Employment Rights Bill

Debate between Lord Storey and Baroness Wolf of Dulwich

Report stage
Monday 21st July 2025 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Wolf of Dulwich (CB)]

My Lords, I support Amendments 111A and 111B in the name of the noble Baroness, Lady Barran. I declare an interest as a governor of King’s College London Mathematics School and as a member of its finance and pay committees.

I have been trying to get my head around the implications of these clauses for support staff ever since the Bill was introduced. The more I think about it, the more unworkable it seems to be. As the noble Baroness pointed out, the complexity of support staff roles and the way they vary with different types of schools has become much greater in the last 20 years.

My experience is of a rather unusual 16-to-19 academy. We do outreach and projects in collaboration with charities and the university. We engage in a large number of things that are not about just standard school teaching. The standard scales for teaching staff are not a problem for us but, for support staff, we have specific roles that are suited to the particular activities in which people are engaged. We certainly pay as much as we can afford to; in the London market, we do not have much choice.

The point that I want to stress is that, while it is very welcome that the Government recognise that people’s pay should not be reduced as a result of this, the real problem is that there are huge numbers of important and central jobs and roles out there, which vary hugely according to the nature of the school, the nature of the environment and what people are doing. The complexity that this will introduce when we do our workforce planning and try to work out where a new role fits on these scales really worries me. I hope that, as things roll out, the Government think very hard about how to move forward in a way that allows successful schools, which are going beyond traditional classroom teaching and doing a huge number of important things, to continue to create support staff roles that fit what they are trying to do.

[Lord Storey (LD)]

My Lords, I declare an interest as a governor of King’s Leadership Academy in Liverpool. Schools face two challenges, some might say crises. First, the shortage of staff is becoming quite a serious concern. Secondly, there are real pressures on school budgets.

It was easy when all schools were local authority schools, because they all had the same framework and structures. We now have a very different landscape, which we all accept. There is no difference now in how we see that landscape. Half the schools are what I call maintained schools and the other half, with a preponderance towards secondary schools, are academies within large multi-academy trusts, which in a sense are bigger than the local authorities. The local authority where I worked for a number of years had 50 schools. There are multi-academy trusts with far more schools than that.

We want a system that is fair to all our non-teaching staff. We do not want to see anybody seeing a cut in their salary. But we also have to recognise that you have to have a system that is not bureaucratic and gives the freedom to schools in both cases to be able to do what is best for their staff. I fear that that will not be the case if the Government have their way. I am hopeful that the Minister will give us real reassurance on this.

I agree with the noble Baroness, Lady Wolf, that we have a more varied system, but I slightly disagreed with her when she said, “All schools, particularly the successful ones”. It is all schools, not just the successful ones, that will face difficulties.

[Baroness Wolf of Dulwich (CB)]

I totally agree with the noble Lord.

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

Debate between Lord Storey and Baroness Wolf of Dulwich

Report stage
Wednesday 5th February 2025 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Wolf of Dulwich (CB)]

My Lords, I will speak to Amendment 15, to which I have put my name, and in support of Amendment 9.

Everybody here is agreed that apprenticeship is hugely important for productivity and growth, and in offering young people a valuable and valued route into skilled employment and adult life. When IfATE—it started off as the IfA—was created, it was seen as a major step in the ongoing recreation and revalidation of apprenticeship and was praised as such by all major parties. It was thought that it could be an independent structure with the convening power that is critical to that mission.

I certainly hope that we might be creating something like the BIBB—the German Federal Institute for Vocational Education and Training—which is a wonderful institution that convenes employers, unions, government officials at all levels and researchers, all of whom have an established and major role, and one which everyone in Germany knows about. That did not happen overnight; it was built up over the years. None the less, it has been absolutely critical to the huge role that apprenticeship has played in German life and in the German economy, in its ability to change and develop when economic circumstances change, and, most dramatically, to recreate and revitalise apprenticeship in what was East Germany.

I know that the Government agree about the importance of apprenticeship and that Skills England is designed to support apprenticeship as well as to signal the importance of skills more generally. But there is a cost associated with the reassertion of a habitual and deeply ingrained pattern in this country of constantly reinventing institutions and public and quasi-public bodies, especially in the skills area. It is a real problem because, although skills professionals can just about keep up, most of the people who are actually involved in delivering skills—employers and people on the shop floor, in local government, in colleges and in unions: people who are not professionally engaged in following skills policy—find this very difficult.

Although I hanker after a statutory body, because it has the visibility and the power to convene people in a way that something inside the Department for Education never can, what worries me most is the fact that we have reintroduced instability and uncertainty into the skills world at a time when we are also really aware of the huge importance of developing our skills policy and continuing to grow apprenticeships. Like the noble Baroness, Lady Barran, I am very concerned by the fact that we have this drop-off in level 2 and 3 and with young people. So I feel that Amendment 15 offers a clear signal to people about when change is coming, which could be extraordinarily helpful to those who are actually involved in developing, amending and delivering standards, and in planning apprenticeships.

Obviously, I was reassured to hear from the Minister that it was unlikely that IfATE powers would be moved immediately, but I have to say that, although that and the direction that Skills England is going in may be clear to her, out there it really is not clear. People are in a complete fog. They are going, “Yes, I’m sure it’s a great idea. What is it? What is happening?” If it could be made really clear to people that there will be a year’s delay before IfATE powers are transferred, at which point Skills England will be in much better shape, everything will be much clearer, and lots of the other things that have to be done will be done, I think that would be really helpful to everybody concerned.

This is not about having something that you put on the statute book but it never happens—which does occur: quite a major clause in the last piece of skills legislation has never been activated. It is not about that. The transfer of functions will be on the statute book, and it will be very clear that this is going to happen, but it will also be clear to people when it is going to happen, and I think that would be enormously helpful.

[Lord Storey (LD)]

It always concerns me that when new Governments come in, they invariably get rid of particular bodies and create their own. For example, the previous Labour Government set up the regional development agencies, which were hugely successful and built up expertise, et cetera. The coalition Government came in, abolished them and set up a different type of organisation, which took literally years to get going and to be as successful as the regional development agencies.

I do not like the phrase “to delay”; I much prefer “to hand over”. When you hand over, the organisation you are handing over to needs time to embed itself, to understand the situation and to work properly. I am not particularly happy about it, but I will live with Skills England being in the department. We are where we are, and if the Government want to do that, they will.

What is important is that, wherever Skills England is, it is successful and works, because we all want that. It will be successful, to my mind, for three reasons: first, its direction, which the Government set; secondly, who is appointed as chair, and the quality of the board; and—probably—thirdly, the opportunity for the various bodies, be they trade unions, the employers or the combined authorities, to give their information, views and thoughts. To use a strange word, I am quite smitten with this proposal, because it works and helps to enhance the Bill, so I will be interested to hear what the Minister says.