Maintained Schools: Term Dates

Lord Lucas Excerpts

Monday 9th December 2024 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Smith of Malvern (Lab)]

My noble friend is absolutely right: how well you do throughout the whole of the rest of your education is often determined very early on in your school life. That is why, last week, the Prime Minister set out our target to ensure that 75% of children are school ready by the age of five. That is an increase on the current figure; noble Lords may be quite shocked to hear that fewer children than that are ready to start learning at the age of five. Whether through government-funded provision or government-supported voluntary sector provision such as that outlined by my noble friend, we must focus on making sure that children and their families are ready for them to start school and gain the absolute most that they can out of their time there.

[Lord Lucas (Con)]

My Lords, what is the Government’s opinion of Devon County Council’s proposal to charge schools £21,000 for each pupil whom they permanently exclude?

[Baroness Smith of Malvern (Lab)]

That has not been drawn to my attention, but I am certainly willing to look into it and perhaps come back to the noble Lord.

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

Lord Lucas Excerpts

Committee stage
Thursday 21st November 2024 Grand Committee

[Lord Hampton (CB)]

My Lords, I was at Second Reading. I am a teacher and an optimist, and I genuinely trust the Government. As the noble Lord, Lord Knight, said, we all desperately want this to succeed; we want the 13th iteration to be the Bismarckian iteration that actually cuts through and cuts down flab. We were talking about this and I said that it is like trying to amend fog. We have the sunshine coming through, but at the moment we cannot really see it.

Amendments 21 and 33 seem like a sensible idea because there is a real worry about something going into a government department. I will talk about my amendments later but they are all about scrutiny. There seems to be less scrutiny rather than more once something has disappeared into a government department, which is slightly strange. If we could get Skills England to being a statutory body, out in the open and with more scrutiny, people would have a lot more belief in it.

[Lord Lucas (Con)]

My Lords, I share many of the concerns expressed by noble Lords. The Bill should by no means leave the House in the state in which it entered it. It is important that whatever body Skills England occupies has a great deal more status than the Government have proposed. I just do not think that what they have proposed will ever work in Whitehall. We need to take more care with the preservation of the relationships that have been established by IfATE, which make it work so well. I do not see anything in the transition proposed here that does that and, as I said at Second Reading, I would like to know what is going to happen to the Careers & Enterprise Company.

[The Minister of State, Department for Education (Baroness Smith of Malvern) (Lab)]

I thank noble Lords for their broad enthusiasm for Skills England that we heard on this first set of amendments. I hope my response will reassure noble Lords not only that the intention behind the legislation is precisely to transfer functions from IfATE into Skills England—legislatively, that needs to be done via the Secretary of State—but that, furthermore, Skills England is already making an impact on the types of issues that have been identified in the debate. Legislation is important, but it does not always drive action. This Government’s absolute commitment to bringing the current fragmented landscape together has enabled us to make progress already, which I will outline for noble Lords.

The Institute for Apprenticeships and Technical Education has worked closely with employers to develop, approve, review and revise apprenticeships and technical qualifications. It is important to acknowledge IfATE’s achievements, most notably to develop and revise a suite of more than 700 high-quality occupational standards across sectors.

However, despite IfATE’s success in embedding employers into the processes for designing technical qualifications and apprenticeships, the wider skills system remains too fragmented and complex. It is insufficiently responsive to the present and future skills needs of the economy.

To address this fragmentation and unlock the potential for skills which drive growth and widen opportunity, we are creating a single organisation—Skills England. On the point sort of implied by some people that Skills England is, in some way, just a figment of Ministers’ imagination, I reassure noble Lords that it is not just the Department for Education; it is already operational in shadow form. Noble Lords may remember its announcement by the Prime Minister in July, which was one of the earliest actions of this Government. It is already driving change in the way that skills gaps are identified and how key organisations are working together to fill them.

On 24 September, Skills England published its first report, Driving Growth and Widening Opportunities, which provides an authoritative assessment of the key skills challenges that limit growth and opportunity, and an initial assessment of the skills needs in the economy. It also laid out its ambitions for the way in which it would operate, for noble Lords and others to read.

