Skills and Post-16 Education Bill [HL]

Debate between Lord Watson of Invergowrie and Lord Aberdare

3rd reading
Monday 25th October 2021 Lords Chamber

[Lord Aberdare (CB)]

My Lords, briefly, it has been a great pleasure for me to participate from the Cross Benches in these debates, along with so many much more distinguished experts and a wisdom of former Education Ministers, if that is the correct collective term. This is a very important Bill and I very much echo what the noble Lords, Lord Blunkett and Lord Storey, have said. I hope that the Government will listen to the issues raised in our debates and think about them carefully as the Bill progresses. I add my thanks to the Minister, to her predecessor and to the Bill team, not least to the current Minister for going beyond her normal duties to help me with my maths abilities, which clearly need some improvement. I very much hope that this will be the Bill that delivers the skills and post-16 education system we need, unlike so many of its unfortunate predecessors.

[Lord Watson of Invergowrie (Lab)]

My Lords, I have prepared a few words that I intended to say on the Motion that the Bill Do Now Pass. I thought that the Minister would have moved that but we seem to have got there anyway, by whatever route. I am sure noble Lords will not be too unhappy about that, although perhaps the clerk may be.

As noble Lords have demonstrated over four days in Committee and two on Report, the Bill as drafted was not fit for purpose and required considerable improvement. In addition the Minister herself has introduced three concessions, not the least of which concerns net-zero emissions targets, which of course we welcome. Noble Lords have supported eight amendments; what was most remarkable was the extent to which they were the product of effective cross-party planning and execution. Of course, as noble Lords know, no win in your Lordships’ House can be achieved without some cross-party co-operation. But we believe that the number of noble Lords from the government Benches who made clear their dissatisfaction with various parts of the Bill, as the noble Lord, Lord Aberdare, has just suggested, ought to give the Minister and her Government pause for thought.

With three of their defeats involving amendments in the names of former Conservative Secretaries of State for Education, the Government need to accept that with regard to the Bill they do not possess a monopoly of wisdom on matters as diverse as universal credit conditionality and the withdrawal of BTECs. My noble friend Lady Sherlock has a unique ability: she can explain universal credit in an understandable manner. I have never found anyone else who can achieve that feat.

It would be unkind to press the Minister any further on the mystical missing amendments on the lifelong loan entitlement, because I suspect that in her private moments, she asks herself the same questions as noble Lords: do they really exist? Will they ever appear? We have been promised them so often that on these Benches the suspense is now killing us. We also await details of sharia student finance for both higher education and further education to be announced as part of the spending review, as well as an announcement on fees, which the noble Baroness, Lady Berridge, the then Minister, promised in Committee.

However, I would like to record my admiration for the Minister’s ability to pick up the baton on the Bill after it was, I think I can say, thrust at her midway through its consideration in your Lordships’ House. I should say that the change of Minister caught us on these Benches by surprise, because we thought that the noble Baroness, Lady Berridge, had coped admirably up until then—although it would appear that was not the view shared by the Leader of the House and the Chief Whip. On my behalf and that of my noble friends Lady Sherlock and Lady Wilcox, I say for the record that we want to thank the noble Baroness, Lady Berridge, for her work on the Bill and for her openness and willingness to engage with us. I also say on our joint behalf that that is not to suggest that the Minister—the noble Baroness, Lady Barran—is any less so in that regard.

I also add my thanks to the Bill team for the briefings it facilitated and its willingness to discuss with us, openly and in detail, aspects of the Bill that were unclear or about which we had concerns. It certainly helped to put us more in tune with the thinking on the Bill, even if we were not always convinced by the arguments.

I thank all noble Lords who have been involved with the Bill at various stages. Of course, the Public Bill Office has, as ever, been extremely helpful. All Ministers, including the noble Baronesses, Lady Barran, Lady Berridge, Lady Chisholm and Lady Penn, have been most helpful and always pleasant to deal with. Given that my team has also contained two noble Baronesses and a female legislative and political adviser, I have clearly been the token male in all this.

I thank my colleagues, my noble friends Lady Sherlock and Lady Wilcox, for their support and advice, particularly last week, when the change of date for the second day of Report made it impossible for me to participate. They achieved five wins out of five on that occasion, which perhaps suggests that I should have absented myself more often.

As noble Lords are aware, Ministers have a vast array of officials behind them at times like this, and rightly so, but, as the Opposition, we have just one person: Rhian Copple, the legislative and political adviser for our team. She has been an endless source of ideas and support in so many ways, not least in drafting amendments and negotiating with the Public Bill Office, representatives of other parties and Cross-Benchers. We all owe her a huge debt of gratitude.

I wish the Skills and Post-16 Education Bill good luck in another place. It will need it.

