved themselves. They have in some places, but it would suit young people in particular and employers better to have something made up of shorter-term elements with the pastoral care—particularly for small companies—being provided by experts rather than randomly through an overstressed corporate HR department.
That would provide quite a good structure for looking after the interests of returners and career changers. We ought to be providing these people with a real opportunity to contribute to the economy in the way they can. That will involve a degree of retraining. There should be no hurdles as to the level someone has reached previously. They might well have a degree in Greats but want to retrain as a motor engineer, and it does not help if they are not able to access the right level of provision for that change. We ought to be supporting that.
We ought to do it through grants initially. I agree with my noble and learned friend Lord Clarke that for someone coming out of education and into their early years of economic life with no substantial qualifications, to have a chance to get something under their belt is important. However, it should be what is necessary to get on the ladder for the career they are looking at. That may well be a level 2 or 3 qualification, or it may be something much shorter.
If you are looking at doing something more substantial than that, I do not think that we need do more than make sure that people can access the loans system to get themselves on track. However, we ought to be being fair. I like the spirit of these two amendments, and I hope that the Government will move in their direction.
Lord Layard (Lab)
My Lords, I rise to support Amendment 76. As the noble and learned Lord, Lord Clarke, has argued so powerfully, we are, as a nation, very good at producing graduates and pretty bad at producing skills for the other 50%.
I start with a quite extraordinary statistic: if you ask what proportion of all the 18 year-olds in our country are not in any form of education or work-based learning, the answer is 30%. That is an absolutely incredible situation, and it really is time that we addressed that problem. It is a problem for our national productivity and, of course, it is a big problem for the subsequent incomes of those people. If we are looking for priorities, which is what this is all about, the central aim of post-school policy development must now be to deal with that problem and get more of our young people up to level 3—or at least level 2.
The lifetime skills guarantee is of course a very welcome proposal towards that end—giving a first level 2 or 3 to everyone, free of charge, irrespective of age—but it should be put into law. If the Government are serious about it, they should have no reservations on that point. That is covered in the first bit of this amendment. However, the more substantial issue, to which my noble friend Lord Adonis referred, is how to deliver that guarantee. Unless the places are there, there is no point in a person feeling that they have the right to free education if, when they look around, they see nothing that they like. They would not, in effect, have a right—they have that right only if the money automatically follows their choice.
What we are saying to the Government—I hope that the Minister will reflect on this—is that there is actually no chance that the guarantee can be delivered through the existing system of contracting with the colleges. In that system, each college has a capped budget, the size of which it negotiates annually with the Education and Skills Funding Agency. That agency, in turn, has a capped total budget, which, currently—even taking into account recent increases—is half of what it was in 2010. So that is what our present funding system enables us to do for the other 50%. We can do whatever we will, but, unless we do something about that funding system, we will not be able to deliver the right to a lifetime skills guarantee.
The contrast between what faces those people and what faces people going down the academic route is extreme because if you go to university or sixth form, the money of course follows you automatically. That is why our academic education is among the best in the world. It is difficult to think of anything more completely unjust in our social arrangements in this country than the comparative treatment of people going down the academic route and of those wanting to go into further education.
We have to dynamise the system of further education in the same way that we have dynamised universities: by enabling any institution that thinks that it can attract the people who are entitled to put the course on, knowing that the money will automatically follow. It is very nice that we have the “lifetime skills guarantee” expression because we can say that any student who is accepted by a college should automatically be funded for exercising their guarantee. What is a guarantee if the money does not come with it? It should be a guarantee of free education, funded in an automatic fashion. We want our colleges to lead in transforming the skills of our non-graduates, which, as I say, is more important than any problem relating to graduates. Let us take the colleges off the leash and pay them for any eligible student who they can attract—that is the only way that we can implement the lifetime skills guarantee. I hope that the Minister can reflect on how that guarantee could be implemented in any other way.
I turn finally to apprenticeships. Again, as many noble Lords have already said, we have to be clear about what the really big problems are, as opposed to other things that would also be desirable but are not of the highest priority. As I said at the beginning, the biggest problem is that so many young people are entering adult life without any proper training—we absolutely have to address that. The key moment occurs before people are 25; we must do better for people at that stage. To put that in context: 30% of people have had no form of work-based training or education. This is a problem of opportunity and of places. We are still trying to get the figures, but we know that there is huge excess demand from young people for places on apprenticeships. There are people who want apprenticeships and cannot get them. Finding a mechanism to generate those places is absolutely critical. At the Youth Unemployment Committee, to which the noble Lord, Lord Baker, referred, we constantly have evidence of this huge excess demand. We are trying to get the numbers; we do not have them yet, but everyone says that that demand is there.
We can only solve that problem if we use the apprenticeship levy to generate those places. One could imagine all kinds of subtle ways to incentivise employers to spend the apprenticeship money on younger people, but I do not think that they would work. That is why this very simple rule—two-thirds of apprenticeship funding going to people under the age of 25—is the most direct approach. Of course, it has to be for people taking apprenticeships at levels 2 or 3 because, if we said “under 25” but not the second part, we would see that they would want to fund degree and graduate apprenticeships. They would want to recruit bright young graduates and not bother about the other half of the population.
I stress the need to focus not just on the places but on the money for the places, because places for younger people are cheaper than those for the older people. As the amendment says, two-thirds of the money should go to people starting at levels 2 or 3 when aged under 25. Of course, I am very keen on degree and graduate apprenticeships but, if employers want to do those, they should come from the other third of the money or their own resources.
This whole amendment is about how to generate the places for young people to get the proper start in life that we want them to have and, thereby, earn a decent wage and contribute to national productivity. Such things do not happen just by saying, “You’ll have a guarantee”; you have to put it into law, as the other amendment also says, and then have proper ways of funding both the guarantee and the apprenticeship.
It is true that the Government now have the right aspirations. We are in a new situation with huge opportunity, and the skills White Paper absolutely heads in the right direction, but this amendment is, in a sense, a test of how serious the Government are about actually realising their admirable aspirations. I hope that the Minister will find the amendment helpful.
Lord Lucas
Member’s explanatory statement
The purpose of this amendment is to make it clear that the role of an institution in the further education sector is to ensure that there are no gaps in local provision, and that the Secretary of State must take account of provision from other providers that can reasonably be accessed locally e.g. online.
Lord Lucas (Con) [V]
My Lords, the question I ask with Amendment 76A is: who is making sure, in this new world that we are creating, that the overall educational provision at sixth form and beyond is as it should be? I hope we are not dividing the world into academic and technical; there is such a broad stretch across that divide. I hoped that we were trying to heal that divide, but we seem to be creating new structures for driving technical education that do not obviously or easily fit into the structures we have for driving academic education.
On technical education, the Minister told me last time we were here that the Sussex Chamber of Commerce would be a trailblazer. That is an area that is not obviously different from the South East local enterprise partnership. The main differences for the constituent parts of Sussex are that this is a new entity unused to this sort of responsibility; that it has none of the old associations, familiarities and relationships that go with, in this case, either of the local enterprise partnerships that cover the area; and that it is not congruent in any way with the providers of ordinary education, which are, at that level, East Sussex and West Sussex. It is not clear how they will have a co-ordinated voice in dealing with academic provision, because a lot of the academic provision in our part of the world is provided by further education institutions.
If we look at what is happening in Eastbourne, where I live, we are a town of 130,000 people with no substantial academic sixth form provision. There is one fine free school, but it is small. There is an excellent FE college, whose A-level provision consists of business studies, English, history and sociology. In this new arrangement that we are looking at, who will be responsible for making sure that the young people of Eastbourne have the educational opportunities they deserve? It is not clear to me that there is anyone effective to do that without making a change, such as I have suggested in this amendment, to ensure that the FE colleges sweep up where the schools have failed to provide. I beg to move.
Lord Adonis (Lab)
My Lords, the points from the noble Lord, Lord Lucas, are very well made regarding the need to see adequate local provision of technical education, including, as his amendment would provide,
“academic qualifications, taking into account other provision accessible locally”.
I would like to raise one very specific matter. I do not expect the noble Baroness to be able to answer me immediately, but I would be very grateful if she could write to me about it. A very significant aspect of further education—by which I mean post-16 academic education—is the availability of the international baccalaureate. I would be grateful if the noble Baroness could write to let me know what the recent trends are in the availability and provision of the international baccalaureate—availability in terms of how many providers there are in the state system, and provision in terms of the take-up of places over recent years.