Over the coming months, Skills England will continue to work closely with government departments and relevant stakeholders to expand on the initial assessments of skills needs within 10 particular sectors, both identified in the industrial strategy and because they need quick action. Skills England will continue to develop a detailed, consistent approach to skills measurement and cement its position as the single authoritative voice on skills needs in the economy, which should be addressed to support growth and opportunity.

As I say, Skills England is already working across government. It is working with the industrial strategy advisory council to support the industrial strategy. Regarding when Skills England will broadly take on functions currently delivered by IfATE, it is our intention to lay commencement regulations promptly following Royal Assent to bring into force the provisions that transfer IfATE’s functions, along with its assets and liabilities. Skills England is already operational, and we are determined to ensure that there is no delay in enabling it to become even more effective.

The noble Lord, Lord Aberdare, referenced the Government’s post-16 education and skills strategy, which we are currently working on. I talked about the broad principles of the strategy at the Association of Colleges conference last week. We will publish a broad framework for that relatively soon, with further detail at the beginning of next year.

Skills England will provide an authoritative assessment of skills needs in the economy. It will then use those data and insights to develop and maintain a comprehensive suite of technical qualifications and apprenticeships. As I said, it is already working with key stakeholders to ensure that the identified need and available training are reflected in local and regional skills systems. In response to the noble Baroness, Lady Barran, who argued that it would be appropriate to run Skills England and IfATE concurrently, that would very much lose the benefit that comes from bringing those functions together so that the available training and qualifications that are developed exactly reflect the analysis that Skills England will be in a better place to do. Skills England will take on functions currently delivered by IfATE, delivering them alongside and in line with its broader strategic purpose. In doing so, it will ensure that the system becomes more responsive and better able to quickly and efficiently supply the skills most needed by the economy.

We intend to establish Skills England as an executive agency of the Department for Education. In our debates on the Bill so far, and in Amendment 33 in the name of the noble Baroness, Lady Barran, it has been suggested that Skills England should instead be established as a statutory body. I reassure the Committee that we have considered carefully the risks, opportunities and benefits of different models, to understand from the beginning how the organisation will be successful.

Thanks to the progress that IfATE itself has driven, the system for developing technical qualifications and apprenticeships has matured since IfATE was established in 2017. However, as I said, at the same time we have seen a growing severity in the skills challenges the economy faces. We need Skills England to be a different type of organisation, to support the Government’s growth and opportunity missions. Working as an executive agency, Skills England will balance on the one hand the need for rapid action and independent objective analysis of skills gaps and on the other—this was the point made by the noble Lord, Lord Johnson—proximity and clear links into central government to inform decision-making. This is an appropriate balance of independence and the ability to drive at speed what all noble Lords have argued is the impact that we need Skills England to have.

Skills England will, as with any arm’s-length body, be subject to the highest standards of governance and transparency, including any relevant requirements for review. I will come to some of the questions raised on that in a moment.

Clause 1 introduces Schedule 1, which transfers functions to the Secretary of State and will therefore enable Skills England to take on and deliver functions currently delivered by IfATE, alongside other functions as appropriate, in line with its strategic purpose. This will help address the fragmentation that is holding the system back and restricting improved workforce development and productivity gains.

Clause 2 introduces Schedule 2, which makes provision for a transfer scheme to transfer IfATE’s property, rights and liabilities smoothly to the Secretary of State. It will ensure functional continuity of property, rights and liabilities, including the many contracts that are critical to the operation of the skills system, and it will set a firm basis for the operation of Skills England.

--- Later in debate ---

Moved by

[Lord Lucas]

17: After Clause 8, insert the following new Clause—
“Review: Chief Skills AdviserWithin six months of the day on which this Act is passed, the Secretary of State must lay before Parliament a review of the impact of this Act on the case for creating the role of Chief Skills Adviser, with responsibility for advising Government and reporting to Parliament on the state of skills needs in the economy.”

[Lord Lucas (Con)]

My Lords, I acknowledge that a great deal of the thinking behind Amendment 17 comes from the Edge Foundation. Skills England is a big change and a big opportunity. The Government’s ambitions to unify the skills landscape and respond to the skills need, which is very large and well acknowledged, will require impetus, which Skills England seems to have, but also connection—connection which allows competing interests, particularly between departments, to be resolved and common pathways to be evolved.

