Technical and Further Education Bill

Baroness Cohen of Pimlico Excerpts

Committee: 1st sitting (Hansard): House of Lords
Wednesday 22nd February 2017 Grand Committee

[Lord Aberdare (CB)]

My Lords, I want briefly to add my support for these amendments, particularly Amendment 1. There needs to be a real commitment to assembling the data we need to assess how well apprenticeships are working and whether there are areas that need improving, looking at or changing. I also agree with a number of noble Lords, including the noble Baroness, Lady Morris, that this is a key part of being able to raise the esteem for apprenticeships and vocational education. I add to the issues covered those relating to whether we are meeting the skills needs not just of the UK but of all the employers concerned. Are there sectors that are not doing as well as they should? Are SMEs being suitably addressed by the system and is it working? The amendment is a helpful way of ensuring that we are committed to collecting the data we need to measure, assess and demonstrate that apprenticeships are working.

[Baroness Cohen of Pimlico (Lab)]

I, too, support the amendments and thank the noble Lord, Lord Nash, for his helpful letter. My heart lifted when I saw in it that there would indeed be controls to prevent employers refusing to release apprentices for training. That is jolly good; it will improve the quality of apprenticeships no end right there.

I retain an area of muddle in my head. We are all talking about apprenticeships, and degree-level apprenticeships operate rather differently. I thought degree-level apprenticeships would be designed by the Office for Students. I believe the Bill says that their conditions will be enforced, including the formal condition that people must be released for training, by the SFA—that is fine if I have understood it; there is nothing wrong with the SFA—while the design of all other apprenticeships and the setting out of conditions will be done by the new Institute for Apprenticeships. Do I still have this wrong, or will the new Institute for Apprenticeships design all our apprenticeships, including degree-level apprenticeships? There is a cross in responsibilities between the higher education Bill and the technical education Bill. To be frank, I am still “Slightly Muddled” of the House of Lords here. I would welcome assurance on this point.

[Baroness Donaghy (Lab)]

My Lords, I apologise for not being present at Second Reading. I hope that when the Institute for Apprenticeships is up and running the first apprenticeship it approves will be to teach the acronyms in this complicated area—it might do the whole country a service. As an educational administrator of 33 years, I do not understand the Bill, which I think is because we have a very complex and inadequate system which we are trying to turn into an adequate one. I fully accept the Government’s intentions; I am not absolutely clear whether they will be achieved.

I understand from the Minister’s briefing that the work to develop the detail of what the new system will look like is yet to be done and that the measures in the Bill are the first step, so I recognise that he will not have all the answers. However, in echoing the concern expressed by the noble Baroness, Lady Cohen, who takes the final decision about judging the quality will be a measure of the success or failure of the scheme. If the 20% off-the-job training works, the compliance issues are reliable and the Skills Funding Agency has the material—

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[Baroness Donaghy]

I will be brief, because some of these issues will come out when we deal with other amendments. In supporting issues of quality, it is first important that we know what the organisational chart will look like. A valiant attempt was made at an organisational chart, but whether I was any wiser at the end of reading it, I am not sure. I am not sure that an individual applicant, their parents or providers would be clear either. It seems to me that there is a separation of important issues of quality, not unlike the break we had just now—we were talking about one subject and have come back to talk about another. I am interested in the 20% off-the-job training. How will compliance with that fit in? To what extent will the integrity of the employer be relied on? How will it fit in with the qualifications that will be subject to either the Institute of Apprenticeships or the successor body to HEFCE? I am just not clear what the organisational chart is.

I do not expect the Minister to give me an answer straight away, but if I cannot see my way through this, acronyms and all—I have a bit of background in this area—I do not think we have necessarily got it right when it comes to the function of the Bill. Who exactly is in charge? Who will enforce compliance? Will it be separated out? If so, that relates to the issue of quality that my noble friends Lady Morris and Lord Young have spoken to very clearly. I am asking for clarity as the Bill goes through Committee, rather than for all the answers now.

[Baroness Cohen of Pimlico]

I, too, am not asking for all the answers now. I think we have a muddle with providers here. As I think everybody knows, I am chancellor of BPP University, which provides degree-level apprenticeships. We had expected that to be looked after and designed by the Office for Students. Fine—but the Bill says that all apprenticeships will be looked after by the Institute for Apprenticeships. Outside the university, we do skills training and proper apprenticeships, and I think I am clear that that part of our work will be looked after, regulated and designed by the Institute for Apprenticeships. If the Bill said that it applied to all apprenticeships, including degree-level apprenticeships, I would know where I was, but is this what we mean? I thought that bit of the university, of which I have the honour to be chancellor, was to be regulated, along with the rest of the university, by the Office for Students. There will be more and more universities doing this—they are natural providers of degree-level apprenticeships—but I think they will be in as much of a muddle as I am.

