Skills and Post-16 Education Bill [HL]

Lord Patel Excerpts

Committee stage
Monday 19th July 2021 Lords Chamber

[Lord Patel (CB) [V]]

My Lords, I am delighted to follow the noble Lord, Lord Baker of Dorking, and I support his amendment. If he has to bring it back, I will support it and join him in the Lobby.

I will speak to Amendments 83 and 84, which would ensure that there is always an up to date careers advice strategy in England. I referred to this in my short Second Reading speech, saying that simply offering more further education and training courses alone, although clearly important, will not deliver on the levelling-up agenda and improve the UK’s skills picture. I made the point that advice and guidance on how to access courses and the pathways into certain careers are central to the Government’s ambitions and to the ambitions of the Bill.

In 2017, the Government published a careers strategy, which acknowledged that careers advice had for some time been unevenly distributed across the country, hindering opportunities for some groups to gain insights into different career options. Its aim was to make Britain a fairer place and promote social mobility by ensuring that everyone, regardless of their background, has the opportunity to build a rewarding career. It also promised to assess the breadth and effectiveness of current careers provision in schools and colleges on STEM subjects, and test new approaches if necessary.

The strategy provided a central role for the Careers & Enterprise Company—CEC—tasking it with co-ordinating support for schools and colleges across all the Gatsby benchmarks. It asked schools and colleges to meet the standards set out by the eight Gatsby benchmarks, and introduced the National Careers Service. Assessments of the impact of the careers strategy to date have highlighted the progress made in terms of careers provision in schools and colleges in England as a result of the strategy, and the impact it has had on young people.

A recent report published by the Careers & Enterprise Company, which looked at the impact of schools following the Gatsby benchmarks on post-16 destinations, found that there is a positive relationship between schools using Gatsby benchmarks and where young people end up post 16. The report asserts that improvements made in relation to the Gatsby benchmarks have led to fewer young people becoming NEET—I agree with the noble and learned Lord, Lord Clarke, that that is a terrible acronym—saving the Government about £60 million a year in lifetime NEET costs alone.

A different report, by EngineeringUK and seven other STEM and careers organisations, and the Royal Academy of Engineering report, which I mentioned at Second Reading, also highlighted the importance of good careers provision in schools and colleges in England in the drive to encourage more and more diverse groups of young people to choose a career in STEM, and in particular engineering. For example, it praised the positive impact that careers hubs have had on STEM careers provision in schools and colleges. I will come back to that point in relation to Amendment 84. However, the report from the Royal Academy of Engineering also highlights some of the challenges that still persist. It shows that Covid-19 has had a profound impact on how schools can—and do—deliver employer engagement, for example, and it draws attention to the capacity and funding issues hampering the ambition to provide insights into the kinds of careers on offer in the STEM sector to all young people, rather than a select few.

For the Government to succeed in making the UK a science superpower, to achieve net zero and to experience economic success, they need young people and adults to know what careers are on offer and how to get there. As it stands, many pupils leave school unaware of the exciting career opportunities available to them, for example, in the STEM sector. A misunderstanding of STEM professions among many young people and a lack of awareness of the pathways that can be taken into STEM careers mean that many pupils, particularly those from disadvantaged backgrounds, still do not visualise themselves being successful in these roles. In order for the Bill to succeed, we need to sort out the loans system, and make sure that the lifetime skills guarantee is truly that—but we also need to make sure that young people and adults have access to information, advice and guidance and are inspired to go into the careers that this country needs.

The 2017 careers strategy came to an end in 2020 and there is as yet nothing to replace it. Although the White Paper implies that the Government will continue with this strategy, I would like to know from the Minister what the plans are. My amendment aims to ensure that careers provision will continue to be considered an important piece of the education and skills puzzle, and will have the status and funding it requires to succeed. The noble Lord, Lord Baker, also mentioned schools and, although my amendment does not include schools or secondary education for skills advice, I think that should be included.

