Skills and Post-16 Education Bill [HL]

Lord Triesman Excerpts

2nd reading
Tuesday 15th June 2021 Lords Chamber

[Lord Triesman (Lab) [V]]

My Lords, I declare my interests as a board member of the Capital City College Group and chair of the advisory board of Learning Development Training, a private further and higher education provider. It is a pleasure to follow the noble Baroness, Lady Bennett, who raised some important issues. I add my congratulations to the noble Baroness, Lady Black, and look forward to hearing more about her life.

FE and skills were described by the Minister, and many others, as a Cinderella service in education. However, Cinderella did actually get to the ball: FE rarely has. This is not new; we have a record of neglect. In his history of the loss of British influence, Corelli Barnett set out a two-centuries’ long failure to foster a coherent skills base, which equipped us so poorly as an industrial power before each world war and then again afterwards. Yet we routinely say that the Government must do better, and despite efforts in FE and some exceptional colleges—I pick just one, Bridgwater & Taunton College—the Government themselves routinely do no better. This legislation is a major opportunity for more than 2.2 million students per year currently to develop career opportunities. I welcome that, but the devil is in the detail.

The noble Baroness, Lady Wilcox, set out an extensive set of details we will need to amend, especially given the extent of cuts in recent years. The Bill faces a world of profound social and cultural change. Work is restructuring and sometimes vanishing at an unprecedented rate. AI will accelerate the change. Personal and group identities and aspirations are changing, and I believe there is a concomitant acceleration of social fragmentation. Access to information and knowledge is unparalleled, and with changing technologies has come a growth in personal demand for choice—an insistence on personal choice which will not be amenable to strict direction.

The world of skills providers is no longer the traditional rationalist, calculative, instrumental and depersonalised one. It still demands expertise, not least because of its complexity, but it is now more characterised by being networked, information-based, personal, risky and often post industrial. There is a demand for new competences, the capability to withstand more competition, to deal with faster technical and environmental change and to know that there are no jobs for life. They flow from the structural changes in industry and occupations, and all these changes in the nature of workplaces, work/life balance, and the dreadful fact that some households have people now in the third generation of unemployment —truly left behind—pose a great challenge. This must surely focus us on enabling personal aspiration wherever the aspiration can be met in the UK.

The Bill has to achieve vital goals. First, it must overcome chronic poor productivity against the background I have tried to describe. It must ensure high skill levels are achieved and geographically distributed, but allow for enhanced personal mobility. That means far more lifelong learning and far better literacy and numeracy. Raising skills would drive the UK to being a high-supply, high-demand economy and away from low productivity but, if it is to succeed, the financial support of students must be far more explicit than it is in the Bill, especially up to level 3 and as people change career course.

Secondly, the Bill has to respond to the need for work readiness. The better the qualifications of students, the better employers say their applicants are prepared. It is right to focus on employability, but experience shows that employers are not always expert at reading the runes about the future rather than identifying their immediate needs. If the Bill is to succeed, there will need to be serious consultations about developments in business demand. With the best will in the world, that cannot rely exclusively on employers. There is a significant role for government industrial strategy, for skills advisory councils and certainly for individual students.

Next, a third of adults engage in no formal learning whatever after leaving school, yet they live in a world which is changing rapidly and constantly, so the Bill must address the motivational barriers from early learning onwards. This is not just a matter for colleges, sixth-form colleges or indeed the many entities in this space. They need to work collaboratively; it is a whole-society issue. It is fundamentally an issue of economic and social resilience for the United Kingdom, and we must learn the lessons of the last couple of years. Perhaps our most valuable asset is our ability to co-operate.

Finally, a simple switch between university and skills funding, as several noble Lords have said, is surely misconceived. To prosper in a world of rapid technological change and innovation, and with the growing importance of creativity, including the arts, in our economy, it is essential to develop people who can work through the challenges of fundamental rethinking. A significant proportion will have to be able to deal in conceptual analysis, and this has been a central example of progress in history. Professor Robert Reich’s huge influence on boosting the competitiveness of the United States economy was built on this thought. In short, higher education provides the necessary condition for education-led prosperity, as it is also a wide basis for vocational qualification. Yet we must also meet the needs of the sufficient conditions, and that is where the skills agenda and this Bill can be transformative. This is the foundation of meaningful parity of esteem. Let us not embark on a turf war between HE and FE funding—that can never help. We, and the Bill, will be tested on the promotion of an all-through co-operation, not on robbing Peter to pay Paul.