Skills and Post-16 Education Bill [Lords]

Debate between Alex Burghart and Chris Skidmore

Monday 28th March 2022 Commons Chamber

[Chris Skidmore (Kingswood) (Con)]

I reiterate the general remarks of my right hon. Friend the Member for Harlow (Robert Halfon) about how the Bill is welcome overall. I will support the Government in their motions to disagree with the Lords amendments, and I agree that it is important that the Bill sees its final passage so that we can get on with the important journey towards an integrated education system. I refer to my entry in the Register of Members’ Financial Interests as chair of the Lifelong Education Commission, which I set up with ResPublica to look at the long-term structural issues underpinning why the United Kingdom, and England in particular, has had such a difficult, long tail of underachievement and the need, as we look at the Government’s mission to level up for the future, to place skills provision front and centre of the agenda.

About six million people—the figure hovers around that number—still have only qualifications at level 2, and there is a desperate need to give more people an opportunity to enhance their qualifications so that they can apply for the many jobs and vacancies out there. People are not refusing to do those jobs. It is partly that they do not have the skills and capabilities to engage with the process, but they are desperate to do so, and that it is why it is so vital to match their skills with their ambitions.

The Bill begins the long process of moving from a top-heavy system that focused unduly on universities and did not give the further education sector the opportunity and investment that it needed to progress. Hopefully, we will now focus on tertiary education overall instead of pitching HE against FE. However, the Bill must be just chapter one of that educational revolution. As the hon. Member for Chesterfield (Mr Perkins) mentioned, the Bill goes only so far, and a number of caveats have yet to be addressed, particularly on financing. I am particularly interested in financing for lifelong education, as such learners are not 18-year-olds who can access loan finance—and, even if they could, they have families, and they have mortgages and other debts to pay, so simply saying, “You can apply for an additional loan” will not work. We need to look at grant financing and understand the pressures placed on individuals and the barriers that they will need to overcome to access lifelong learning.

I tabled nine amendments the other month, none of which was accepted by the Government; nor, sadly, were they taken up by the Lords. I will continue to press the Government on skills provision, the lifelong loan entitlement and the lifetime skills guarantee, which applies only to a small proportion of the overall population. I wish it could be expanded, and I hope that the Government recognise that that ambition should be realised, particularly for individuals who have received qualifications at levels 3 to 5—or even levels 6 or 7— and need to retrain. They may have taken a degree 20 years ago, but they cannot access the opportunities to do that retraining.

The opportunities for lifelong learning and skills provision need to be more inclusive in the future. At the moment, the Bill addresses only a small segment of society—it is a segment that must be addressed and tackled—but let us look at chapters two, three and four and begin the journey of levelling up for everyone in this country, not just the immediate priority on which we are focused today.

[Alex Burghart]

It is a pleasure to follow my right hon. Friends the Members for Harlow (Robert Halfon) and for Kingswood (Chris Skidmore), who both have great expertise in the field. On what my hon. Friend the Member for Kingswood said, we are interested in building up the offer for people already in the workplace. We see a great many people taking apprenticeships to reboot their careers. The Prime Minister’s lifetime skills guarantee is offering people who did not get level 3 technical qualifications at school or college the chance to do so later in life. Of course, we also have the LLE, which is championed by the Minister for Higher and Further Education, my right hon. Friend the Member for Chippenham (Michelle Donelan).

We are about giving everyone, whatever stage they are at in life, the chance to step forward and build their careers with new opportunities. The Bill is central to that. I have heard the hon. Member for Chesterfield (Mr Perkins) criticise the Bill at various stages for not mentioning apprenticeships. They are obviously extraordinarily important to what we are doing, and I am delighted to report that, in the first quarter of the academic year, 164,000 people started apprenticeships, which is up 34% from last year and—crucially—up 6% from the pre-pandemic period. He often likes to quote figures of yesteryear, and I must remind him—not for the first time—that the change in the number of starts was not down to the creation of the apprenticeship levy but because, in 2017, when my right hon. Friend the Secretary of State was in a more junior job in the Department for Education, he started to reform apprenticeships to ensure that our 640 standards reflected the needs of employers. That golden thread has run through all our reforms over the past 10 years, building from the report written by Baroness Wolf in 2011 through to the Sainsbury review in 2016.

To hear those on the Opposition Benches say, “Slow down, you’re going too fast” is somewhat reminiscent of the Locomotive Act 1865, which recommended that the speed limit in town should be 2 mph and that somebody with a red flag should walk ahead of the vehicle as it made its progress. We have waited long enough and students have waited long enough for high-quality technical qualifications that are designed with employers to give the economy the skills that it needs and to give students the skills they need to prosper in that economy.

The hon. Member for Chesterfield also referred to the number of people on BTEC courses and the number of people expected to do T-levels. I remind him again that we are not in the process of defunding all BTECs: BTECs will survive where they do not overlap with T-levels. Just as now, there will be some people who do not study level 3 at age 16 to 19, and those people will have an enhanced offer at level 2, off the back of our level 2 reforms that are currently out to consultation.

I was delighted that at the beginning of last week 69 T-level providers from throughout the country—from north to south and east to west—came to the Department for Education and talked to us about their experiences in the first two years. A great many students came with them, and the level of enthusiasm for the qualifications and the level of excitement about the opportunities that the reforms are going to provide for the next generation was tangible. It therefore gives me great pleasure to commend the Bill to the House and sit down.

Question put.