I see this as a very important part of academic further education provision. There is a bit of history here that I would like to draw to the attention of the House, because this may be an issue we wish to return to on Report. One issue being debated in respect of this Bill, and which is a live debate in the whole of the post-14 education arena, is what should happen to GCSEs and whether we should move to a more baccalaureate-type system. I am sympathetic to the argument in both respects: that we should conceive of the phase of education from 14 to 18 or 19 as a single phase and that we should move to a broader provision of subjects as part of the mainstream academic curriculum—and indeed the vocational post-16 curriculum—rather than the very traditionally narrow curriculum we have had, with the emphasis typically on three A-levels or technical subjects.
A generation ago, the introduction of the international baccalaureate sought to deal at the post-16 level with this very narrow academic subject focus by introducing a now well-established international course, which is taught in international schools and many schools within national jurisdictions. The international baccalaureate requires six subjects to be taught and studied between the ages of 16 and 18, leading to the diploma of the international baccalaureate, which must include mathematics, a science and a modern foreign language besides, obviously, the language which students study as a matter of course.
It is my view—and the view of a large number of educationalists—that the international baccalaureate is a superior course to A-levels. When I was the Minister responsible for these matters, the judgment we reached was that it was too difficult a reform to carry through, for all kinds of reasons, to replace A-levels entirely with a baccalaureate-type system. It was our policy to make the international baccalaureate much more widely available—and available in state schools as well as private school. As the Minister may know, the international baccalaureate is quite widely available in the private sector but, going back 15 years, it was hardly available at all in the state system.
At the time, we provided a significant incentive for the teaching of the international baccalaureate by requiring that each local education authority area should have at least one provider of the international baccalaureate in either a school, sixth form or further education college. This led to quite a big take-up of the IB, which was a positive development in the education sector and led to a raising of the skill level and an extension of choice.
However, after 2010, the requirement for there to be at least one IB provider in each local education authority area was dropped—not, I think, because the then Education Secretary, Michael Gove, was against the IB but because of funding cuts and insufficient funding in the system to provide for it. My understanding is that the number of providers offering the IB and the number of students studying it have plummeted. I see this as a retrograde step and a significant denial of choice in the education system, particularly for students in the state system because, as I said, there are providers in the private sector and parents can choose to pay for their children to study at schools or colleges that provide the IB.
Can the Minister provide—either to the Committee now or, if she unable to do so, in writing to me and other Members; I perfectly understand that she may not have the figures in her brief—an update on the actual position with the IB in terms of numbers of providers and students and how those numbers have changed in recent years?
The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State, Department for Education and Department for International Trade (Baroness Berridge) (Con)
My Lords, Amendment 76A relates to intervention in FE college and sixth-form college corporations and designated institutions.
The measures that we set out in Clause 22, to which the amendment relates, will enable the Secretary of State to intervene where the education or training has failed adequately to meet local needs. It is, as the noble Lord, Lord Watson, outlined, a new duty under Clause 5, and the corresponding change to the enforcement powers comes in response to putting that duty on local providers. This builds on the existing intervention powers under the Further and Higher Education Act 1992 by enabling the Secretary of State to direct the governing body to restructure. This measure is part of a package of reforms, including the introduction of local skills improvement plans and the new duty under Clause 5. However, I can assure noble Lords that the statutory intervention powers are intended to be used only as a last resort—that is, when all other alternative courses of action have failed to secure the improvements necessary to deliver for local learners.
The amendment from my noble friend Lord Lucas seeks to ensure that the Secretary of State takes into account academic qualifications and other local provision when considering how well local needs have been met. I join the noble Lord, Lord Watson, in being fascinated by my noble friend’s descriptions of Eastbourne. I can confirm for him that, at East Sussex College, 118 students are enrolled on A-level courses as their core study course, which is more than 50 in each of the two years. He also mentioned Gildredge House, a free school with around 65 students on level 3 academic programmes. I understand that East Sussex College is undertaking on each of its campuses a review of the specialisms offer that it makes to ensure that it best fits with local needs, and that it is considering enrolment activity and the level of demand from young people.
The assessment we envisage under the Bill will therefore not be restricted to a particular type of provision. Although the Secretary of State must consider the priorities set out in any LSIP, this does not exclude other provisions that are relevant to local needs—including academic provision specifically—also being reflected in the assessment. If there is a failure to meet needs in a local area, there is a responsibility on all the providers serving that area to work together to agree the changes required to bring about improvement. Every college involved in meeting the needs in a local area should be accountable for how well those needs are met.
I hope that these brief remarks provide some reassurance to my noble friend, and I ask him to consider withdrawing his amendment.
Lord Lucas (Con) [V]
My Lords, I am grateful to my noble friend for that answer. I would be delighted to entertain her in Eastbourne for a day or two, particularly in this weather; I think she would enjoy it.
I understand that there are processes that are supposed to deliver what a local area wants, but they seem to be becoming ever more remote and fractured under the arrangements in this Bill. I remain unconvinced that what we are setting up in this Bill will deliver better provision than we have at the moment, but I will read my noble friend’s answer carefully and with interest. I beg leave to withdraw the amendment.
Lord Lucas (Con) [V]
My Lords, these essay mills are getting ever more sophisticated and are employing in some cases quite high levels of artificial intelligence to disguise what they are creating based on existing sources so that the cheating software cannot find it. I suspect that there is no reasonable solution if we are to continue with a system where essays produced in unsupervised conditions count towards a qualification. However, there is some hope, and I encourage the Government to look down this avenue in the work that has been done, for instance, by FutureLearn on analysing the pattern of keystrokes made by a particular individual typing an essay and working on that essay while they are in the course of preparing it. That sort of analysis is very difficult to duplicate and defeat. If we use technology to defeat technology, we can again be confident about the quality of essays.
Lord Addington (LD)
My Lords, my noble friend—despite the fact that he has been defeated by the wonders of technology—here addresses one of the other problems we have. Something went from students who knew certain essays would come up in certain courses at certain times, and vaguely plagiarising them—that went on just about everywhere—to an industry that means students can gain a qualification. Continuous assessment is reckoned to be quite a good way of learning or of assessing somebody’s ability, or has been in many cases. That is particularly vulnerable to some of these services. The sums of money involved are considerable, because people are paying for it. Furthermore, a student who does this is then open to blackmail for the rest of their professional career. Their qualification, which is the way they make their living for the rest of their life, could be invalidated or they could have a black mark against them. They might not have to pay just a few hundred pounds but could end up paying tens of thousands over the course of their lifetime.
I hope that the Minister will give us a positive answer. My noble friend is quite assiduous on this—he has a Private Member’s Bill going through. If I may appeal to those who are planning government business, it might be a quicker and easier way to accept this amendment or one like it than to have to have an entire Bill go through Parliament. There is not much hope of that but let us try.
Can we find out what the Government are planning to do about this? Technical checking of every essay might be possible—I do not know the state of play of the technology—but everything will have to be entered to be assessed by it, and I am not sure how long that takes. We will have to look at this and at things such as dissertations, or studying by oneself, which are a traditional part of long-term studies in further and higher education. These cannot really be done in any other way than a person working independently, unless there is a lot more monitoring or a lot more time spent on it by staff.
We will have to deal with this problem, or at least learn to live with it and minimise its impact. I hope that the Minister can tell us that there is a coherent plan to at least display the dangers of blackmail and coercion that people are exposed to throughout the rest of an academic career. This is a real problem, and if we can solve it or at least make it slightly better now, surely we should.
Lord Lucas (Con) [V]
My Lords, I start with the areas where I agree with the noble Lord, Lord Adonis, and principally join in his praises for Sir Kevin Satchwell, a truly extraordinary, outstanding head; there are only ever a very few people like him in the system. The more we can listen to and learn by him the better. I certainly agree with the noble Lord, Lord Adonis, that the core to getting careers education right is to have someone strong in each school charged with that responsibility. The focus of parents’ interest in schools is: where am I sending my child in life? What is their future? Where will they end up? What am I equipping them to be able to do? University is just a stepping-stone; it is the quality of insight and advice available in school that is really important, as is the status given to that within the school. Taking an interest in a pupil’s career has to be a high-status activity—up there with sport in some schools and mathematics in others. It is just as important. The people doing it should be painted wearing just as much purple as their academic colleagues.