It does not seem to me that we can run a skills system by diktat. There is nothing about any department, except the Treasury, that allows it to impose diktat on others. My amendment suggests to the Government that they look at the success of the chief scientific adviser structure. Obviously, there would be the chief skills adviser in the DfE, but skills advisers should be in each department, as with the chief scientific adviser network. It is about evolving a combined understanding and having someone in each department for whom skills is their principal occupation, who has status in that department and who is intimately connected into the Department for Education’s network.

Every department has skills needs and its own understanding and ideas about them. Fragmentation impedes employer and provider engagement. Anyway, modern life needs cross-cutting skills and a lot of jobs require skills whose roots are in several departments, and these things need to work together. The Government’s missions are very much dependent on effective collaboration on skills.

Looking at the individual departments, we see that even within the DfE skills cross schools, FE and, notably, higher education. There is plenty of need for communication just within the one department. Having a chief skills adviser would help.

In other departments, one wishes that the Treasury would import some people who understand the real world a bit better, but it is also responsible for the evolution of skills in the financial and accounting space. Those are the kind of skills that spread into a lot of other careers.

The Foreign Office handles languages, history, geography and diplomacy. Diplomacy is not something that social media seem to cultivate; the Foreign Office must care where that skill is coming from.

The Home Office covers police and security but, above all, migration—bringing in the skills we have not generated here. I remember plenty of conflict with the Home Office in my 30 years here on whether particular skills would be allowed into this country and the speed at which that should be done.

The Department for Business and Trade obviously covers management and skills for business, but a huge skills effort is actively under way there under the heading of the industrial strategy. The people and skills division is trying to solve underinvestment in skills by industry and to improve management and tech use skills. A huge agenda is being actively pursued there, not as a subsidiary of the DfE but as a subsidiary of the industrial strategy.

The Department of Health and Social Care is a huge user of skills and a very big user of microcredentials. Really small bits of learning have evolved to be accepted by the particular employers at which they are aimed. When you have a bigger employer such as the Department of Health, that is really quite easy. So these skills qualifications are evolving in large numbers and at great speed not only in Health but in a lot of other departments.

DESNZ needs the green workforce, the MHCLG has construction and especially housing, DSIT uses the sciences, DCMS has creative skills, and the Cabinet Office needs skills for the Civil Service. If productivity is slipping back in the Civil Service, there is clearly a need for big skills investment. The MoJ needs legal skills and the Department for Work and Pensions is concerned with access to skills. What qualifications are available for people who are bottom of the heap when it comes to employment? The MoD has a huge range and depth of training, the DfT has skills from lorry driving to logistics, and Defra uses environmental skills.

Local government, through the LSIP network, has a real interest in how the skills agenda is delivered. The word I hear is that LSIPs have been a real success, as they are effective and flexible. It takes a couple of years for the DfE to evolve a qualification but LSIPs can do it in weeks, because they are so focused on the actual local employer need and work closely with a provider. The Minister for Women and Equalities brief is now in the DfE but it used to wander around Whitehall. It has a very strong interest in the skills agenda.

Every department in Whitehall is intimately linked to the skills agenda and needs to be bound to a common sense of progress. It is not possible to do that by pushing; it has to be by linking. A structure like that of the chief scientific advisers would help, and the DfE has experience of this. It has its own chief scientific adviser and a council of scientific advisers to go with it. This is a resource that the DfE is used to having.

By having a chief skills adviser network to feed into and get feedback from, the Government and the DfE will know and understand the skills challenges of all departments so that they can synthesise and co-ordinate. Individual departments would have immediate access to the DfE resource, so that they can plan and integrate. That would be a good way forward for a skills structure.

I would be very grateful if the Minister replied to the questions I asked at the end of my previous intervention. I have seen too many sets of relationships die when institutions change. Some of the sector skills councils had really good relationships with business and they were just trashed. Most relationships with local enterprise partnerships just ended; they went nowhere, because local authorities were not capable of maintaining them in the same way. I want to be sure that what IfATE has built will continue under the new arrangements. As I said, I would also be interested in how the Careers & Enterprise Company fits into this structure. I beg to move.