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[Lord Knight of Weymouth (Lab)]

My Lords, I also apologise that I was not able to speak at Second Reading and I remind the Committee of my interests in respect of my employment at TES, which is probably where I was when the Second Reading debate took place. As others have said, careers education has been a failure under successive Governments, including the one of which I was a part. It is a hard area to resource well and it is hard for professionals in this area to keep up with the real world. From the contacts I have had with careers education professionals, they feel that the situation is getting worse, but that is for people generally to judge. I certainly mourn the loss of the education business partnerships that were part of keeping schools in touch with employers in their localities.

I join with those who are looking forward to a careers strategy from the Government, as set out in Amendment 2, but I am not sure about Amendment 9 and the need for a platform. I remind the Committee that UCAS itself has apprenticeship routes on it. You can search for apprenticeships on the UCAS website. I also remind the Committee that there are other providers. There is a company called Unifrog, which has been set up by a young man who is a Teach First ambassador. It takes the API feed from UCAS, provides a range of advice around apprenticeships, higher education and various learning providers, and as far as I can see it does that very well. I have some scepticism about requiring the Government to set up websites when others are providing them perfectly well and are probably better able to keep up with how technology is being used on the ground by young people.

I am very pleased to see that Amendment 11 would apply to all schools, including academies. I see that the noble Lord, Lord Adonis, has added his name to it. I remember a similar amendment to the Education and Skills Act 2008 requiring the provision of impartial careers advice, but that applied only to local maintained schools because my then fellow Minister, the noble Lord, Lord Adonis, did not want it to apply to academies. However, there were not very many of those at the time. I also remember that in the following year the Apprenticeships, Skills, Children and Learning Act came in which required all post-16 institutions to give specific advice on apprenticeships.

To an extent, we have been here before. That is why the comments of my noble friend Lady Morris are so important on the incentives, and indeed the disincentives, in the system around giving impartial careers advice. So much is loaded on the intellectual, academic route and, in the end, that is what our schools system is designed for. It was designed in a bygone age to route people towards intellectual destinations in the knowledge that there would be a lot of wastage along the way but that those people would be picked up by the labour market employing them in factories or by marriage to someone who worked in a factory. However, we do not live in that labour market any more.

The substantive point I want to make to the Committee is this: how are we going to keep up with the rapid changes in the skills environment that are going on in the labour market? How do we ensure that these apprenticeship qualifications continue to have currency with the level of technological and demographic change that is altering things so dramatically? How do we ensure that careers advisers know the reality of what is changing? Demographic change means that a child starting school last September has a more than 50% chance of living to be over 100. The only way it is affordable for them to live to such a ripe old age is for them to carry on working into their 80s. They will have a 60-year working life and will, therefore, change career on many occasions. We need a skills infrastructure that allows them to be credited for the skills they acquire in work, to take short, intensive breaks from work to acquire new skills, and to take longer sabbatical periods to reacquaint themselves, if they have been there before, with higher education. How we design that is a big challenge, as is how we give young people through their educational journey, particularly their statutory one, a fundamental love of learning and the skills to learn so that they can retrain as technology deskills them. That way, they will have the resilience and reflective ability to understand that need.

Yesterday, I was discussing an Oxford University study, being done jointly with NESTA, on the skills needed for 2030. It is a bit of a mug’s game trying to predict what those might be, but a good projection is that the particularly vulnerable skills are in transport, customer services and sales, administration, and skilled construction and agricultural trades. These are among the themes that are picked up in the letter we were so pleased to receive from the Minister yesterday and in the 15 routes set out in the Sainsbury review. But some of those will go. For example, we have seen huge investment into driverless vehicles, particularly in Silicon Valley, and know the number of people who will be affected if that investment achieves a return—we can be pretty sure that it will over the next 20, 30 or 40 years. We have also seen the first humanless retail outlets being opened by Amazon. We can start to see some of these changes taking place, and I question how we are going to keep the advice, qualifications and structure sufficiently agile to keep up with the rapidity with which these changes may come and the new sectors that will emerge. We should not be wholly pessimistic about what will happen to the labour market, but advanced cognitive skills will undoubtedly be in increasing demand as artificial intelligence and robots take over some occupational categories.

How often does the Minister see the occupational categories set out in Schedule 1 being reviewed? How often are we likely to review the agility of the qualifications themselves? Qualifications generally are losing credibility with many employers because it takes too long to design them and get them approved. In particular, the suggestion set out in the letter—of procurement on a single licence for each one—means that whoever wins the qualification has to get a return on investment for delivering it. That might lock them into a period that removes the very agility that I am talking about. Finally, and most importantly, how will the new institute work with employers to ensure that that agility is informed by the best possible predictions about future skills needs five and 10 years hence?

[Baroness Cohen of Pimlico]

My Lords, I support the amendments in general. I declare an interest as a director of Parkside Federation Academies Multi-Academy Trust and as a governor of the UTC Cambridge UK. We have had all the difficulties recruiting for the UTC that the noble Lord, Lord Baker, has so eloquently adverted. No school has wanted to let us come in and take their kids.