This is something that ought perhaps to be secured by making it clear that Ofsted will take a real interest in the quality of the advice being provided in schools. None the less, looking at the history of careers advice, something has always been greatly lacking, because, unless they have had an extraordinarily broad career, someone working in a school has access only to a pretty partial view of what is going on in the world; certainly not a broad view of what areas are developing and how things are changing. It would be good to use the opportunity of this Bill. I hope that others will agree on an amendment for Report that puts careers advice and guidance right at the centre of this process.
Lord Aberdare (CB)
My Lords, I am a believer in the value of the Kickstart scheme and would like to see it extended in the manner suggested by Amendment 87, in the names of the noble Lords, Lord Storey—Lord Storey-cum-Addington—and Lord Shipley, following a review of its operation and experience to date.
My own former employability training business was involved some years ago in the delivery of the Labour Government’s Future Jobs Fund, which, like Kickstart, enabled employers to take on young people for six months, with their salary paid by the Government. Many of the young people involved had never worked before and faced significant challenges in entering the job market, including lack of work-readiness and employability skills, poor educational attainment, lack of funds for travel or even suitable clothing, chaotic lifestyles, lack of aspiration, substance abuse, and records of offending and imprisonment. A period of six months’ employment, with employers willing to make initial allowances for their circumstances and much personal support from the organisations delivering the programme—including Barnardo’s and Nacro, by which we were contracted—was enough for many of them to acquire the skills and behaviours needed to become reliable and useful employees, often with those same employers they had been with for six months. This is not a low-cost approach and not for everyone, but I believe it is an effective way of enabling many young people in these specific circumstances to make a successful transition into work.
Kickstart has got off to a rather bumpy start, as we have heard from other noble Lords, with delays and difficulties both in employers being accepted on to the programme—initially through the gateway process, which has fortunately been removed, but there are still quite a few hurdles to get over—and, more particularly, in recruiting candidates through the rules of the Jobcentre Plus scheme. But I believe it offers the right approach for the young people in the target group I have described. I hope the Minister can tell us what plans the Government have to review the scheme so far and to consider whether, and in what form, it might be further extended to perhaps meet the specific needs of the most challenging young people within the overall skills system created by the Bill.
Lord Lucas (Con) [V]
My Lords, I too am a fan of Kickstart, and I hope that the Government will consolidate and build on it. A review, as proposed in this amendment, seems a timely suggestion. I support a lot of what the noble Baroness, Lady Fox of Buckley, said, and I would add only two emphases. First, there are certainly some occasions when a Kickstart six-month placement ought to be combined with a course of training. For instance, if we employed Kickstarters to do environmental work, it would not do them much good if they had not achieved their chainsaw certification and other necessary qualifications to enable them to continue in the industry. Sometimes the Kickstart placement ought to be bundled in with training, and that ought to be made easy.
Secondly, £1,500 for looking after a Kickstarter is really not much. You have to have spare employee time substantially beyond that value to make good use of a Kickstarter and to give them a really good experience. I hope the Government will review people’s experience on that front and consider what it would take to really recompense employers—particularly small employers, who often do not have a lot of spare capacity—for the effort they are making, day to day, looking after a Kickstarter.
Lord Adonis (Lab)
My Lords, all three noble Lords who have spoken, and the noble Baroness, Lady Fox, have made pertinent points. I will make a suggestion and ask a question. Unusually, the House has it within its powers to cause an inquiry into Kickstart, because a Select Committee is currently proceeding on youth unemployment. Indeed, my understanding is that it is being chaired by the noble Lord, Lord Shipley, who is a colleague of the noble Lord, Lord Addington. May I therefore suggest that he asks his noble friend to ensure that that Select Committee examines Kickstart and makes recommendations to the House on its future, which of course will carry weight with both the House and the Government? My question for the Minister is this. I assume that an independent evaluation of Kickstart is taking place. Can she confirm whether that is the case? If not, obviously it is desirable that one should.
Lord Adonis (Lab)
My Lords, as ever from the noble Lord, Lord Willetts, these are excellent suggestions and I strongly commend them to the Government.
I would just like to add to his second proposal, which is to
“facilitate universities’ communication through the Student Loans Company with their graduates without passing any personal data”.
He said that this was so that universities could market to the graduates what the universities can do for them, which is excellent in respect of lifelong learning. However, equally valuable is marketing to the graduates what they can do for the universities, in particular what mentoring opportunities they can provide for current students.
As noble Lords know, students from better-off backgrounds, particularly those who have gone to schools with strong university and graduate traditions, provide a dense web of networks, employment opportunities, advice on employment destinations and so on. Graduates who are not endowed with those advantages, even while they are at university, do not have the benefits of such developed networks. Graduates could be engaged much more systematically in providing mentoring opportunities, particularly, as the noble Lord, Lord Willetts, says, at the point at which universities generally lose contact with their graduates, which is often quite soon after graduation, though the more years that pass, the more they lose contact. When graduates are 10, 15 or 20 years out of university, they are reaching senior positions in their professions and are often in quite niche organisations, such as voluntary organisations. Advertising to them the opportunity to mentor students, which, in my experience, graduates are very willing to do, could be a real and significant benefit to existing students.
Like other noble Lords, I am often contacted by students, just by virtue of the fact that they know who I am, asking for mentoring opportunities and seeking advice. There are very few of us who would not provide that as a matter of course, and I think the same would be true of graduates. If they were harnessed in a systematic way, which this would make possible, it could be transformational for the life chances and career destinations of graduates, particularly those who do not come from graduate families or from schools with lots of graduate connections.
Lord Lucas (Con) [V]
My Lords, I thoroughly support the amendment in the name of my noble friend Lord Willetts and the addendum to it by the noble Lord, Lord Adonis.
The Student Loans Company is a real treasure trove of opportunity. The long-term relationship it has with graduates is a way of improving our university system over time, improving the lives of the graduates themselves and—my particular interest—improving the decisions taken by potential students as to which courses they should pay attention to.
I would go a bit further than my noble friend Lord Willetts and encourage the feedback to universities from the Student Loans Company to include something that puts some context into the raw earnings figure. Earnings can be a very one-dimensional view of what is happening to alumni. Not everything—not every decision or judgment as to the quality of a course—should be based, let alone entirely so, on the earnings profile of its graduates. You want something much more than that, which is why I absolutely support what my noble friend proposes in the second part of his amendment, in contract with graduates.
As he says, it is really difficult to get universities to tell you what their graduates are up to. I am somewhat relieved to discover that that is because they do not know. This is a vital piece of information for prospective students: if you are going to judge what you should invest upwards of £50,000 and three years of your life in, you want to know what it leads to. Very few historians end up as historians. Few physicists end up as physicists. People go off in lots of different directions, but the skills and the understandings that you have gained as part of your university degree absolutely help shape what you go on to.
To know which courses—even the very academic ones—lead to people becoming professional writers, say, is a really valuable piece of information if that is the direction that you want to take. You have to go back a decade or so to the Next Gen. report from Ian Livingstone, which looked at university courses that had “computer games” in the title, to see his analysis that 85% of those courses produced graduates that the industry would not hire because the courses had been designed not with the industry in mind but just in terms of catching the attention of students. We owe our students better than that.
The real source of information that they ought to be able to see through to is: where do students go on to, where does this lead to and perhaps, beyond that, are they happy? Are the alumni pleased with where life has taken them since university? Do they look back on their courses with pleasure? Coming back to the first part of the noble Lord’s amendment—do they have insights about the courses that they were on that ought to be fed back to the universities so that they can improve their offering?
There is as much potential for the nation in this as there is in the national health data. We are taking, mining and using that seriously, professionally and carefully, and we are setting about that in government and in the legislation to come. We absolutely ought to be doing that in the case of the Student Loans Company.
My noble friend is quite right that there is a lot of value to be offered in return. It took Oxford 40 years to realise that perhaps someone who had spent three years of their life studying physics was interested in physics—and, therefore, if it combined its “Please will you give us some money?” letters with an opportunity to keep up with the latest trends in physics, it might have more success. That should absolutely be extended to looking for opportunities for career support and for ways in which the learning and understanding of the university can be accessed again to make it a lifelong relationship. We need to build that sort of lifelong relationship into learning providers around apprenticeships as well. There is a lot of value for a person in having somewhere that they can turn to in order to refresh their skills and understand what opportunities now lie open to them.