[Baroness Garden of Frognal (LD)]

My Lords, I added my name to the amendment from the noble Lord, Lord Lucas, on the importance of a chief skills adviser. As I have said before, skills always need advocates within government because it has a predominantly university-educated membership. This role could be key to ensuring that skills changes will be enacted by someone who can take a view over the country of which skills are in short supply in which areas and need local support. The network of skills advisers in all departments that the noble Lord proposes would be a great way forward, and I support the amendment.

--- Later in debate ---

Having assessed the merits and risks of different models, we are not convinced, at this point, of the case for a chief skills adviser. It would be disproportionate to impose in statute the requirement to report on that matter. Instead, we should focus on the most pressing matters: making progress towards minimising skills gaps in our economy through the passage of this legislation and the establishment of Skills England. I hope that, with that assurance, the noble Lord, Lord Lucas, will feel able to withdraw his amendment.

[Lord Lucas (Con)]

My Lords, I am very grateful for that reply. I completely understand that this is a direction in which the Government do not want to take at the moment, but I cannot recall, in my unexpectedly long time in this place, seeing any structure like that of the chief scientific advisers that really enabled collaboration between departments. It gives each department a sense of ownership of the policy, that it is in some way its own, rather than something that some other department is trying to impose on it.

Looking at long-running problems, such as how to care for the elderly, we see that the inability to get a few government departments to work in collaboration with each other causes immense problems, such as bed-blocking in hospitals, and questions about whose budget something is supposed to be on. The difficulties of working cross-departmentally are legendary and real. Clearly, Skills England is setting out to have cross-departmental impact. I wish the Government great fortune in that, but I hope that, if things start to prove sticky, they will turn their minds back to doing something, perhaps within Skills England, to produce a structure that makes collaboration work. The more we can do that within government, the more we will solve some of the big problems that have proved intractable in terms of making government work well. I am happy to withdraw the amendment; I do not expect to be here to bring it back.

Amendment 17 withdrawn.

Home School Education Registration and Support Bill [HL]

Lord Lucas Excerpts

2nd reading
Friday 15th November 2024 Lords Chamber

[Lord Lucas (Con)]

My Lords, I am grateful to the noble Lord, Lord Storey, for giving us the opportunity of looking at this Bill. I am a long-term supporter of home education, though I confess I have never had the courage to try it myself. I declare an interest as the proprietor of the Good Schools Guide, which covers home education and the best online schools. In that context, I may well stray over the four-minute ideal, but I think this is an important area to deal with since, as the noble Lord, Lord Storey, says, we are likely to see this in the upcoming government Bill.

Home education is a very varied world; there is a great deal of good practice, some problematic areas and very little data. Therefore, a review, in this Bill or otherwise, is really timely. We should approach home education with both humility and respect. With respect because the parents who are taking this on are taking on a huge responsibility and a great deal of work, relying almost entirely on their own resources, and many parents I know have done so with huge success for their children. With humility because, despite the state’s resources and all the improvements that have been in the last 30 years in state education, we still have failing schools. Special educational needs, as the noble Lord, Lord Watson, said, is still a mess and alternative provision is not what it should be.

We are far from perfect and we should understand imperfection in others. However, we should approach home education with confidence in our culture. Children have a right to education and a right to be part of society. Just because someone is a follower of the Taliban, it does not give them—in this country—the right to treat their children in the way the Taliban do. Based on that confidence, we should have confidence in accommodating difference—as indeed we do. I have been around some truly astonishing—in terms of what they are teaching the children—Catholic and Church of England schools. But, fine—we can live with that, as long as they are not closing their children off from a full education and from the world.

In dealing with religious authorities, we should negotiate with confidence and strength. We should approach the whole thing with support. Home education is a huge challenge, even if it is something you have chosen. And, as the noble Lord, Lord Watson, said, it very often is not—it is because of some failing in the state system, and parents being determined that their child should not suffer from it.

I very much feel that the best way of interacting with home education is by making home-educated children visible, and by offering them support. As the noble Lord, Lord Storey, says, there are many excellent examples of local authorities which will provide support in mathematics, which is always difficult for someone who does not have that skill to teach. Sport offers other ways of getting together and making the children visible, making it easier to see which children are thriving.

Yes, some local education authorities do this really well, and the result is that the money local authorities spend is mostly spent doing good, and the families that are not thriving in home education become immediately visible, because they are not participating. The money and the focus of helping children can just be on the children who really need it.