I will now move on very briefly to Amendment 84, which follows on from Amendment 83. The proposed new clause looks to ensure that all further education providers in England—and, through that, by default, all secondary education providers—will be able to access the support, training and guidance that careers hubs can offer. As defined on the CEC website, a careers hub is a group of between 20 and 40 secondary schools and colleges in a dedicated area which work together to deliver the Gatsby benchmarks. Collaborating with business partners, the public, education and voluntary sectors, they help deliver the Gatsby benchmarks and improve careers outcomes for young people.

As I mentioned in my earlier contribution, career hubs play a pivotal role in the careers provision landscape. Schools and colleges that are part of a careers hub generally perform better in the Gatsby benchmarks. They also fare better on certain aspects of STEM careers provision than those not in the hub. For example, among schools and colleges in careers hubs recently surveyed by EngineeringUK, 80% said their pupils received at least one STEM employer encounter every year, compared with 53% among schools and colleges not in the careers hubs. The Skills for Jobs White Paper, which predates the Bill, made a commitment to continue with the rollout of careers hubs in England. However, the White Paper was much less clear on timelines and the extent to which the network will be expanded. The Bill itself makes no mention of careers hubs, so I ask the Minister: is it the Government’s intention to continue with the careers hubs, and will they support the CEC in rolling out this programme? Will it be rolled out by the end of 2022?

[Lord Aberdare (CB)]

My Lords, I have added my name to Amendments 83 and 84 in this group, from the noble Lord, Lord Patel, and it is a pleasure to follow him. I will also speak in support of Amendment 78, in the name of the noble Lord, Lord Storey, and Amendment 82, in the name of the noble Lord, Lord Baker. My approach tends to be the opposite of that of the noble Lord, Lord Baker; I tend to start with a written speech and then have to try to update it in line with what people have said before—which sometimes results in a greater degree of incoherence than might otherwise have been the case.

A comprehensive, well-informed and properly funded system of careers information, advice and guidance for people of all ages and stages should be an integral part of our education and skills system. Such a system needs to be based around professional advisers who, firstly, have a very good awareness and information about the opportunities and skills available in their area and, therefore, should be properly engaged in the local skills improvement plan process; and, secondly, are capable of giving personal advice to the individuals they work with. That means, firstly, being able to understand the interests and abilities of those individuals and, secondly—by no means the lesser part—understanding the different pathways and approaches to pursing those interests and achieving the aims that the individual seeks.

The Bill is designed to create the framework for the post-16 education system going forward. As the noble Lord, Lord Addington, said, it would seem extraordinary if such a framework made no reference to careers guidance. The four amendments in this group seek to ensure that the proposed new arrangements under the Bill include essential provisions relating to careers guidance. The one I would perhaps add to those—or at least to the planned guidance on LSIPs—is a requirement for careers guidance professionals to be fully involved in the development of local skills improvement plans, along with the other partner organisations.

Amendment 83 would introduce a duty to publish a careers strategy for England, with updates every three years. As my noble friend said earlier, the careers strategy launched in 2017, which expired at the end of last year, has played an important part in improving the quality of careers guidance over recent years, largely through the efforts of the Careers & Enterprise Company, the National Careers Service and other bodies, including LEPs, careers hubs and the Career Development Institute, representing careers professionals. One of the key elements of that was including a requirement for employer engagement and workplace experiences, which again links to the Bill’s aims.

Careers guidance nationally is now less patchy than it was, and schools are making steady progress towards achieving the eight Gatsby benchmarks of good career guidance. I hope the Minister will indicate in response how that momentum will be maintained, with a careers strategy that properly integrates national and local needs and provides the resources and professional support to schools and colleges to deliver careers guidance in line with those needs.

Local careers hubs have been a central feature of the strategy and currently cover 45% of secondary schools and colleges in England, with a focus on areas of disadvantage. As the noble Lord, Lord Patel, mentioned, they have proved highly effective in careers education delivery, with results better than those in areas that do not have careers hubs, and should be available to all education providers across England, as required by Amendment 84.