I also very much approve of what the noble Lord, Lord Adonis, said about mentoring. This is difficult—it is a very tricky relationship—so I would not like to pitch anyone into mentoring without giving them some training first. However, if you have been trained and if you are supported, neither of which come free, it can be a very rewarding experience for both sides—but it needs to be done well. We ought to look at it being done cross-university. It does not seem to me that all the experiences of Oxford graduates ought to be confined to young people at Oxford; we ought to be able to spread these things around a bit to have wider access than that when we are designing the scheme.
However, if we do it with one of the professional mentoring companies, I think we would get something like that, because the focus will very much be on how to help the uncertain and disadvantaged, rather than just compounding the advantage of those who know already what a good thing mentoring can be. So, altogether, this is a really worthwhile amendment. I hope that the Government will take it seriously, and I look forward to my noble friend’s response.
Skills and Post-16 Education Bill [HL]
Lord Lucas ExcerptsThursday 15th July 2021
(3 years, 5 months ago)
Lords ChamberRead Full debate Skills and Post-16 Education Act 2022 View all Skills and Post-16 Education Act 2022 Debates Read Hansard Text Read Debate Ministerial Extracts Amendment Paper: HL Bill 5-III(Rev) Revised Third marshalled list for Committee - (15 Jul 2021)
Lord Lucas
Member’s explanatory statement
The purpose of this amendment is to ensure that the employer representative body is required to have an understanding of skills that are required nationally, and that may be required by local potential students but may not yet be required by local businesses.
Lord Lucas (Con) [V]
My Lords, I shall speak also to Amendments 33 and 85. All three amendments in this group address the same question of providing access for the local skills improvement organisation to clear and consistent information on skills that are required nationally. I am very grateful to my noble friend for announcing the trailblazers today and am delighted to see that I find myself living in one of them—which is three hours wide, and that is on a good day. It is really quite hard to see how an organisation will hold together a coherent view across the many businesses composed in a spread that wide. It is also hard to see, given the current make-up of the chamber, how it will have access to a deep skills base in areas where Sussex is not currently strong.
There are a lot of skills required in the City of London which are not well represented in Sussex, which is not one of the great centres of the IT industry. There are a lot of areas where it does extremely well, but it is hard to see how you can take an organisation such as the Sussex chamber of commerce, which does very well in trying to knit together the varied economic landscape across this very hard-to-travel region and turn it into something that knows everything about skills in the local area, let alone something that has a real grip on skills nationally, unless we are providing it with a strong source of information on the national picture that it can build into the foundations of what it is trying to achieve locally.
When we last met, my noble friend the Minister referred to the skills and productivity board, which was announced last September and launched in November, with a letter from the Secretary of State saying that within the next 12 months he hoped to have information from the board on what the national skills needs were, how that would change over the next 10 years and how we should be focusing on productivity growth. As of today, as far as I can find, the organisation has no website; it has not reached out to people to discuss these affairs, and the only activity that I can discover is a contract it put out for a scoping study to help it develop a functional skills taxonomy by the end of June. This does not feel like a body that is moving with pace. It certainly does not feel like it is going to get anywhere effective by the end of November.
Perhaps my noble friend can fill us in a bit more than the skills and productivity board has felt willing to do on where it has got to and why a body that is largely composed of professors will be able to fulfil the remit it has been given. It is crucial that the Government get this right, and I am not at all clear that they have.
Baroness Morris of Yardley (Lab)
My Lords, I support these amendments. This Bill is full of good intentions and starts with a lot of good will—people want it to succeed and the nation needs it to succeed—but it is becoming increasingly clear that the backbone, the foundations on which we can build other things, is just not there. It is missing.
I understand it is difficult to know what to put in legislation and what to develop as you go along. I understand that that balance is always difficult, but I think the Government are erring on the wrong side. Like almost all the amendments we have been considering today, this is another one asking for clarification of the Government’s role in setting a national skills strategy, and in particular—the noble Lord, Lord Lucas, has rightly brought up on previous occasions—their role in almost future-proofing the skills needs of the nation.
Local people might know what needs to be done to provide a skilled workforce for the present economy, but I am not sure they have got time to speculate on the what the economic and skills needs might be in 10, 20 or 30 years’ time. That needs a broader discussion and I am left wondering again what the role of the Government will be in their relationship with the local skills plan. Surely the Government are not going to say, “Get on with it, regardless of what we have decided at national level”. The national skills strategy should be what our experts say the skills needs in the next couple of decades might be.
The Bill lacks a clear vision of what the structure is, and as long as that is the case, we will not make progress. I would sooner the Government gave us something that we can amend and debate and move forward with, but they are not giving us anything. The guidance is delayed; it is not there in the Bill. There is hardly anything to debate—it is like whistling in the wind and guessing what the Government might intend. On this amendment, I am not sure how all these different locally determined, local skills plans are meant to fit in to the national skills strategy.
Lord Lucas (Con) [V]
My Lords, I am grateful to my noble friend for her extensive reply and to other noble Lords for their supportive words on these amendments. I am afraid that I remain entirely unconvinced that the Government have a firm platform on which to go forward in this area. I hope that it may be possible to talk to the Minister and officials between now and Report. In the absence of some further clarification, I think that this is an area where we ought seriously to try to improve the Bill.
Listening to my noble friend, I think that there still seems to be an idea that the interests of local employers and local potential students are automatically aligned. This is a fundamental misconception: within a particular area, there are many skills where employment is not available in the quantities that might be required. Students require a much broader view of what their capacity and prospects are. People follow my noble friend Lord Tebbit’s advice and get on their bike and get around the country, particularly when they are young, and their view should not be restricted to what is available locally.
I am also not convinced by the picture that my noble friend paints of a whole collection of local skills improvement partnerships talking to each other. We are getting into the now-familiar territory of exponential growth, this time in emails and confusion, as these organisations try, in a collection of people that is far too large and diverse, to evolve some view on what the national skills need is, armed with a collection of reports of variable quality from different bits of government and other people. This needs drawing together to make it something that informs not only the local skills improvement partnership but government as a whole. We need a view on where our skills requirements are. That way, we can make an effort to do something about it.
As the noble Baroness, Lady Garden, pointed out, these things change quickly. This is not intended to be a plan that we expect to be worked through but one that we expect to live with, but, unless you are looking a few years ahead, it is impossible to put in the provision that you will need. Unless we are looking nationally, we will find national shortages emerging, because large parts of the country, where these industries are not present, turn out not to contribute to the provision of employees in areas where we need them. I will of course withdraw the amendment, but I very much hope that, between now and Report, we can get to a rather better place.
Lord Lucas (Con) [V]
My Lords, I very much share the concerns of the noble Lord, Lord Blunkett, and my noble friends Lord Willetts and Lord Baker in particular.
The last legislation that we had in this area was the Technical and Further Education Act. There was a belief then in the perfection of the new—almost a post-modern belief that destruction was the necessary precursor to success. The Government had just destroyed the sector skills councils and they have not yet managed to recreate the complex relations and understandings that led to their successes. In the run-up to the technical education Bill, the Bill team said they thought that this would probably result in the destruction of City and Guilds, as if that institution and all its reputation and quality had no value for the future in the face of their newly-created ideas. Now we seem to be destroying the local enterprise partnerships, which in many areas have established a pattern of understanding and reputation that has enabled projects to be undertaken that would have been very hard otherwise.
I do not share this disdain for the old; I think that it is best to work with it where we can. As the noble Lord, Lord Blunkett, pointed out, the reputation that qualifications have built up with employers is a thing of great value. It means that employers know what they are getting but it also means that, when a young person gets that qualification, it is something with strong currency. People know exactly what to expect. It has a high reputation and is a highly tradeable asset.
This is not yet true of T-levels. As noble Lords may know, I have run the Good Schools Guide for many years. I cannot yet imagine advising a parent to let their child do a T-level. It still seems a misconception that you should have to spend the whole of your sixth form years doing this one qualification to the exclusion of everything else. If one is aiming for parity of esteem then it ought to be through the route of being able to mix academic and other qualifications. As the noble Lord, Lord Baker, said, that would allow the technical qualifications to be heavily technical to carry the sorts of skills an employer is looking for, rather than being overly general and not directed towards making someone instantly employable when they come out of school.