Other authorities, however, in my experience, are positively demonic and it really is up to the DfE to hold the ring. We must have clear requirements and a clear understanding of what both parents and local authorities are meant to do. It must be clearly expressed, so that there are no arguments over the language. We must have had the opportunity of extensive discussions about it. We must make it easy for people from the local authority to act with confidence, to know that their judgments—that, yes, this family is doing well—will not be questioned. We must have a confident appeals process, we must gather data—as we are not doing at the moment—and, when something is going wrong, we must deal with the rogues crisply.

And so to the Bill. A register must be of all children in the country, not just home-educated children. There are some dark corners of state education that are really not well enough documented. We must document children in private schools better than we do at the moment; they are not included in the national schools census.

I have some substantial problems with the wording of Bill. If the Government wish to proceed with the Bill, or with their own, a meeting would save a great deal of parliamentary time.

Universities

Lord Lucas Excerpts

Thursday 14th November 2024 Lords Chamber

[Lord Lucas (Con)]

My Lords, this is a most valuable report, although I wish it had been a mite more self-critical. I would have liked to have seen more of an interest taken in the value of undergraduate degrees. Is the content of our degree courses what is needed now in both breadth of subject and connections? I do not think it would do any harm for a physicist like me, who would probably these days end up in the depths of the AI revolution creating something which would have a big effect on society, to have at least a passing acquaintance with mediaeval English drama, and therefore perhaps to understand people a bit better.

It is also important that the content of courses is reviewed in the context of the curriculum review that is taking place in schools, so that all that is being taught to children is shaped not by the wishes of some professors but much more by the needs of our children. I very much support the whole speech from the noble Lord, Lord Rees of Ludlow, but particularly his going on about what we are teaching our students. This morning, I attended an All-Party Parliamentary University Group meeting on the Government’s plans for skills, and it was notable that there was nobody there from the Russell group. I think that is a great mistake, but it rather indicates a style of thinking.

We need to question whether it is any longer appropriate to have isolated arts and creative arts schools. I declare an interest as having a child at one of them. The needs of children are so much wider than what is taught there. They need an acquaintanceship with the whole of the humanities and a good deal of business if they are to succeed in a difficult and competitive world. These isolated institutions, however grand, just do not provide it.

We need to ask universities to be a great deal more open and honest with prospective students about what their courses will actually lead to. What do students go on to do by way of careers? What do they think of the courses they have taken when they look back on them? It is hard to find anything approaching that sort of information. I think it is untruthful and unworthy of universities that they continue down this road. It is just marketing; it is not taking the interests of our children into account. In that context, I urge them to take seriously the calls for universities to have a duty of care for our children.

Reference has been made to the value of overseas students. Yes, but I note how slow universities have been to sign up to the British Council’s Alumni UK, which would offer considerable additional incentives to students to come here, and a great deal of value to the country as well. I sense universities looking after their own parochial interests, rather than caring for the larger picture.

I would like to see much more openness about finances. Assertions that universities are short of money are not enough. They ought to share with the Government and with students the details of what the money is being spent on, so that somebody setting out on a course which will leave them with a very large student loan knows where that money is going.

If I can offer a small ray of hope, I think the Government are wrong to try to bear down on level 6 and level 7 apprenticeships. Rather than subsidising them, the Government should open them up to the student loan. These are the safest possible investments for the Student Loans Company: somebody who is being backed by an employer to take on a long course of education and be employed at the same time has a very high chance of success.

I end by picking up on something the noble Lord, Lord Patel, said about doctoral students. I am reminded of my first year working for a merchant bank in the City. We were approached by the National Coal Board for a very large loan to build a new coal mine. We had a long look at it, then we went back to the National Coal Board and said, “Yes, we will give you the money, but if you had run the mine differently and started extracting coal as soon as you’d sunk the first drift, you wouldn’t need a loan at all”. I declare an interest as having a child who is studying for a doctorate, but we ought to review whether the current system of not extracting any value out of a student for three years is the best way of financing a doctorate.

Sex and Gender: Official Data

Lord Lucas Excerpts

Tuesday 5th November 2024 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Smith of Malvern (Lab)]

The first part of the review has been received by the Government, who are currently considering it. I undertake to come back to this House with a response to that.

