Creative Industries: Qualifications

Baroness McIntosh of Hudnall Excerpts

Thursday 23rd July 2026 Lords Chamber

[Baroness McIntosh of Hudnall (Lab)]

My Lords, as the last Back-Bench speaker I have to congratulate my noble friend Lady Keeley on having promoted a really interesting debate in which, on the whole, I have very little to disagree with and little extra to add. I should congratulate my noble friend the Minister, were she in her place—and I shall not take it at all personally that she left the Chamber just before I stood up. None the less, I will keep talking in the hope that she will catch some of it. I really will not take it personally—I look at my noble friend Lord Katz, who is on the Front Bench at the moment, and I am sure he will assure her of that.

My professional career has been spent in the cultural sector, specifically the performing arts, where much of my time over many years involved the finding, assessing and employing of performers and directors for theatre and musical productions. Unfortunately, it did not include the talented child who went on to become my noble friend Lord Knight of Weymouth. But it did include, at a very early stage in his career, his friend Sam Mendes, whose incredible career now could not have been predicted at the time that we both knew him best. I make the point that you cannot always see what is coming in this particular field. I am approaching this subject not from any expertise in the relative value of this qualification over that, but from extensive practical experience of what works for employers and employees in this complex area.

I have got only a couple of points that I want to reinforce; they have been cogently outlined by a number of other speakers, but they will bear a bit of emphasising. I am instinctively disinclined to special pleading and exceptionalism, but I believe that education and training for the creative industries is unusual, if not unique, as we have been hearing. To make it clear why understanding this is so important, I can do no better than quote from a recent edition of FE News, which was helpfully included in the Library briefing. It said:

“Creative industries education has never been about training for a single job role. It is about developing transferable, adaptive capabilities that allow learners to thrive across multiple sectors, careers, and economic shifts. Most creative professionals do not follow linear career paths. Instead, they build portfolio careers, combining freelance work, short-term contracts, cross-sector projects, and entrepreneurial ventures. This reality demands education that prioritises flexibility, creative problem-solving, collaboration, communication, resilience, and self-direction—skills that are inherently transferable and increasingly valued across the entire economy”.


My experience entirely bears this out, including watching my own two children—both conservatoire-trained performers who are now well into mid-career—progress in exactly this way and arrive at quite different and unexpected places.

Like others, I want the new vocational qualifications to succeed, but—as we have heard over and again in this debate—as currently envisaged, they are not well matched to the needs of the creative industries. I hope my noble friend will reassure us that the promised consultation on how to structure new qualifications for the performing arts will not just listen to the concerns of employers, practitioners and education providers but genuinely hear and understand what they are saying. I will not repeat the mantra of the day, except to say that, if it has not dawned on my noble friend already, one size does not always fit all.

The UK’s creative industries are precious. We are rightly proud of them, and the Government are relying on them to continue contributing to economic growth and our international reputation. However, they are also vulnerable. If we do not protect and enhance the pipeline of talent into the sector, and if we fail sufficiently to recognise its special nature, we will eventually lose the pre-eminence in this field that we currently enjoy. That would be a tragic mistake.