Doubtless we are all going to put a lot of effort into making things succeed. We are where we are; we have to make the best of where we have got to. But to give powers to IfATE and others to continue on a path of destruction without consultation and care, and in particular to give them the direction of this Bill without the permission of employers seems wrongheaded. I very much hope that, between those who have proposed amendments to this Bill, we will get something on Report that will help change the Bill’s direction.
The Deputy Chairman of Committees (Lord Russell of Liverpool) (CB)
The noble Lord, Lord Liddle, has withdrawn, so I call the noble Lord, Lord Addington.
Lord Lucas
“and,
(b) by reference to— (i) the degree to which the mental health and wellbeing of persons who undertake a higher education course with the institution are sustained and improved while they are attending the institution;(ii) the quality improvement and response to mental health crises among persons who undertake a higher education course with the institution;(iii) the pastoral and academic care of students attending the institution.(5A) In this section “quality improvement” has the same meaning as in the report by The King’s Fund, Quality improvement in mental health, published in 2017.”Member’s explanatory statement
The purpose of this amendment is to ensure that higher education institutions should be evaluated on the basis of their care for students as well as purely academic measures.
Lord Lucas (Con) [V]
My Lords, I welcome Clause 17. There has long been a lack of satisfactory information available to prospective students on the outcomes of a degree. What happens afterwards, other than a degree, first, second or even third class, as in my case, awarded on obscure criteria—although no doubt correct in my case—but with no indication to a prospective student of what comes afterwards? How do students who have been through the degree course look back on their time at university? Are they appreciative of what was done for them? Have they suggestions about what could have been done better? What sort of careers have they secured?
This can be very different in further education, where a good FE college, running a course in, say, golf course management, will have an immense network of alumni with whom it will work to improve the course and with whom it will be in correspondence about the prospects for their current students. It will be able to portray to someone who intends to take on the cost of a course exactly what the outcome will be. For such a substantial personal investment by students, universities owe prospective students a much better set of information about what their prospects are.
My interest in this clause, though, is in the opportunity to broaden it to include mental health and well-being because, in my experience, this is an area that universities have been much less good at than they ought to be. I agree that this has, to a certain extent, come up on them. It is the result of increased parental interest in university education—that is, in parents wanting to make sure that they are launching their children on a good course. I have been a champion of that for a long time. I do not think that it sits easily with universities, which have historically taken refuge in the mantra that their students are adults and therefore do not need support from home, and communication with home is inappropriate.
I sense that that is changing but, for it to change to good effect, it needs some kind of support from the Government. Universities need to know that they are being watched—that information will reach prospective students as to how good their mental health and well-being services are and how well they look after their students. This will form part of a student’s decision on which course to take. If we do not have that kind of visibility, we will see a continuation of the inaction that has been my experience of universities’ response to this over the past 10 years or so.
I am sure that we all have stories about a mental health crisis hitting a friend’s child at university, perhaps even to the point of suicide. Mine, fortunately, has a happy ending. The son of a friend of mine went to a Russell group university, found that the course they were on did not really have its own social life, went back to university accommodation, which likewise had no social life, and fell into a cycle of despair. Bar a casual acquaintance knowing someone who knew his mother and getting a message back, that might have been the end of it. Fortunately, he had a very active mother who whisked him out of university and helped him to find a course that was much better socially adapted to his needs. He flourishes still.
There are many, however, for whom the outcome has been much less good. Universities have not traditionally seen themselves as having a duty of care in looking after their students. I remember—it must be about 10 years ago—trying to tell universities that they should pay more attention to teacher recommendations, that they could use some kind of online reputation system to score the teacher recommendations in the light of their experience of the student when they arrived at university, and that this would enable them to reach through the surface of qualifications to look at the underlying person and maybe start to use that to address the inequalities of access that were very apparent then.
The answer I got from universities was, “Can’t do that. We never get to know our students well enough to know whether that teacher recommendation is accurate or not”. I contrast that with my experience of the better degree apprenticeships and the way in which a company looks after children of the same age whom it has recruited into much the same circumstances. It can be extraordinarily good. I single out JCB in that respect: the way they look after young people who arrive in the wilds where the JCB factory is set and look after them through their degree is absolutely exemplary. JCB is, however, by no means alone. It has set a standard, in the minds of parents and people like me who advise parents, for what we now expect of universities, and I would really like the Government to take a hand in moving the needle.
I am not in any way committed to the particular formula in this amendment. It is a formula that is necessarily stated by its circumstances; it has to fit in with the structure of this Bill. I am not at all convinced that having a scored measure—an outcome measure—at the end of the day for mental health and well-being is the right way to go, but we have to get to a point where universities know that they are being observed and where accurate information finds its way to prospective students.
In the Good Schools Guide, if a school is a place that is a difficult environment for the less robust, we say that. It is fine. You can happily say that you have to be pretty rumbustious to get on in this school, and students and parents know what you mean. It will absolutely suit some people. Others will be put off by it and will find a place that is better suited to them. There is no reason why all universities should be the same, but it is absolutely obvious to me that prospective students and their parents should be given the information needed to make good judgments as to the environment at the university and whether their child will flourish there.
I also hope that, by doing that, we will raise the standard of universities generally. This is a move that Universities UK talks very strongly in support of, and some individual vice-chancellors are clearly ahead of the crowd in this. We ought to be out there supporting them, helping this change to happen and helping universities generally to up their standards. At the end of the day, these are children, and it is a big transition between home and local school to university in a strange city a long way away with completely different customs. We want them to be cared for; we want them to be looked after; we want to be a part of that, where we have a relationship with our children that will support that. We want the university to be strong and active in looking after them. If we cannot do that through this amendment, I hope that the Government will confirm that they have plans in this direction. I beg to move.
Lord Willetts (Con) [V]
My Lords, I wish to speak to my Amendment 69 very much in the spirit of the powerful speech that we just heard from my noble friend Lord Lucas. We definitely need more information about student outcomes. One way in which that information can be presented is the absolute information on the absolute outcomes. I am sure that the Minister will be eloquent on that. There is nothing in my amendment that tries to suppress any of that sort of information—far from it. However, the way in which the legislation is currently drafted means that it goes out of its way to exclude a different sort of equally valuable and relevant information: how our higher education institution is doing relative to the types of students that it has. That is a measure of distance travelled; it is a measure of how a university is performing, given the students that it recruits.
We have heard several important interventions in the course of our debate about students with special educational needs. A university that recruits an unusually high proportion of students with special educational needs, within the approach set out by Ministers, will not be able to signal that it does that; it may just appear to be a less well-performing institution. To offer a second example, which I know is a source of deep frustration and shame to us all, we should look at the performance of students from ethnic minority backgrounds. For any given level of academic qualification, a graduate from an ethnic minority background may do less well in the labour market than a graduate of similar academic achievement but not from a minority ethnic background. That is shocking; it is also a description of the British labour market as it is today. This would mean that, on the approach set out by Ministers, a university that had a disproportionately high number of graduates from ethnic minority backgrounds would do less well on labour market outcomes without the university being able to display its commitment and what it was doing.
Lord Lucas (Con) [V]
My Lords, I am grateful for the support of those who have spoken. The question of supporting students and getting their mental health needs looked after is one for which I—and, I suspect, a very large number of other parents—absolutely have a minimum expected level. I therefore find my noble friend’s statements of government policy in this area uncomfortably flabby. The Government support UUK—good. They back the mental health charter—good. However, universities have been subject to this sort of pressure for a long time and have not moved.
In the spirit of the Bill and of a minimum expected level, I really hope that the Government will consider what else they might do. It absolutely does not need to be measurement under Clause 17; it would work very well if, to pick up on the spirit of the suggestion of the noble Baroness, Lady Morris of Yardley, someone with character and reputation set out as an individual to work with the universities to get them to the place they should be. Such people are not impossible to find. However, we need something to make universities focus, and which says, “This isn’t just one of the other things that the Government find important but one of the things which we must do, and we know that, even if it can’t be expressed as a number, there is a standard which we have to reach”.