[Lord Lucas (Con)]

My Lords, do the Government have a working definition of gender and gender identity and, if so, could they share it with the House?

[Baroness Smith of Malvern (Lab)]

The noble Lord would be well advised to look at the Equality Act, for example. I have to say that this would be a better debate if we spent more time worrying about how we provide services and account for people’s needs, and less about how we catch our political opponents out.

Higher Education Reform

Lord Lucas Excerpts

Tuesday 5th November 2024 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Smith of Malvern (Lab)]

I understand my noble friend’s point about young people, particularly those from less well-off backgrounds, being worried about their student debt. We all, therefore, have a responsibility to continue pointing out that this is a very different type of debt to a credit card or another form of loan. There is no upfront payment for their university education, and their repayment is dependent on their level of income; and if that is not paid off at the end of the period of the loan, it will be written off completely; that is a very different category of debt. I understand her point, which is why I can give her the commitment that we will prioritise, as part of the reform programme we will work on, how we improve participation, how we close that gap, so that disadvantaged students can achieve the ability to go to university when that is something that they want to do and they have the ability, and we will ensure that their experience when at university makes them more likely to continue and be successful.

[Lord Lucas (Con)]

My Lords, I too welcome the Statement and look forward to the ideas that are coming forward over the next few months. The Secretary of State said:

“I heard too often from students of the gap between the course they were promised and the experience they had”.

In that context, will the Government encourage universities to give much better information to students about what courses lead to and what jobs and careers their students go on to from each course? At the moment, it is extremely thin, and it is very hard for a student, who will after all invest a large amount of money, to see whether a particular course actually does lead on to the career that they hope to follow.

Secondly, the Secretary of State said she had heard from international students that they felt “neither valued nor welcomed”. Will the Government, therefore, put their weight behind the British Council’s excellent Alumni UK initiative, which would give international students a real and lifelong sense of belonging to the UK, with real, lifelong practical benefits and connections? It would considerably benefit this country, but it seems to me that universities are being very slow to sign up at the moment.

Lastly, in deciding to increase fees, did the universities provide evidence of why it costs them 50% more than a sixth form college to educate a student when universities provide less contact time and less pastoral care by a considerable margin? If they provided that information, will the Government share it with the House?

[Baroness Smith of Malvern (Lab)]

The noble Lord is right in his demand and his expectation that universities need to improve the information that they provide for students about the course and about potential progression. That is an important area that we will want to work with the sector on improving.

On international students, I would strongly support anything that enables international students to maintain their contact with the university and with the country. One of the big benefits of our ability to attract international students is precisely that, for example, nearly 60 world leaders are former students at UK universities. That is an enormous amount of soft power, as well as very strong relationships that have been built up, and I would support any initiative that ensures that continues.

On the noble Lord’s final point, one of the first things that we did in government was to ask the Office for Students to focus more clearly on identifying the financial situation of universities. I cannot say that, at this point, we have the metrics around the value for money that the noble Lord is asking for, but that is one of the areas where, in terms of the efficiency work, we need to have much better transparency within the sector about how money is being spent, how it is being allocated, for example, between research and teaching and how that then results in student experience. That will be one of the things we expect to see.

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

Lord Lucas Excerpts

2nd reading
Tuesday 22nd October 2024 Lords Chamber

[Lord Lucas (Con)]

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Independent Schools: VAT Exemption

Lord Lucas Excerpts

Thursday 5th September 2024 Lords Chamber

[Lord Lucas (Con)]

My Lords, I declare interests as proprietor of the Good Schools Guide and having sent my children to both state and independent schools. I do not think taxing education is right, but we do. If I spend £20,000 on holidays, I will pay £3,333 in VAT. If I spend that same amount on schooling, I will forgo twice the value of that, and the state will benefit by twice the amount for the cost of schooling that it would have incurred otherwise. In putting VAT on these parents, we are not making tax fair: we are taking people who are already taxed at twice the rate of other people and taxing them at three times the rate. It will not hurt the rich; it will hurt the people who are struggling to afford the fees as they are. As I know from my work at the Good Schools Guide and through correspondence in this House, most of them are people who, one way or another, have found that the state will not educate their children in a way that they need. As the noble Lord, Lord Addington, said, a lot of this is due to special needs: a lot of the education is not provided through education, health and care plans but just as part of ordinary education.

