Skills and Post-16 Education Bill [HL]

Baroness Blackstone Excerpts

2nd reading
Tuesday 15th June 2021 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Blackstone (Ind Lab)]

My Lords, I welcome a Bill which focuses on lifelong learning and is committed to enhancing skills among the many young and indeed older people who do not go to university. I also welcome a Bill which aims to enhance the further education sector and support outstanding teaching as well as emphasising collaboration between employers and education and training providers, with the provisos made by my noble friend Lady Morris of Yardley. Lastly, I welcome a Bill which seeks to correct the injustice of considerable financial support for students in universities against negligible financial support for students studying in FE colleges.

We undoubtedly have serious skills gaps compared to other OECD countries, with shortages of skilled employees in many sectors and low levels of productivity. This reflects too little investment by government and employers in alternative qualifications to university degrees. This has been particularly apparent in the last decade, when the coalition Government and the Conservative Government who followed them slashed further education, cutting colleges’ incomes by 50%.

Having welcomed the aims of the Bill, I turn to some of its limitations. As a piece of legislation, it is short on detail; it is a skeleton with too little flesh on it to allow us to understand how it will work in practice in key areas. This perhaps explains the long timescale for implementation, which will not be until 2024-25 for core proposals. The Bill reads a bit like a work in progress rather than the end of a detailed policy-making approach culminating—rather than beginning—with a piece of legislation. In a post-Covid world, action will be needed urgently and cannot be delayed for four years. This is especially true of training and educational support for the unemployed after furlough ends.

As others have said, the Bill’s implementation is also dependent on a large injection of resources, both in the short and the longer term. The Institute for Fiscal Studies has questioned whether these resources will be forthcoming and whether detailed calculations of the costs entailed have been undertaken. What is the total price of the Bill when implemented, and when will the Government start injecting new resources?

Let me illustrate this with respect to FE colleges. Their funding has been insufficient. They need more, and they need longer-term funding settlements. This much was recognised, as the Minister knows, in the White Paper. It becomes even more salient when their funding is compared with that of schools and universities —as my noble friend Lord Layard has already mentioned—since they are much less well off in funding per student. Recent research by the IPPR found that to keep up with demographic pressures and inflation, over the last 10 years we would have had to invest £2.1 billion more per annum in adult skills and £2.7 billion more in 16 to 19 year-olds in FE. The Government must provide for future needs and redress the long-standing past underinvestment. Are the Government committed to starting the process in the next spending review, and will they move to long-term, multiyear simplified funding? Without this, the colleges will not be able to develop their curriculum and the range of courses needed to meet the outcomes of discussions with employers on local skills needs, nor will they be able to pay the salaries needed to attract high-quality lecturers to develop and teach new programmes.

I want to pick out one important area for new courses that may not emerge from locally based identifications of skills needs but requires a national scheme. This concerns the green economy. The Government’s commitment to net-zero carbon emissions by 2050 requires a big shift to education and skills training to stall climate change. The Bill is a lost opportunity as it fails to link the Government’s goals on decarbonisation in energy, transport, and buildings, sustainable land management and carbon sequestration. Not only will those entering the labour force for the first time need to be prepared for green jobs, but many who currently work in fossil fuel sectors will need retraining. Why does the Bill make little or no reference to net zero? Should there not be a requirement for skills improvement plans to refer to national objectives on the green economy?

Lastly, I want to touch on the lifetime skills guarantee, on which the Government are still consulting. I am really glad that the gist of the Augar report’s recommendations on student support has been accepted, but the Government must provide more detail on eligibility, whatever the level or type of course the student is training in. Who will be eligible in terms of the range of subjects? I hope the range will be very wide and not narrow. They also need to consider, as others have said, how to support the maintenance needs of students from disadvantaged backgrounds—or are the Government just going to ignore this? There will be a great deal of work to be done in Committee in this area and, I fear, in many other areas too.