Not surprisingly, I listened with interest to my noble friend Lord Willetts’s explanation of his interest in this area. The question “How are people like me doing at this university?” absolutely ought to be something that interests the university just as much as the student. They should be looking at, for instance, students they have recruited with high and low qualifications relative to the average of a class and asking, “How do they do? Why are students dropping out? Is there stuff here we should be feeding back to their schools because perhaps they have not had the advice that they ought to have had there? Do we really understand the needs of particular types of children, whoever they might be? Are we seeing effects that might reflect something we could improve in this university?” There are lots of different ways of cutting that cake. The self-improving university comes from an attachment to data and a care for its students, rather than just a care for process; that is what we must strive to inculcate, improve and increase in our universities. That human side of the interaction is the foundation of making sure that the physical university survives in a virtual world.
As I said, I am grateful for all the support that I have received. For now, I beg leave to withdraw the amendment.
Covid-19: Education Settings
Lord Lucas Excerpts(3 years, 5 months ago)
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Baroness Berridge (Con)
My Lords, we have outlined some of the details that the noble Earl outlined on personal protective equipment. In relation to the advice that it will not be necessary to use masks in schools as of 19 July, that is in accordance with step 4, which is based on the best scientific advice we have. There is no absolute certainty in any of these decisions, particularly in schools. Wearing masks has never been a requirement for primary-age children, because they affect children’s experience of education and cause difficulties. We are as clear as we can be, being human beings making decisions, that, for balance, as the right honourable Secretary of State for Health and Social Care said, in terms of mental health and well-being, this is the stage at which to take this step. Schools will be in line with what we are expecting of other people. We will not restrict school pupils more or less than the general population.
Lord Lucas (Con) [V]
My Lords, will the Government use the summer holidays to see whether they can revive the relationship with the head teachers’ unions, review the guidance with them and evolve a plan B for use in the event that it becomes necessary to bear down on transmission in schools, so that schools know what will be expected of them if that happens? Will the DfE also produce a template advice leaflet for schools, so that schools can give advice to parents when children return to school?
Baroness Berridge (Con)
The noble Lord is correct. Engaging with unions and head teachers has been an important part of what the department has done over these times. The guidance we have issued has been in consultation, through regular meetings at official and ministerial level, to produce the best guidance we can. As I have outlined, we have issued guidance for an updated contingency plan for what might be expected of schools if they were in an area where a new variant of concern was prevalent or there was a local outbreak.
Skills and Post-16 Education Bill [HL]
Lord Lucas ExcerptsTuesday 6th July 2021
(3 years, 5 months ago)
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Lord Lucas
Member’s explanatory statement
This amendment seeks to ensure that the interests of students whose needs are not encompassed by local employers are included.
Lord Lucas (Con) [V]
My Lords, I declare an interest as editor of The Good Schools Guide and a member of City & Guilds Council.
I welcome the local skills improvement plans. A strong link between local business and local skills provision for local people is a very good idea; it will build a set of relationships which will be long-lasting and much valued. However, how exactly do the Government think this process is going to work? I hope that the Minister will be able to give us an outline of how the Government now see the local skills improvement plans actually working. Are they intended to be comprehensive, covering the entire needs of an area, or are they sector-specific, as I understand some of the bids for the pilots are? Are they intended to be inclusive of independent training providers? Will the local FE college be the dominant force or just a part? Is it intended that funds will be channelled through the local skills improvement plans? If they will, at what sort of level and with what sort of scope? How do the Government see this working in terms of local relationships? How exactly will the local skills improvement plans be held to account for their results? Will the decisions they reach be easily open to challenge, and if so, how? What is the interface locally with careers information advice and guidance and the Careers & Enterprise Company? There are a lot of things I would like to understand better about the direction in which the Government are intending to take us.
Whatever those answers, there is one big thing missing from the Bill: the interests of potential students, and that is what my amendment addresses. I want to see a reference to what local people need, from their point of view. The young people in Eastbourne, where I live, are pretty average—they are not in any way lacking compared to the national average. Business in Eastbourne, however, which is a coastal community, is typically very skewed. There are some areas in which we are very strong—hospitality, obviously, building and allied trades, education—but when it comes to cyber-security, IT generally, engineering, writing, creative careers, and management and science-based careers, all of which go on in London, there is really not much around. This is not surprising or unusual, but many of these are the growth areas of the economy. It is absolutely in the best interests of our people here—not only the young people, but career-changers and others—that they have good access to the skills necessary to those parts of the economy, not least because it will encourage such businesses to move down here or, in the new fashion of remote working, employ people here. That way, we as a community will have access to the more prosperous, higher growth, higher wage parts of the economy that we do not currently have.
The interests of individual people, potential students, are not congruent with those of employers and providers. In the interests of our people, we must offer training locally in the main growth areas of the economy. I do not mind whether it is through independent training providers or remote training, but it must be substantially good.
I will not speak at length to the other amendments in this group, many of which I have a lot of sympathy for, except to mention that in the name of the noble Baroness, Lady Whitaker, on getting people a base level of skills in maths and English. That is absolutely key to raising the level of the economy locally. Somebody locally must have responsibility for that. We need something better than GCSEs here. GCSEs are aimed at the requirements of an academic curriculum; what we need is a test aimed at the base skills needed by employers. Those are two different things. We test English competence extremely well when students come to this country or want to be employed as doctors, for example. We have skills-centred tests aimed at establishing competence. We need something like that for our own people in English and maths, so that everybody has a chance of getting through and we do not continue to suffer the comparable outcomes system, which condemns 40% of our young people to having substandard English and maths qualifications. I beg to move.
Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle (GP) [V]
My Lords, it is a pleasure to follow the very clear introduction to this group from the noble Lord, Lord Lucas. Having listened to his explanation, I rather regret not having attached my name to his amendment, as the noble Baroness, Lady Garden of Frognal, did. He really has nailed the key problem with this Bill and the reason for many of these amendments: the Government’s focus on employers, presumably existing employers, fails to explain how a local skills improvement plan can actually help an area to improve. By focusing on potential students, Amendment 1 really helps us to think about how people might also want to get the skills to be part of communities, to run community groups, to be involved in cultural activities or to be voters or parents. All of these are areas in which people might want to improve their skills. It would also help communities that are subject to the Government’s levelling-up agenda, which are often lacking in social capital. We are talking about skills that pretty well every community is short of. Any community group that any noble Lord has ever known has had to find a treasurer—someone who is prepared to take on doing the books, even if there is not much money in those books. These are skills that every community needs, but they might not actually be a business need.
However, I shall speak chiefly to Amendment 2, which is in my name. It tries to get at another aspect of the Bill addressing the so-called economy by adding in to consult in the skills improvement plans
“potential employers, start-up businesses and the self-employed.”
Looking at recent figures from the pre-Covid time, there were 5 million self-employed in the UK, up from 3.2 million in 2000. They are a very major part of our workforce and, if they are running a business, what they may need to help them find work, and improve the work that they find, is not necessarily going to be reflected by the employers in a town. I think here of a very old-fashioned term, perhaps—the “company town”.
A few years ago, I visited Barrow-in-Furness where the top employer, by a scale of many thousands, is of course the shipyards. The next two biggest employers, of around 1,000 each, are the largest supermarket and the local hospital. Barrow-in-Furness, as I said when I was there, clearly needs to diversify its economy and develop things such as local food-growing and tourism businesses, through all kinds of objectives. How are those three top employers going to provide advice on the skills needed for that?
At the moment, the Bill feels really half baked. I am in a difficult position in speaking before many of these amendments have been explained, but I support the sentiments behind them all. I shall pick out a couple briefly. As the noble Lord, Lord Lucas, said about the two amendments in the name of the noble Baroness, Lady Whitaker—particularly, perhaps, Amendment 81, which has broad support—the focus on the attainment gap is crucial. There are many people whom schooling has failed in the past; they need support with the right kind of courses, the right way to improve and lift their skills, not just for their jobs but for their lives.
I also particularly support Amendments 20 and 21, both of which address, in different ways, distance learning. We are not going to be able to put into every village and town every course that might be of use to everyone. It is crucial that we have, in the Open University, a very successful and important structure; something that people can use to advance their knowledge, as well as their skills, and get into the practice of lifelong learning. That is such a crucial skill that we are going to need for the coming decades. The number of amendments tabled to this clause really shows that the Government need to go away, having listened to today’s debate, and think about how they can improve not just the Bill, but their thinking about how we provide the skills needed for a very different age.
Baroness Berridge (Con)
My Lords, the point I was making was that the Bill does not mention being only at level 3, level 4 or level 2; it does not mention those levels. The only definition in the Bill in terms of the LSIP and relevant providers is around technical education. I will just get the definition; I might as well read from it. It refers to
“post-16 technical education or training that is material”.
