Lifelong Learning (Higher Education Fee Limits) Bill

Debate between Aaron Bell and Siobhan Baillie

2nd reading
Monday 27th February 2023 Commons Chamber

[Siobhan Baillie (Stroud) (Con)]

It is an absolute pleasure to follow my hon. Friend the Member for Wantage (David Johnston), who I genuinely believe could speak for an entire day on this subject and still enthral the entire Chamber. I completely love this focus on lifelong learning. Whether short courses, long courses or life-enhancing learning, it is hugely important not only to the individual, but to the country. I am pleased that we finally have a Government who are committed to all forms of learning, jobs and sectors. I give credit to the Department for Education and all the officials in the Box as well, because I know how hard they have been working.

I did not go to university; I left home at 15 and did not do particularly well at school. I got a job as a legal secretary, and then I worked my way up. I went to night school, carried on and qualified as a solicitor. I was quite embarrassed about all that. I did not tell anybody. I remember going out with barristers and their saying, “Just give this up. It is hard work. You are going to work all day and studying at night. You are teaching aerobics as well in the evening to pay for all the law school fees. That looks like hard graft, why don’t you just go to uni?” I used to fumble around and stumble in my explanation as to why I was learning in the way I was. That was because the entire country and the Labour party for a long time had focused very much on getting 50% of youngsters into university, and there was not a lot of chat about the rest of us.

We know that a lot of parents are often very supportive of further education colleges, but mainly for other people’s children, because many families, many schools and many quarters still consider that university is the only way forward. Let us fast-forward to me as a bright-eyed, bushy-tailed candidate in Stroud. I got chatting to those at the amazing further education college, South Gloucestershire and Stroud College. I spoke to people at all our secondary schools, and I met bright and ambitious young people. On the doorsteps, I kept meeting people who had qualified through further education colleges, and I was learning all the time about these great careers. Often they were running great big departments or leading the way in their individual industries, but they tended not to talk about how they had qualified, often because they had been written off by the time they had got into colleges. We drop that part of our lives.

I started bothering Education Ministers about further education and skills, and I started a campaign called #FEFriday. I basically bang on about further education every single Friday on all my social media. What I have learned from all that is just how valuable everything that goes on in our colleges is and how important our lifelong learning programmes are. I remind everybody that during the pandemic the professions that people missed the most were the chefs, hairdressers, childminders, those in beauty and those in construction. We should remember when we were not allowed plumbers in our houses, and how much trouble that caused. I absolutely welcome this Bill, the focus on lifelong learning and finding a way to support that financially.

Similar to other Members, I have questions for the Minister that I know he will deal with about the funding behind the Bill for our colleges and how much that will help them. They have a real crisis in recruitment. They are seeing other colleges and other sectors providing golden hellos and cash to recruit and retain staff, which FE colleges cannot offer. Similar to my hon. Friend the Member for Waveney (Peter Aldous), I am interested to see how this Bill works alongside the apprenticeship levy, which we could have another very long debate on, and how we are ensuring that we are seeing reforms.

I want to hear—not necessarily today—a little more about the polling and work that the Department has done to look into the perception of taking on more debt, because when I was growing up I did not want to get into debt. That is the reality for lots of people in my communities. That is why I worked to learn, and it is why I made sure I was teaching those aerobics classes to pay my fees.

[Aaron Bell]

Does my hon. Friend agree that some of the contributions about debt, particularly, I regret to say, from Opposition Members, have been very unhelpful? I have found that the best advice has often come from Martin Lewis, who is very widely trusted on these things. Going to university or taking on any course, as people could under the Bill, should not be seen as a debt in the traditional sense of the term; it operates for UK-based people much more like a graduate tax than actual debt, and that framing is far more important, because that will encourage people into learning, rather than discourage them.

[Siobhan Baillie]

My hon. Friend is absolutely right. When we look into how these things work, we see that it is not a debt, but very much an enabler. However, we know that many people feel that it is a debt. I want to understand how the Department has looked at this issue and how we deal with those concerns going forward.

In the final minutes I have, I want to make two separate points: first on green skills, then on employability. I wrote an article some time ago that set out and argued that net zero cannot happen without know-how, but we have effectively got a green skills emergency. There is a challenge to reskill those who work in existing industries that will be affected by the transition. Fossil fuel production in the North sea, for example, created skilled and well-paid workers who are sorely needed to make the transition successful, but they need to have a skills bridge to make sure they are being retrained for future industries. I am interested to know how the lifelong learning entitlement can help that.

The second issue with the skills emergency is educating our young people. We have a huge skills gap for our future workforce, which urgently needs closing. I did some work with the Chair of the Select Committee, my hon. Friend the Member for Worcester (Mr Walker) to create a nature GCSE and engage people. My main message to young people when I go into schools is, “Do not lie down on motorways or glue yourselves to stuff. Do your STEM subjects and make sure you are learning well, because if you become scientists, you will be fixing the environmental challenges that we have today, and you will be the saviours of our future.”

I encourage people to look at the Onward report, “Green Jobs, Red Wall”. I work closely with the Onward think-tank, and it is excellent. I will run out of time if I go through that report, but alongside the Bill, it is important that the Department for Education works with other Departments to ensure that the landscape is set up so that we educate, encourage people to gain skills and encourage people to take on more courses. However, unless we get the factories up and motoring and unless we get the seed investment into some areas of tech, the jobs will not be there, so I ask the Department for Education please to work with other Departments.

On employability, I started the all-party parliamentary group on the future of employability in direct response to the calls of employers in Stroud, which are echoed around the country, about recruitment issues; the calls of potential employees who are feeling burnt out post pandemic; the high number of people with mental health issues; and the millions of people on welfare. I have also been fighting the good fight on childcare, because we have a huge group of economically inactive people—mainly mothers—who are not working at full tilt.

I had been looking at the issue and I spoke to a good friend, Ronel Lehmann, who started an employment company called Finito. It is his job to get people work ready, so we put our heads together and started the APPG, because I passionately believe in the power of work doing good. I can see that thousands of people are no longer work ready, that many millions are not working at full tilt, and that people do not feel that they have a place in the workforce because they do not feel that they can engage.

All the evidence tells us that work is the fastest route out of poverty. It gives us a reason to get out of bed and it is good for mental health and for relationships. It is also good for children to see their parents have a routine and a sense of purpose. We do not always have to like our jobs—there are days, even though it is a great privilege to be here, when we do not like our jobs—but we have to send a strong message to the country that, “Work is good for you. Work will help not only you and your family, but the country.”

Having a focus on lifelong learning, on employability and on ensuring that we are getting people work ready and into a job—and that once they are in a job, they can transition into a more responsible part of that job or to a new job—is the quickest way for people to feel sustained and fulfilled. I look forward to working with the Minister, and I believe passionately in what he and the Secretary of State, who is now in her place, are trying to do. I am genuinely ambitious for every single person I meet, and I think the Front-Bench team from the Department for Education feel exactly the same, so I wish the Bill Godspeed and I look forward to making sure that it happens.