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[The Deputy Chairman of Committees (Baroness Pitkeathley) (Lab)]

My Lords, before we continue, I have a special request. Because the loop is not working, could noble Lords speak up when they are contributing? Thank you.

[Baroness Cohen of Pimlico]

My Lords, I had got as far as noting that the university technical college in Cambridge had encountered major difficulties with recruitment. The jury is still out on this, but the technical college has joined the Parkside multi-academy trust, and we believe that because the multi-academy trust has financial responsibility for all four secondary schools in our charge, it is probably going to be a little easier to envisage recruiting children from one of our schools over into the academy trust, if they would be better suited there. But it seems to me a possible route to help the UTCs, because the money does not go away from the multi-academy trust—it stays in. We hope this will be a little better.

On careers advice generally, I support the amendments. However, I have been wondering, particularly in view of the provisions that make the Institute for Apprenticeships responsible for producing careers advice, whether one ought to take it away from schools. It is very difficult for a school to keep up with its expertise, but then I was horribly reminded by my noble friend Lady Morris that individual teachers at a school are very influential in what their students choose to go on and do. So I wonder whether we could group schools’ careers advice. We could probably do that inside a multi-academy trust, and I will take home from this debate the suggestion that we try. For example, the University of Cambridge provides a perfectly effective careers service, with professional, HR-trained people, who will never have met the people whose careers they are advising on but seem to be doing it perfectly satisfactorily. Providing experts in careers, rather than forcing teachers to become experts, might have legs as an idea. Indeed, I know there are parents paying for professional careers advice because it works better than what they are being offered by the school. I do not want to propose it as a formal amendment, but I would be interested to know the Government’s thinking on that.

[Lord Young of Norwood Green]

My Lords, I will endeavour to be brief, because we have had a very extensive debate on this. I particularly support Amendment 11, because that is probably the most practical way forward. On careers advice, I incline to the point that my noble friend Lady Morris made. Whatever you do, you cannot take away the role of teachers, who are a very powerful and continuing day-to-day influence. However, as my noble friend pointed out, the problem is that the incentives are to direct their young people towards the sixth forms, which we encouraged or allowed many of them to set up. The point about the financial incentive is a difficult one, but nevertheless will not go away.

As for where people get information about apprenticeships, I cannot help but remind my noble friend Lord Knight that we set up the Apprenticeship Vacancy Matching Service, which I think is referred to in the letter, and that is still there as part of the National Apprenticeships Service. It is true that not all employers register their apprenticeships there, but there are certainly significant numbers on there and we should not ignore that.

What I really want to address is what happens when I go into secondary schools and speak to the sixth form: when I ask the students where they are going I get the inevitable response that mostly they are going to uni. Then when you ask them what the alternative career paths are, if you are lucky you will get one or two answers. They might mention apprenticeships. Apart from all the compulsory stuff that is outlined in Amendment 11, which I am not opposed to, it seems important that every school ought to have links with business, as has been said, such as the collaborative links that the noble Lord, Lord Lucas, referred to, which are good.

If you want to really enthuse and inspire young people about apprenticeships, the best thing you can do is send successful apprentices back into the schools. There is no better influence than sending young people back in to say, “Look, I’m doing it. I’m not going to get a £50,000 debt. I’m likely to get to a job at the end of it”. Young people are not stupid. They soon begin to think about the attractions of earn while you learn, with a definite job destination as well. I do not know how we will encourage that but we certainly should. If we are talking seriously about trying to improve the brand image of apprenticeships—the esteem in which they are held by both pupils and parents—this surely has to be a part of that process.

Again, it is interesting when you go into secondary schools and look at what they are proud of—on the walls you always see the number of people who have gone on to university, especially Oxford and Cambridge. I have yet to go to a school which has another board saying, “These people were our successful apprentices. They had degree-level apprenticeships. These people graduated in apprenticeships”. Some companies are now beginning to realise the importance of having a graduation ceremony on the completion of apprenticeships. That is another important way of improving the brand.

I will address the point made by my noble friend Lord Knight about the 15 routes and whether they will survive. The good thing about them is that they are generic. Look at transport and logistics: the nature of transport might change but it will still be there in one form or another. I am not too worried about that. However, how they actually work out in defining future skill needs will be a real challenge for the Institute for Apprenticeships. We have some very powerful indicators of what the needs are. If we look at the demographics of the engineering industry or the construction industry, we see that there are huge numbers of vacancies. The biggest age groups there are those in their 50s and 60s. We know there is significant demand there, as well as in information technology. Taken at its broadest description, there is significant demand there. I hope that when the Minister replies he will address some of these points.

My noble friend Lord Knight was right to remind us that if you look at the career path of young people who are starting their careers, they will require lifelong learning and probably will change their careers a number of times. Who knows, we might even get to the point of introducing significant sabbaticals for everybody, so that they can take career breaks. We still have a very fixed attitude towards employment. I welcome the amendments and I look forward to the Minister’s response.