Other aims of a new careers strategy might include ensuring lifelong availability of personal, face-to-face, professional careers guidance for everyone who needs it; boosting the pipeline of qualified careers development professionals to provide that personal guidance—the Government have put resource into the National Careers Service, but other professional advisers need funding as well; increasing co-operation between the Careers & Enterprise Company and the National Careers Service—I would be interested to hear when we are going to hear some of the results of the work that Sir John Holman is doing in that area; and including the role of careers guidance in initial teacher training, so that new teachers are fully aware of the importance of that role.

Of course, the strategy would also need to ensure that there is adequate funding so that schools and colleges can access the support they need to deliver high-quality careers guidance. A while ago it was the responsibility of schools—it still is—but they do not have all the resources or skills they need to deliver it.

Amendment 78 would require Ofsted to take into account the careers advice provided by FE colleges in conducting its inspections, and further would make it impossible for a college to receive a good or outstanding rating unless its careers advice were also rated good or outstanding. This would provide an important incentive for colleges to give proper focus to their careers guidance efforts. I hope the Minister will either accept it or at least explain what other mechanisms the Government might use to ensure that careers guidance in colleges meets required standards.

Finally, Amendment 82 from the noble Lord, Lord Baker, provides another vital brick in the construction of a strong careers guidance system. As he said, the Baker clause inserted into the Technical and Further Education Act 2017 is honoured more in the breach than the observance, so Amendment 82 would make it a statutory duty for secondary schools to provide such access and is more specific about the precise form it should take.

The great majority of apprentices I encounter still have not learned about apprenticeship opportunities from their schools. This amendment could make a real difference in making more young people aware of the technical education, training and employment opportunities available to them, including apprenticeships, and I strongly support it. I look forward to hearing from the Minister how the Government will ensure that high-quality career guidance will be an integral part of the system created by the Bill.

Skills and Post-16 Education Bill [HL]

Lord Patel Excerpts

Committee stage
Tuesday 6th July 2021 Lords Chamber

[The Deputy Chairman of Committees (Lord Lexden) (Con)]

My Lords, I must inform the Committee that if Amendment 5 is agreed to, I will not be able to call Amendment 6 by reason of pre-emption.

[Lord Patel (CB)]

My Lords, I speak to Amendment 35 under my name. The amendment is designed to have a body that will be representative of employers in a specified area. The Secretary of State must consult local education, business and enterprise groups, with the aim of ensuring that local employers are represented on the body. So it is a wide-ranging, all-inclusive probing amendment to ensure that there is a range of employers of different sizes, as well as local education groups. In that respect, I support Amendment 5 from the noble Lord, Lord Storey, which includes educational organisations. They should all be represented on employer representative bodies, which will be tasked with pulling together the local skills improvement plans. There are a number of amendments, already tabled, highlighting the need to expand the types of groups feeding into these plans to ensure that they truly represent the local situation and will be able to address any local skills challenges that there might be.

The concern that I believe all of these amendments share is that the Bill, as it stands, potentially gives too much power to a small group of employers in a local area that are not necessarily representative of the wider business community. The Bill currently also risks limiting the choices of young people as well as adults who want or need to retrain in terms of courses and training opportunities. There may be skills that we need nationally—to achieve, for instance, net-zero—which will not currently be required in the particular locality. As a result, no training opportunities may be available for young people who are keen to move into such careers.

I believe that the Bill should enable a truly collaborative approach to local skills planning, with a range of stakeholders to co-create local skills improvement plans. Taking that approach and making sure that the local policy ambitions link up with the national strategies and vice versa might be the right approach and put us in a good position to ensure that we have the workforce, the scientists and the engineers of the future to make the UK an economic success. With 6 million SMEs, some of them quite small and with very niche skills requirements, it might be appropriate that even their voices are heard.