For instance, in a sixth-form college, the entirety of its provision might not be relevant under its duty to co-operate with employer representative bodies. That is not linked to saying, “Technical education at level 4, 3, 2 or 1”. The Bill does not talk about that; it is just talking about technical education as defined in Clause 1.
Lord Lucas (Con) [V]
My Lords, I am very grateful to the Minister for her encyclopaedic reply to this long debate. In general, I am encouraged, and I did not notice any point I raised that she did not address. I am particularly grateful to her for filling out the picture generally.
I will pick up a few points from the debate. I thought the noble Baroness, Lady Morris of Yardley, had it right when she referred to place. Place is very important. That importance seems to be becoming recognised within various areas of government. I was very pleased, for instance, by the structure of the levelling-up fund and the way it required a place to get together to decide what it wanted the money for, rather than the former system that applied down the coast, where a pier was imposed on Hastings by the National Lottery Heritage Fund and not tied into what the place wanted to do. That developing sense of place needs to find a way to be tied into local skills improvement plans. These organisations want to be talking to each other and moving in the same direction, by and large. I think that is what I mean by accountability. This should not be an organisation which just wanders off on its own and does not feel that it needs to have any relationship with the way that the place it is embedded in wants to go.
The noble Baroness, Lady Bennett, raised the question of towns adding new areas of business. It is really difficult to see how that works in the structure which has been proposed. I will devote some time to thinking that through when I get a chance to read Hansard. I am conscious that in my own home town of Eastbourne, a conurbation of about 130,000 people has 50 places per annum for A-levels. That is ridiculous, but it seems really hard to change, to move and to draw attention to. I suspect that a town which needed to add a new area of business would find it similarly difficult to shift some of the structures that are being proposed here—but, as I say, I will look at that more carefully.
There is a question of how existing businesses realise they need new skills, which is a function that historically has been provided by the good awarding bodies. How that is going to flourish in the new system is going to be worth looking at.
Several noble Lords were looking at the structures of employers that the Government are proposing to work with. As the noble Lord, Lord Liddle, said, it is not easy to build good employer groups. That is why I very much support the call of the noble Lord, Lord Adonis, to include the mayors. They have a convening capability which will mean that the local businesses produce good people to be on the LSIPs. It will not be third-rate or fourth-rate people; it will be people who are at board level taking part in them. That will make an enormous difference to how well they perform.
Perhaps the noble Lord remembers the old sector skills partnerships, many of which did not work well because they were just too low level. The one that I liked, e-skills, which was a top-level one, the Government killed— but there we are. The nice thing about the structures proposed in this Bill is that they are—I hope, by and large—existing employer structures, which will mean that they have a resilience against falling out of favour with the Government and an ability to retain the relationships and ways of working they build up under this structure.
So, as I say, I am grateful to my noble friend for her answers. I will look at them in detail and I am so pleased to have the noble Lord, Lord Adonis, back on home turf and out of the dark world he has been inhabiting for these last few years. I beg leave to withdraw the amendment.
Ofsted Review of Sexual Abuse in Schools and Colleges
Lord Lucas Excerpts(3 years, 6 months ago)
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Baroness Berridge (Con)
My Lords, in relation to the Keeping Children Safe in Education guidance I have outlined, it was changed fundamentally in, I think, 2014 to become a framework document so that schools and institutions know their duties and can put in place the policies they need for their particular setting. There are different risks in a rural primary school from those in a busy secondary school in an urban setting. It will be up to schools to frame particular lessons so that the instances the noble Lord outlined can take place. However, I recognise that there are specific issues related to PE and music lessons, particularly given the dynamic in specialist institutions. The noble Lord will probably be aware that that was a concern of the Independent Inquiry into Child Sexual Abuse, which had to investigate whether it was something to do with that particular environment. However, Keeping Children Safe in Education gives all schools the framework to put in place for their setting and for particular subjects, so that they can work out how to keep children safe.
Lord Lucas (Con) [V]
My Lords, I declare my interest as editor of The Good Schools Guide. A good pastoral system is effective and open, particularly with regard to communication within the school, so that everyone feels comfortable about talking to teachers and pupils alike. It is effective and open about taking action when something goes wrong so that everyone knows what has happened, what is being done and how the matter is to be resolved. It is also effective and open in its liaison with parents and outside agencies so that the whole problem is treated, not just the little local bit which has appeared within the school.
The Government can make a substantial difference in this regard by requiring Ofsted and the Office for Students to keep their eyes open. We will come back to that in one of my amendments to the skills Bill. That will enable schools to know that this issue is going to be looked at, so they will keep it at the top of the list of things they are trying to do. They will know that this is something that cannot be neglected. As the noble Baroness, Lady Benjamin, said, this has been going on for a very long time, but it has just been ignored or accepted as something that it is hard to talk about. A real opportunity has been provided by the Everyone’s Invited website. This is a moment when we can change things and we should take advantage of that.
The Government also need to provide a structure for sharing best practice because it is really quite hard to get this right on your own. A school needs to have the confidence to reject bad advice. Indeed, that is needed at university as well. Look at all the problems that universities have had in dealing with students with mental health issues and the knots they have tied themselves in because they have not understood what the correct procedures are when a student is in severe distress.
A number of charities are circulating material to schools that is actively against involving parents and actively against going to outside safeguarding agencies, as well as being greatly biased against girls in terms of their relationships with their fellow pupils. This sort of problem needs to be dealt with by the Government, because only the Government can provide that security of reaction and the confidence that you are doing something right. You cannot ask schools, with all the pressures on them, to try to discern the difference between good and bad advice coming at them from charities and pressure groups. I hope my noble friend will confirm my reading of the Statement: that the Government will be doing just that.
Baroness Berridge (Con)
My Lords, on the cultural points my noble friend references, schools are reflecting wider society so he is right that we need to recognise that there is a role for everyone. The guidance is really clear that safeguarding in a school is everyone’s responsibility. Everyone should be given chapter 1 of KCS and they all should read it, and that means the cleaner and the caterers as well as the teaching staff. There should be an environment within a school where a young person can share with any appropriate adult, and they should know what their obligations are. The guidance is really clear that school staff—whoever they are—should never assume that something has already been reported and it is someone else’s responsibility.
Schools know that they are going to be inspected on this. One of the four pillars of the Ofsted 2019 framework is very clearly around safeguarding. Each pillar stands and is assessed separately, so if you are inadequate for safeguarding you will fail an Ofsted inspection regardless of your educational performance. That is really important for those schools, some of which were named by Everyone’s Invited, that have very good educational records and yet have been found by reports on Everyone’s Invited to be lacking in terms of culture, particularly in respect of girls.
As Minister for the Schools System, I can say that sharing best practice is what the multi-academy trust system is all about. It enables groups of schools to have robust safeguarding training and safeguarding leads that share best practice and concerns regarding pupils as they move from one phase of education to another.
Skills and Post-16 Education Bill [HL]
Lord Lucas ExcerptsTuesday 15th June 2021
(3 years, 6 months ago)
Lords ChamberRead Full debate Skills and Post-16 Education Act 2022 View all Skills and Post-16 Education Act 2022 Debates Read Hansard Text Read Debate Ministerial Extracts
Lord Lucas (Con) [V]
My Lords, I declare an interest as a council member of City & Guilds. I am very much looking forward to Committee. It has been a pretty challenging Second Reading so far and I am confident that we can do some things to improve this Bill. My own suggestion will be that we should broaden the definition of outcomes in Clause 17 to cover mental health in higher education.
Going into HE is a huge step change for most children. In JCB’s apprenticeships provision, which is pretty remote and therefore provides the facilities a university might, it goes to immense lengths to look after the mental and general well-being of their apprentices. To my mind, universities fall well short of that standard.
When I tried a few years ago to see whether it might be possible to persuade universities to rely more on teacher recommendations to pick out students who were underperforming for reasons of background but might turn out to be extremely good students none the less, they said that they could not do that as they never got to know their students well enough over the course of three years to evaluate whether the teacher recommendations had been accurate enough.