Skills and Post-16 Education Bill [HL]

Debate between Lord Watson of Invergowrie and Lord Aberdare

Committee stage
Wednesday 21st July 2021 Lords Chamber

[Lord Aberdare (CB)]

My Lords, it has always seemed odd to me that so many of us complete our education with extensive knowledge of maths, English language and literature, history, languages, the sciences and other academic subjects—in my case including Latin and Greek, much to my benefit—but with few, if any, of the skills listed in Amendment 90C from the noble Baroness, Lady Bennett, nor other rather fundamental skills such as cooking and household maintenance, generic skills such as communications, teamwork and self-presentation, or even typing and map-reading, which may still prove to be not entirely redundant, despite the impact of technology. Yet these are all valuable life skills that schools should be well placed to teach.

One of the skills listed in the amendment, first aid, could even be a matter of life and death. The figures I have, which may not be wholly up to date, indicate that 60,000 people suffer cardiac arrests out of hospital every year in the UK. Almost half of those that occur in public places are witnessed by bystanders, not infrequently children. With every minute that passes, their chances of survival decrease by about 10%, so teaching children quite straightforward first aid techniques at school, such as how to give CPR or use a defibrillator, can literally save lives, as well as being fun for the learners. The many countries in which such teaching is compulsory have significantly better survival rates from shockable cardiac arrest than the UK—as high as 52% in Norway, for example, against 2% to 12% in the UK, depending on where you live.

I will not labour this specific hobby-horse of mine, except to say that, in my view, it is just one of many strong arguments in support of the need for an assessment of current gaps in the teaching of non-academic but highly valuable life skills and how those gaps might be addressed, as suggested in Amendment 90C. I look forward to the Minister’s comments on how that might be achieved.

[Lord Watson of Invergowrie (Lab)]

My Lords, we are very much in favour of Amendment 90C. I endorse the remarks of the noble Baroness, Lady Bennett, in moving it and those of the noble Lord, Lord Aberdare.

The life skills set out in the amendment are all essential building blocks in a developed, compassionate and forward-looking society. Many of these categories would fall under the heading of “social solidarity”, a concept that is, I have to say, anathema to many in the Conservative Party who still hold to the infamous, and utterly fatuous, claim by Prime Minister Thatcher that

“there’s no such thing as society.”

If the past 17 months show us anything, they have graphically described how society has pulled together in ways that perhaps we have not seen before out of wartime. I should make it clear that I have seen no evidence that either of the noble Baronesses looking after this Bill fall under that heading, and I am perfectly happy to do so.

Not to accept that these life skills are necessary in ensuring that there are as few local skills gaps as possible once the locals skills improvement partnerships are developed would be, at best, to leave the Ministers open to the charge that they do not attach sufficient importance to them. In reply, the Minister will no doubt say they are unnecessary, but I believe that what this Government regard as necessary does not correspond with what most people have a right to expect in a civilised, advanced society.

Sadly, yesterday provided the latest example of that, with proposals for severe cuts to arts and creative subjects in higher education confirmed by the Office for Students. The Government claim that they want to redirect funding for high-cost STEM subjects, as well as medicine and healthcare. Nobody is denying that these are important subjects—indeed, priority subjects—but that does not mean that arts and culture subjects are not important themselves. They should not be abandoned.

Almost one in eight businesses are creative businesses. Some 2 million jobs in the UK as a whole are in the creative sector, worth a staggering total of £111 billion a year to the economy, and yet this Government of philistines are prepared to ignore those huge numbers and to seriously undermine the creative industries, which include much more than the arts—themselves a form of social solidarity, of course. Yes, film, TV, animation, video games, children’s TV, theatres, museums and orchestras are all included, but so too are advertising and marketing, design, graphic products, fashion, architecture and much more.

The damaging cuts will halve the high-cost funding subsidy for creative and arts university subjects—not next year but as soon as September this year, at the start of the new academic term. That is likely to threaten the viability of arts courses in universities and lead to possible closures, which may well be the Government’s ultimate aim. The universities most vulnerable are those with a higher number of less well-off students, so this will deny young people the kind of opportunities that my noble friend Lady Wilcox mentioned during the last debate.

The attack on culture seems to be just the latest example of the Government’s rather pathetic culture war strategy over recent months. I cannot imagine that the Minister, the noble Baroness, Lady Penn, as someone who served at the heart of Theresa May’s Government, would countenance such deliberately divisive nonsense.

The Bill should oblige local skills improvement partnerships to consider the role played by the creative industries locally and ensure that they are central to skills development plans. Equally, they should cover the life skills specified in the amendment. For that reason, we are fully in support, and I look forward to hearing the Minister’s reply.