[Baroness Morris of Yardley (Lab)]

My Lords, I very much support the comments just made by the noble Lords, Lord Storey and Lord Patel, and the thrust of the argument. It is right that we get as much knowledge and experience and skills before making any of these decisions. I suggest to the Minister that this is going to be a recurring theme throughout our consideration of the Bill: what is the nature of the partnership which she says is at the core of the proposed legislation before us?

There are two issues. The noble Lord, Lord Patel, just used a phrase about people knowing where the power lies. That is part of the problem. In words it looks as though the employers, the people leading the partnership, have got to, by law, consult with people. The Minister may sense that there is not absolute confidence in noble Lords who have spoken today that that will happen to the degree necessary. I share that concern. Once you say so many times that it is employer-led, that it is those people who matter, and that they will be making the decisions, you have created a very unbalanced relationship between the employers and the people they are meant to consult. So I would be looking for something in the Bill, whether it is these amendments or others, to boost the standing and the contribution of the other partners.

I have not heard anybody say that the other partners—employers, education institutions, students, trade unions—are not important and have not got a role to play. But what is missing from the Bill, given our previous experience of such legislation, is any assurance that they will be listened to and will have the ability to influence what is going on, and some powers to put a brake on something if they do not like it. If they are just going to be written to, asked for their view and then ignored, it will not work, and the Bill could allow for that. That is my worry with that part of the Bill. The Bill as written could allow for that.

Covid-19: Children

Lord Patel Excerpts

Thursday 17th June 2021 Lords Chamber

[Lord Patel (CB) [V]]

My Lords, I thank the noble Baroness, Lady Morris of Yardley, for initiating this important debate and for her powerful speech. I also wish her a happy birthday.

Although SARS-CoV-2 does not cause the same severity of illness in children as in other age groups, the pandemic has had a devastating effect on children’s education, social development and access to healthcare, leading to anxiety and mental health problems, all of which will have a long-term impact on their well-being, especially for those from vulnerable families. For today’s debate, I will speak mainly about the effect the pandemic has had on children’s education and health. In doing so, I will exclusively use evidence from various surveys and inquiries involving children.

Data obtained from 6,000 primary schools and nearly 1.5 million pupils found a steep drop in the number of pupils attaining the levels expected in maths, reading and writing, particularly in the six to seven age group. Children from disadvantaged backgrounds fared the worst. The survey also showed that the children in this group were slower to improve on returning from lockdown.

The House of Commons Education Committee has been taking evidence from young people regarding the effects of the pandemic on their education. I am able to quote only a brief account of what some of them had to say about their learning during the pandemic, particularly on more after-school learning to catch up. One of them said that

“it is … important that young people have good wellbeing and are still mentally and physically healthy before that kind of conversation begins. Young people’s mental health during lockdown has worsened.”

Their evidence to the committee makes compelling reading.

Covid-19 will continue to have a major impact on young people’s education and skills opportunities for some time to come. That is evident across the learning landscape, from the cancellation of exams to a reduction in apprenticeship opportunities, which are exacerbating existing inequalities in our education system and, in turn, impacting on career opportunities for young people.

A pulse survey conducted by EngineeringUK last summer of 1,000 11 to 19 year-olds highlighted some of the concerns young people have about their future due to the pandemic and lost learning. Some 62% felt that finding a job will be more difficult; 52% felt that going to university would be difficult; 41% did not think that they would find an apprenticeship place; 44% felt that finding a job they could keep would be a problem.

The Skills and Post-16 Education Bill focuses on skills for jobs in the future. As a health professional, I know that there are job opportunities in the health sector, but outwith that, the majority of jobs will need technical and digital skills. To equip young people to get skills in those areas we need to think about addressing the following: making diversity and inclusion a priority in the context of recovery from the pandemic; a new STEM education strategy; a new careers strategy for England; expanding the careers hub, with a dedicated STEM leader; and a fully funded digital learning strategy for schools. By the way, why do we not give free broadband to children from vulnerable homes? We give them old laptops for free. We also need to embed careers into the STEM curriculum. I hope the Minister will comment on those areas.