Universities can be lonely, frightening, isolating places. The NHS mental health provision can take some long while to catch up with the move from home to university. I am sure that many of us have stories of friends or relations who have had a mental health crisis at university. In my case, a colleague of mine had a son at a Russell Group university, who happened to be on a course where there did not seem to be much social life revolving around it. He was going back to his student accommodation, where there was not a lot of social life, and it was a chance telephone call from a fairly distant university friend to this child’s mother that prevented the suicide.
It really is not acceptable these days that we allow these sorts of things to go on, when we know they are happening and we know we can do something about it. Universities can and should come up to speed. I do not think that we should find ourselves in a situation where we are giving universities a bad mark—it is something that they can all do well enough and come up to speed on, given a bit of oversight, so that they know they will be watched on it and that this is something they have to do. Clause 17 gives us an opportunity to make some serious progress in this area.
On local skills, I am very much in the same camp as my noble friend Lord Willetts. This is a matter of our children, not just businesses; it is not just the interests of the businesses that matter but what our children are and could become. It is ridiculous to imagine that all children in Eastbourne, where I live, are destined to become either waiters or brickies. I am sure that there are just as many musicians, programmers and engineers in our cohort as there are in the middle of some well-provided city. We are a town of 100,000 people, with no academic state sixth-form provision. It would be very sad if that same attitude of provision was to be extended to vocational education as well.
There is a big role in this area for a national input on skills, on what is needed and on where the jobs are going to come from over the next 20 years. Not all employer groups have good coverage of industries, good skills and good cohesion; not all know what they need in a changing world. We have to support the local structures that we are going to build with a very strong understanding of what is happening in the world outside, and therefore an understanding of how to support those of our children whose destinies are not to work in the local economy.
In that context, I very much hope, along with the noble Lord, Lord Bilimoria, that we will do something serious about careers information, advice and guidance. There is an opportunity in this Bill to embed that in a structure that can truly nurture it, to build on the current but much divided successful institutions and provide something that will be part of someone’s lifelong education, which they can turn to whenever they need, and to build on a flexible and modular education that they will receive. Perhaps it will move out of schools, where it really struggles, and into the world of FE, making it much easier for people to obtain the information that they need when they think that they want to change a career.
Queen’s Speech
Lord Lucas Excerpts(3 years, 7 months ago)
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Lord Lucas (Con) [V]
My Lords, I congratulate the Government on the gracious Speech and am proud to be a supporter of a Government in such good form. I have two suggestions for advantages that we might take from the disruption that we have all suffered through Covid.
First, we should keep and build on the online verification of the right to work. This has been a great success for the Home Office’s Covid response. It works well, there are no known systemic problems and it promises substantial advantages to the Home Office over time. It enables employers to professionalise online verification, locate it centrally, support their own skills development, and securely recognise unusual documents. Also, the potential to integrate with other information systems will further increase security performance. It has been a great success for the Home Office and for building back better. Employers can hire remote workers easily, which supports the move to working from home and makes lots more jobs available in unemployment black spots. The process is faster and more secure. There is no posting of passports around the UK, much less vulnerability to fraud, and costs are much lower. Employers reckon that there has been a 75% reduction in costs compared with the previous manual system.
What is the Home Office doing to build on this great success? It is terminating it, except with EU nationals who have the right to remain; they will now be much cheaper to employ than us Brits. This is a daft decision, to do so well and have nothing significant go wrong, to offer so much to the building back better agenda, and then to junk it because the department is frightened of its own shadow. Ministers in the Home Office and in the departments whose interests will be damaged need urgently to intervene. I have hope. The Home Office announced today that the turn-off will be postponed from next Monday until 21 June. There is now time for it to change its mind.
My second suggestion is that we should take advantage of the mess that the pandemic has made of exams and assessment, to build back better. The grading system we currently use has a broad inherent spectrum of error. The comparative outcomes application of that grading system to maths and English GCSE creates hurdles that must be leapt to qualify for further education and exciting employment. It demands in its structure that 40% of our children should be branded as failures.
We know how to do better. We can move away from grades to rank order, as used in Switzerland. We can adopt the comparative assessment strategy championed by Daisy Christodoulou, which is so well adapted to an online world. It has the great virtue of easily incorporating previous examinations and so lends itself to the maintenance of standards. Most of all, we can move to criterion-referenced assessments for whatever hurdles we feel the need for.
We already use this system on a large scale to verify that overseas candidates have sufficient command of English to benefit from their university courses and for such systems as the TEFL qualifications. In these applications, criterion referencing works very well. Iceland uses criterion-referenced termly reading-age tests to great acclaim from its teachers and unions. The trick to making criterion referencing work is to keep the assessment focused. If you try to use it on a broad front, it becomes impossibly complicated.
We need hurdles for maths and English because we want employers and educators to know that candidates have the basic level of skills they need. This is a criterion-referencing task. Let us establish what is needed to demonstrate the level of competence that we—that is, us and especially employers—want everyone to have to succeed in life. Let us make a short, simple specification of it and create criterion-referenced tests to examine it.
That would build into our system a drive for us to achieve a 95% success rate in equipping our young people for the world. That is absolutely what we should be aiming for. We should not, as we do now, have a system that requires us to accept that 40% of our children are failures. The pandemic has loosened the chains of precedent and caution. Let us not put them back on again until we first make sure that they fit.
Commission on Race and Ethnic Disparities
Lord Lucas Excerpts(3 years, 8 months ago)
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Lord Lucas (Con) [V]
My Lords, will my noble friend join me in thanking all those millions of people who, over the last 50 years that I have been politically conscious, have made this country a much friendlier place for ethnic minorities? The noble Baroness, Lady Wilcox, reports that, on average, there is one report of a racial incident at a school every two and a half years—it would have been more like every two and a half hours when I was young. Does my noble friend share my commitment to living up to the commission’s vision of how Britain can continue to do better—a vision of unity and equity, and of shared values, history, culture and future? Will she look carefully at all the ways in which the state is supporting the philosophies that seek to set us against each other?
Baroness Berridge (Con)
My Lords, yes, the Government commend the ambition of this report, which is for us to use it as
“a road map for racial fairness.”
I hope noble Lords have understood that, although we are not the country we were, and we are not in a perfect place—the commission does not say that—we want to work together. We applaud all those people who have stood against the injustices that we have seen decline over the years. We recognise that anywhere racist incidents exist, we all have a responsibility. It is not just government; wherever we see such incidents—many of us will have seen them in our own lives on public transport and places such as that—we must all speak up. We all have a responsibility to get to a racially fair society.
Initial Teacher Training Market Review
Lord Lucas Excerpts(3 years, 8 months ago)
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Baroness Berridge (Con)
My Lords, the recommendations will be published and consulted on, and, as I have outlined, teacher sufficiency across England is a key part of the review. As to the early introduction of the early career framework, 1,900 teachers were part of the first rollout in the north-east, Greater Manchester, Bradford and Doncaster, so we are particularly aware of the need to ensure the best quality of teaching across England.
Lord Lucas (Con) [V]
Will the Government put in place a system to ensure that students interested in entering ITT have a clear view of the quality and reputation of the provider as perceived by schools that have employed their graduates?
Education (Guidance about Costs of School Uniforms) Bill
Lord Lucas ExcerptsFriday 19th March 2021
(3 years, 9 months ago)
Lords ChamberRead Full debate Education (Guidance about Costs of School Uniforms) Act 2021 View all Education (Guidance about Costs of School Uniforms) Act 2021 Debates Read Hansard Text Read Debate Ministerial Extracts Amendment Paper: HL Bill 176(a) Amendment for Committee - (19 Mar 2021)
Lord Lucas (Con) [V]
My Lords, I declare an interest as the editor of the Good Schools Guide. I thoroughly support this Bill and congratulate the noble Baroness on having been chosen to bring it through this House. I also thoroughly support school uniforms. As doubtlessly many others will say, they are a leveller, they stop competition among children to show their parents’ wealth through choice of uniform items, they give a strong identity to the school and they help children to realise that a different set of rules—a different way of doing things—applies within school. As long as the cost is reasonable and the quality is good, they should absolutely be supported.
The originator of the Bill, and the Government, are getting things right. A second-hand shop is important, specification is important and a competitive process for finding a supplier is important. All that I ask is that the DfE commits that, should a major revision of guidance be proposed in the future, it will conduct a thorough assessment of the impacts, economic and otherwise, on children, parents, schools and uniform suppliers before bringing it in. We have an excellent system in this country for providing school uniform. We must be sure that the people involved have a prosperous and effective future in front of them.