This is a tax that is focused on people whom we ought to value and not punish. I do not believe that it will raise the money that it said it will either. There are too many leaks. There are families where the local state system cannot provide local schooling, where they will have to ship them 10 miles or so. You might think that 10 miles is fine, but it has to be by taxi—and 200 days a year of taxis, morning and afternoon, costs 10,000 or 20,000 quid, depending on the state of traffic. There will be parents who opt out of working so hard if their children go state. There will be all sorts of leaks. I really hope that the Government will commit to making a clear evaluation of the effectiveness of this policy and whether it actually raises money.

What I am most concerned about is the merciless decision to put VAT on in January, to force children to move schools mid-year, in the middle of exam years, when there is no chance to negotiate proper provision for SEN; healthcare workers who need to find a way to be able to work the hours they are asked to and cannot turn up at 3.30 pm to pick up their kids from school; and the number of letters I have received from members of our Armed Forces. They are not well paid. It is astonishing that we should treat people who dedicate their lives to our safety in this way, and I find it astonishing, given the years I have been here and the respect I have for the party opposite, that it should contemplate treating children with such cruelty. It really is not in the blood of the Labour Party that I know. I really hope that the Government will think again and make the start date next September.

When approaching the question of the educational divide, I hope this will one day be for the Labour Party a matter of hope not hate. There is so much that the independent sector could do—is doing—for children who need particular help. For instance, there are schools that take on children in care, and there are many other things that could be done by the independent sector, if the Labour Party would only harness its power rather than trying to stamp on it. I think we would all gain.

Higher Education (Industry and Regulators Committee Report)

Lord Lucas Excerpts

Tuesday 21st May 2024 Grand Committee

[Lord Lucas (Con)]

My Lords, I congratulate the committee on an excellent report. However, as someone whose life revolves around schools—as in the Good Schools Guide—and parents, noble Lords will not be surprised if I find myself in many aspects standing, as well as sitting, beside my noble friend Lord Agnew.

I am a fan of the Office for Students. For a couple of decades, I have been trying and failing to get universities to take suicides seriously and to involve families in dealing with the problem. The OfS succeeded where I had failed. I am immensely grateful to it, as are many parents. I am pleased to see that the OfS is taking up cudgels on freedom of speech. As Jo Phoenix, the professor who was so disgracefully driven out of the Open University, said today:

“Imagine a world where those who go to university are taught to value diversity of viewpoints and what knowledge and evidence are”.


I do not have to imagine—I went to a university like that—but that is not the university my daughter is at, and nor is it the university that many of her friends are at. It is disgraceful how their ability to think, talk and discuss is depressed—and, in some subjects, absolutely excluded. We need to do something about this. I am proud of the Government for having taken steps in this direction but that has not been supported by the university sector as a whole, with some honourable exceptions, in the way that I should have hoped.

Look at the latest decision by UCAS to show for university courses the grades that people who got on to the course in the previous year achieved. I have been asking for this for 20 years. Not to provide that information is outright lying. It is misrepresenting what the course is, and this has been supported all the way through by UCAS. It has been absolutely defended, because UCAS is owned by the universities and is not independent of them. The great virtue of the Office for Students is that it is not the university’s creature. That is immensely important in looking after the interests of students.

I therefore hope that the Office for Students will carry on down that course. The first thing that I would like it to focus on is getting universities to provide real information on the value of their courses. What do students who follow a particular course go on to do? When they look back, two or five years later, what do they think of the education they received? That is absolutely basic, vital information that the university should be wanting in order to improve its courses and to do better, and to understand what it is doing and achieving.

The noble Lord, Lord Freyberg, hymns UAL. It is absolutely hopeless when it comes to that. When one looks at the education it is providing, in what way does it fit its students for the life that the noble Lord describes? There is so much that universities can do to improve what they are offering students, and it will take a vibrant Office for Students to persuade it to go in that direction. However, it will be a much better place for universities. They will be selling what they really do and will be appreciated for what they achieve. Their place in all our hearts will be much stronger, and that is something really to aim for.

Another area where I hope the OfS will make improvements in universities is in their relationship with schools. Why do universities not pay attention to the references that schools give their students? Schools have looked after these children for seven years; they know and understand them. There is a whole load of information about how to help, respond to and educate each of these students as individuals, which universities just discard.