The pandemic has also had a negative effect on children’s health. While the pandemic has wider health effects on children, it is the mental health aspects that are of great concern. Evidence from children and young people from YoungMinds, which I already mentioned, estimates that one in eight children has a diagnosable mental health condition. A survey of 4,000 paediatricians found late presentations of health conditions, a drop-off in attendance, increased mental health problems in children and delayed presentation of childhood cancers.

The Children’s Commissioner recently conducted a children’s survey, The Big Ask, to hear from children. More than half a million children responded. I gather that the report will be published in the summer, but preliminary data suggest that mental health is one of the key concerns of the children surveyed. This will be an important report, and I hope that we will have an opportunity to debate it.

We all know that the pandemic has had a huge negative impact on children’s education and health. Any recovery plans should address not only educational aspects but well-being and, importantly, the mental health of children.

Skills and Post-16 Education Bill [HL]

Lord Patel Excerpts

2nd reading
Tuesday 15th June 2021 Lords Chamber

[Lord Patel (CB) [V]]

My Lords, it is a pleasure to follow the noble Lord, Lord Addington. It is an enormous pleasure to add my congratulations to my friend, the noble Baroness, Lady Black of Strome, on her brilliant maiden speech. She is undoubtedly a world leader in forensic science and its use in the criminal justice system, and in forensic anthropology. I have known her for many years. “Tenacious” and “determined” are words I associate with her. She tried to recruit me once to help raise funds for a new mortuary in her department. I declined, so she set up a competition between 10 crime writers: the first one to raise £1 million from their readers would have the mortuary named after her or him. She raised over £2 million. Her newly unveiled portrait in the Scottish National Portrait Gallery in Edinburgh will, I wager, become the most talked about portrait among viewers for three reasons: its size—it is big—it’s title, “Unknown Man”, and the various images within it. I have little doubt that the noble Baroness will make a huge contribution to the House, and I wish her well.

I declare my interests as Professor Emeritus at the University of Dundee and as a former Chancellor there. I support the principle of the Bill and congratulate the Government on bringing the legislation. I am also pleased that the noble Baroness, Lady Berridge, is taking the Bill through your Lordships’ House. I say this because I witnessed her passion for and commitment to improving the lives of disadvantaged young people through creating opportunities for education and skills training when she was a member of the House of Lords Select Committee on Social Mobility.

My comments mainly relate to the need for education in STEM subjects. The Bill sets out government plans to produce a skills revolution and to introduce flexible loans, and a promise to strengthen jobs. The intention is to drive up opportunities, reduce ethnic disparities and narrow pay gaps, all of which is welcome.

Simply offering more further education and training courses alone will not deliver on the levelling-up agenda. Young people need clear advice and guidance on how to access courses, what it will cost them and what is on offer. They will need to be able to see at first hand what kind of jobs are available. Key to all this is the need for high-quality careers advice for young people and adults—an area where the Bill has very little to say, despite the acknowledgement in the Skills for Jobs White Paper that careers provision is an important element of the overall education system.

EngineeringUK, together with seven other STEM and careers organisations, highlights this in its recent report, Securing the Future: STEM Careers Provision in Schools and Colleges in England. It finds that schools and colleges struggle to deliver STEM careers provision to many of their young people. Time and funding are cited as key barriers by careers leaders surveyed for the report, with 70% saying that staff time was an issue and 46% saying lack of funding was a barrier.

The report also finds that the digital divide that has affected young people’s learning throughout the United Kingdom since the start of the pandemic has also affected STEM careers activities in schools and colleges. The report found that 68% of schools with above average free school meals eligibility said that a lack of access to technology and the internet was a barrier, compared with 36% of schools with below average FSM. I hope that my noble friend Lady Lane-Fox might say more regarding the digital divide following her committee’s fantastic report on the subject.

