Vocational Education

Lord Young of Norwood Green Excerpts

Thursday 28th February 2013 Grand Committee

[Lord Young of Norwood Green]

My Lords, I, too, thank the noble Lord, Lord Lucas, for ensuring this debate. If nothing else, it forced me to look up “pedagogy” and find out what it meant. I thought I knew but that, being a fully paid-up member of “Pedants are us”, I had better know the precise meaning. I am also grateful to the City and Guilds Institute, for two reasons. First, the only qualifications I have are from it, so I have some reason to be grateful to it. Secondly, I am grateful for the report, although when I looked at its equilateral triangle that promised to identify the three types of vocational education I did not quite understand it, so it is back to the drawing board for me.

I was tempted to ask the noble Lord, Lord Lucas, for the name of the plumber. If he was as good as that, everybody would want him. Unfortunately, not all of them measure up. I remember seeing a television programme which showed far too many of them saying, “Your boiler’s had it and you need a new one”, when it actually had quite a simple fault. Of course, a plumber these days is not just a plumber. A plumber is required to have knowledge of electronics and chemicals, plus the basic plumbing techniques, so I do not knock that.

My party’s approach to vocational education is, briefly, that we want to develop a transformational 14 to 18 education system featuring a quality technical baccalaureate at 18 for those achieving a rigorous vocational qualification, a work experience placement and achievement in English and mathematics. That is taking into account the point from the noble Lord, Lord Addington, about having different methods for those who have real problems in approaching exams in the standard way. The TechBacc would sit alongside those A-level programmes. We want more and better vocational education up to 18, with all young people undertaking some vocational learning from 14 and compulsory work experience for all 16 to 18 year-olds. I am rushing this because we have only a short time.

One of the smarter things that we did in Government was, I felt, that instead of raising the school-leaving age we raised the participation age. All Governments make mistakes, but I thought that was a good one. One of the mistakes we made was in picking a random figure and saying, “We want 50% of young people to go to university”, which somehow implied that the other 50% had failed in some way. Eventually, we realised that that was not the case and we put a lot of effort into both FE and apprenticeships, but I feel that it was a sort of catching-up process.

There are many of these reports but, looking at the Government’s response to the Wolf report—whether or not we like every aspect of it—it was a significant report. The Government identified a number of things that they felt were failures, and I agree with them. They include perverse incentives created by the performance and funding systems and encouraging the teaching of qualifications that attract the most performance points or the most funding, not the qualifications that support young people to progress. I saw evidence of that in my brief ministerial career, so I do not in any way blame it on this Government—we are all on a journey trying to improve quality. The failures also include students without a solid grounding in the basics being allowed to drop the study of English and maths. We know that they cannot do that. Many potential employers say, “If they want to progress, they’ve got to have a basic grounding in those subjects”. Therefore, we are looking to improve the quality of FE, and we know from the Ofsted review that it needs to be improved.

I was attracted to the point that the noble Lord, Lord Lingfield, made about giving institutions more autonomy. However, with autonomy comes responsibility. Before he said that, I thought that I would not give them autonomy unless they came up to a certain standard. The noble Lord then went on to talk about the royal charter, which I think is a good approach.

When you go into FE colleges—and I have visited quite a few—you can see that when they work, they work really well. One college that I went to had a department dealing with painting and decorating. It worked well because the college had managed to attract a local painter and decorator who ran a highly successful business. It had initially lured him into the college on the basis that he would be coaching, but it trained him in teaching and he created a fantastically successful department. I instance that because we need all colleges to have that relationship with the business community, as the noble Lord, Lord Lingfield, mentioned, as well as the local community.

In the brief time available to me, I want to touch on a couple of other things. We have a concern about the looming introduction of FE loans for all courses at level 3 and above for those aged 24 and over. There is already some evidence that that might prove to be a disincentive. We live in a society where we know that people are not going to retain one job throughout their life and that they are going to have to retrain, and that is something that the Government may need to reflect upon.

Something else identified in the Wolf report is that we can have the best further education but if it does not lead to work experience and apprenticeships then we are in trouble. It is not that the Government are not focused on apprenticeships—I pay tribute to some of the work they have done—but there is still some way to go on quality. Just quoting numbers is not enough, as a lot of the figures relate to adult apprenticeships. The area where I think we need to focus is the 16 to 18 age group, and I say that because of youth unemployment. Although the unemployment figures may be coming down, youth unemployment is still a serious problem. The number of firms employing apprentices is still pathetic. I think that only about a third of the FTSE 100 companies have apprenticeships, and the average is somewhere between 4% and 8%. I fail to understand why the Government do not insist that if you want a public procurement contract, you have to specify the training and the number of apprenticeships. I have just been invited to a Crossrail apprenticeship award event. Crossrail has 400 apprentices because we insisted on it, and the same applied to the Olympics. I do not understand why the Government will not go down that road.

We are in an ever-changing environment—the noble Baroness, Lady Sharp, mentioned further education, distance learning and social media—but we are also in an era when UTCs are on the scene. One question that I used to ask when I went around schools, colleges and universities was, “How many apprentices do you, as an institution, have?”. Often I might as well have asked them how many people from their college had landed on Mars because they did not seem to understand that it is no good teaching about apprenticeships if you do not have any yourself. It is important to encourage them to recruit not just as one school or one college but together as a group. We have ATAs and group training associations, which have been identified in the government report, and every local authority ought to ensure that GTAs operate within their area working with schools, colleges and further education colleges. They are part of the solution to this problem but we have a long way to go.

As part of the Lords outreach programme, I will be speaking to some sixth-formers tomorrow. They are all bright-eyed and bushy-tailed, and we cannot help but think that they are about to face reality. They will be trying to enter the world of work, assuming that they do not go on to university. Even those who go on to university are now wondering whether it is the right journey. We have a huge challenge and responsibility. We cannot afford to fail to create not only apprenticeships, which are fundamentally important, but work experience. If further education colleges are able to apply their pedagogy in an environment that will produce results, they must be able to give confidence to young people that they will find work and work experience out there. Those are some of my brief reflections. This has been a very worthwhile debate, and the subject merits a much longer debate at some time in the future when we can pursue some of its complexities. I look forward to the Minister’s response.