In the early days of this discussion, I asked whether universities could employ modern technology to really get under references, understand what they are saying, and, to help schools make better references, feed back to schools what they thought of the students. The response was, “We never get to know our students well enough; we couldn’t do that”, to which my answer is, “Yes, but you ought to have a duty of care. You ought to be doing that. You ought to be looking after students and you ought to know them well enough”. If they did that, they could also help schools make better A-level predictions. At the moment, it is well known that schools are rubbish at making A-level predictions, but the universities do nothing to improve the matter.

What do universities learn when students are with them about what they could have been taught better at school so that they would succeed more at university? How is that information fed back to schools? If it is not collected, it does not get back to schools. What should universities do to influence the examination system? At the moment, they are absolutely rigid in what they expect. They expect a particular pattern of examinations; they are really narrow in what they are prepared to accept. However, when it comes to what they will take from overseas students, they will look at anything. In essence, the flexibility that universities have to respond to the way that students learn and to their differences and individuality is just not extended to our children, and it is important that it should be.

Lastly, I hope that the Office for Students will pick up on the real need to look after the interests of individual students when a university ends a course. It is not satisfactory just to offer them another course. Does that suit them? Is it right for that student? No; they are just offered the package: “We aren’t doing archaeology any more. Go on to history”. That should not be enough. Universities—and, in particular, we, the Government—should take responsibility for looking after the interests of these people. We need to do better than we are.

There are things that the Government should do, too. The state that we have got ourselves into on immigration is ridiculous. Collect proper data; take proper decisions. I have never won an argument with the Home Office—although I once managed to get it to collaborate with Imperial College, which took a lot of effort—but, for a university, this is a really important part in knowing where it can go, what it can do and how it can run. As the Government know, it makes a big difference to our country; they just have to run it properly. The continued impression of running around blindfolded and bumping into trees is not what we should be doing. We need to do a lot better, and I hope that that will happen soon.

On a more minor point, I hope that the Government will look at enabling co-funding of degree apprenticeships so that there is some blend between the debt that a university student takes on and the complete lack of debt that happens in degree apprenticeships. We need to expand degree apprenticeships much more than we are. I really hope that the Government will look seriously at lifelong learning and really involve universities in it. Obviously, the Open University is there, but the world is moving so fast that we all need to keep learning and adding to our knowledge. My university seems to think that, having spent three years studying physics, that was the end of my interest in the subject—just because I went to become a chartered accountant. It has made no effort in the past 50 years to keep me up to date. I would have paid for that. I think that most people who go to university would like to keep learning and extending their knowledge, but the sector does not seem to respond to that at all.

It is not an easy time for universities. There are many politicians, like me, who are out of love with them and extremely reluctant to burden our children with even more debt. As my noble friend Lord Agnew says, one of the first things we need universities to do is to be open about their costs. How can it cost 50% more than a sixth form? They are providing so much less. What is the reality? Be open about it. Let us see what is going on and really understand how these costs are made up: “You are asking us for more money; how do you justify it?”. It is not just words; we want some figures and an understanding. Really collaborate with Alumni UK. This was something I asked for when my noble friend Lord Johnson was taking his Bill through—that universities work together to support their international alumni, make a group out of them and make them a joined voice for this country and for working with this country.

The British Council has at last launched something like this. It has some support from universities, but much less than it should have. This ought to be the universities’ contribution to our national effort. They will talk to us a lot about soft power, but when it comes to providing it and sharing it, they do not seem so keen. I really hope that they will change their minds on that, get behind Alumni UK and embrace the idea of being self-critical, self-improving organisations, collecting the data they need to do that, so that they do not find it necessary to close courses in panic but close courses in the ordinary course of business when they are not doing what they should do. They should evolve new courses and be constantly trying to improve, change, evolve and—to come back to something I said to the noble Lord, Lord Freyberg—really focus on the needs of their students and make sure their courses are really fitted to that.

I enjoyed and benefited from university. I want as many of our young people as possible to do that, but we really need the universities to improve.

Skills: Importance for the UK Economy and Quality of Life

Lord Lucas Excerpts

Thursday 9th May 2024 Lords Chamber

[Lord Lucas (Con)]

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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