Going back to a lack of careers advice, will the Government commit to publishing a fully funded careers strategy alongside the Bill to help unlock the skills reforms in the Bill and build on the Skills for Jobs White Paper? It sets out the Government’s blueprint for reshaping the technical skills system to better support the needs of the local labour market and the wider economy, with local skills improvement plans being the key component. Clause 1 encapsulates the Government’s plans to deliver on the above. With a fast-evolving labour market, effective local skills planning is important to identify specific skill needs across the country, including demand for skill needs in the engineering sector, the wider STEM-based industry and the economy.

Real-time labour market data is important for ensuring policy reforms to education and skills and emerging sector needs. I would welcome more clarity about how the local skills improvement plans proposed in the Bill will feed into national workforce planning, as has already been mentioned. How will DfE and BEIS work together to ensure a strategic approach to addressing the skills gap? How will information within local skills improvement plans help shape and inform national industrial policy and workforce planning? How will the Government use the reforms in the Bill to identify and respond to low-density regional skills needs important to the overall strategic direction of the UK, such as specialised engineering skills?

I realise that the Minister may not be able to answer all my questions today; she may agree to write. I look forward to the Committee stage of the Bill.

Queen’s Speech

Lord Patel Excerpts

Wednesday 12th May 2021 Lords Chamber

[Lord Patel (CB) [V]]

My Lords, I congratulate the noble Baroness, Lady Blake, and the noble Lord, Lord Lebedev, on their brilliant maiden speeches and look forward to hearing more. To the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Portsmouth I say thank you; like others, I will miss him and wish him well.

I will speak in relation to three areas mentioned in Her Majesty’s gracious Speech but will focus mostly on the health White Paper, with a brief reference to proposed legislation on education and research. The Health and Social Care Act 2012 passed into legislation despite a lack of consensus for it in the wider health service. This time there is a broader consensus, particularly in relation to a more collaborative approach to healthcare that the Bill proposes which includes local authorities, to help drive changes to benefit patients in the form of integrated care services driven locally. However, several areas will require very careful scrutiny.

These are unprecedented times for the NHS as it continues to respond to the pandemic and the worsening effect it has had on health inequalities, rising demand for services, an exhausted workforce and a huge backlog of care across acute, community and mental health services. The pandemic has shown how capable the NHS is when left to get on with the task of making rapid changes, creating partnerships and delivering world-class care. It is to be hoped that the Government produce a strategy to deal with the huge backlog in waiting lists for treatment and diagnostics before implementing any of the changes proposed in the Bill.

The proposed health Bill needs to be clear with regard to regulation, the nature of accountability, and avoiding duplication and increased bureaucracy. The proposals in the White Paper paint a picture of a very crowded field: health and care partnerships, the proposed integrated care system boards, NHS England, provider collaboratives, the commissioning groups, primary care networks, place-based working, and health and well-being boards, to mention but a few. The nature of the regulation, governance and accountability of these different bodies will need a great deal of scrutiny.

The Bill proposes sweeping powers for Ministers to direct and change at will the delivery of healthcare in 10 or more key areas. Such sweeping ministerial powers need transparent accountability to Parliament and the wider public. The House of Lords report The Long-term Sustainability of the NHS and Adult Social Care identified two key challenges facing the NHS: a clear plan to address the workforce problem and a long-term settlement to deal with adult social care, neither of which is being addressed in the White Paper. The Bill is an opportunity that should not be missed to put in legislation a long-term, costed, transparent plan for the health workforce to deliver safe, effective and high-quality care, including future projections. When it comes to the funding and delivering of adult social care, the gracious Speech said that the Government will bring forward proposals. As the health Bill is not likely to reach our House until the autumn, I hope that we will at least see a consultation document on social care by then.

I turn briefly to two other areas of legislation proposed in the gracious Speech: lifelong learning and research, including the creation of ARIA—the advanced research and invention agency. I support the Government’s plans to support further education colleges, which have long been deprived of funding. The plans in the further education White Paper, Skills for Jobs, need to guard against competition between higher education universities and further education colleges. Funding changes institutional behaviour but can also promote collaboration. For FE colleges to succeed and develop collaborations, they will need appropriate funding streams. I look forward to the debates.

