Colleges and Skills: Covid-19 Debate
Full Debate: Read Full DebateDepartment: Department for Education
Andy Carter
Main Page: Andy Carter (Conservative - Warrington South)Department Debates - View all Andy Carter's debates with the Department for Education
Colleges and Skills: Covid-19
Andy Carter Excerpts(3 years, 6 months ago)
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Andy Carter (Warrington South) (Con)
It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Betts. I pay tribute to my hon. Friend the Member for Waveney (Peter Aldous) for securing this debate.
We are, as the Chair of the Education Committee said, in a golden age for further education—that is good, because we need to be, due to the pressure we have on skills and the need to address the skills gap in this country. A lot of colleagues have talked about the work that FE colleges are doing. I want to go in a different direction and talk about the reason they are doing it. The reason is that business needs them to be doing it. The adoption of automation, new technology and artificial intelligence—the digital age we are living in—is unleashing profound structural shifts in the UK workforce. As a result, we have to change the way that we operate our skills.
UK companies need to respond to these threats. If they fail to meet this challenge, they will find themselves with even more acute shortages of talent. Worryingly, the CBI estimates that as many as nine in 10 people currently in work will need to be retrained or reskilled over the next 10 years, partly as a consequence of that new digital revolution. Therefore, hearing the Prime Minister announce that we will be moving to a system where every student will have a flexible lifelong learning entitlement of four years of post-18 education is very welcome, because that is what we will need. Bridging the gap between further and higher education, and increasing flexibility in the funding system to support adults to train—and retrain—and upskill throughout their working lives is absolutely pivotal.
I want to touch briefly on T-levels, which are now being taught in my local college. Priestley College in Warrington became one of the first colleges in the country to offer T-levels. I met the principal recently, and the successful launch of the T-levels in digital production, design and development and in education and childcare has gone incredibly well. I hope the Minister will join me in commending the work of Priestley College, which has not only reopened in extremely challenging circumstances, but made a fantastic start to teaching T-levels in the north of England.