Lastly, and briefly, I turn to proposals for research in life sciences and the creation of ARIA. While the Government have found the means to fund the UK’s subscription to Horizon Europe in the short term, I hope the Minister will confirm that future funding to Horizon Europe will not come from the current R&D funding. On ARIA, apart from its modest funding there are also issues of governance, independence and whether grants will be covered by the Haldane principle. There is also the issue to be explored in relation to government funding to take innovations to commercialisation. I hope the Minister will comment. I look forward to the debates.

International Women’s Day

Lord Patel Excerpts

Thursday 11th March 2021 Grand Committee

[Lord Patel (CB) [V]]

Noble Baronesses and noble Lords, today I wish to pay tribute to the women scientists who literally have saved the world. The noble Baroness, Lady Deech, has given me a lead by mentioning two of them.

SARS-CoV-2—a virus and the disease it causes—was first identified in China just over a year ago. The world did not know then how serious a pandemic was about to follow. It is an incredible feat for scientists to have developed vaccines against the virus in less than a year. The story of the science that led to that is remarkable.

While Brenner and Watson—two Nobel Prize winners —and others identified messenger RNA, it was hard to programme it and to get it into human cells. In 2005, Katalin Karikó, a Hungarian émigrée to the USA, showed how to tweak synthetic mRNA and get it into human cells. Her research was not thought important and she was not granted a professorship at the University of Pennsylvania. She was hoping to develop treatments for cancers, and her research excited many to try to develop cancer therapies. Among them was Özlem Türeci, a Turkish émigrée to Germany, a scientist and a doctor who, with her husband, founded the company BioNTech. A young scientist at Stanford University, on hearing of Karikó’s work, founded a company called Moderna—the name says it all—to develop cancer therapies. Karikó’s research also led to gene editing and earned Nobel Prizes for two women, Jennifer Doudna and Emmanuelle Charpentier.

With the outbreak of Covid-19, Türeci in Germany and Moderna in the USA switched their research to try to develop vaccines using messenger RNA. A young African-American woman scientist, named Kizzmekia “Kizzy” Corbett, working with Dr Fauci at the NIH laboratory, joined the team at Moderna, working to develop a vaccine for Covid-19. Türeci, BioNTech and Pfizer in Germany, and Kizzy and Moderna in the USA, developed the two mRNA vaccines.

As we have heard, before that, Professor Sarah Gilbert at Oxford—mentioned by the noble Baronesses, Lady Deech and Lady Brady—with experience of developing vaccines related to Ebola and MERS, started working day and night to develop a vector-based vaccine as soon as the genome of Covid-19 was known. It is said that she worked from 4 am until late at night. Her ambition was to develop a stable and cheap vaccine for Covid-19, so that the poor countries of the world could benefit. She achieved this in record time, with a vaccine now known as the Oxford/AstraZeneca vaccine. I have personally benefitted from it, having had my first dose. Professor Sarah Gilbert is a remarkable scientist.

The science behind the development of these vaccines underpins other vaccines that are developed in other countries. These four women are the saviours of the world through the vaccines they helped develop. I hope they will all share a Nobel Prize.

Of course, there are many other remarkable women who have helped and continue to help the recovery from Covid—Professor Sharon Peacock from the University of Cambridge for one, and I hope she does not mind me calling her the “queen of genomic sequencing”. Her contribution to identifying mutations cannot be overstated. The fact that the UK leads in the genomic sequencing of Covid-19 is thanks to her.

Time does not allow me to speak about the many other women scientists and their contributions. We need more women to do STEM subjects and to go into science research, and more women in leadership positions in research. Currently, the numbers are less than 30%. What plans do the Government have to increase the number of girls doing STEM subjects and to increase the number of women in science research?