Skills and Post-16 Education Bill [HL]

Baroness Morgan of Cotes Excerpts

2nd reading
Tuesday 15th June 2021 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Morgan of Cotes (Con) [V]]

My Lords, I am very sorry that we have not been able to hear the chair of the Covid-19 Committee, the noble Baroness, Lady Lane-Fox. I hope we will be able to hear her contribution at some point during this debate.

I draw the House’s attention to my role as a director of the Careers & Enterprise Company. I am also delighted to be one of the FE ambassadors that my noble friend the Minister mentioned earlier on. I congratulate the noble Baroness, Lady Black, on her excellent maiden speech. I am entirely in agreement with her that one of the most useful skills I have ever been taught is to touch-type.

I welcome the Bill, as other noble Lords have done, and also the White Paper on which it was based. It has confirmed and elevated the importance of further education, and it is a clear commitment not only to boost skills but to strengthen our economy and increase individual productivity. In the time available I will focus on the involvement of employers in skills needs and, if there is time, say a little bit about the lifelong learning entitlement.

The involvement of employers in identifying skills needs, which is in Chapter 1 of the Bill, I entirely support—and there is wide support for this, as we have heard—the aim for there to be a more strategic relationship between employers and further education and training providers. However, I have spoken to Loughborough College locally, which is already working with more than 700 employers—and I am sure that many other colleges would say the same. So there is a feeling that perhaps what is being asked is not always new but is being pulled together in one place for the first time.

Other noble Lords have mentioned the local skills improvement plans, which will obviously be very important. But, as my noble friend the Minister said, they are really only being piloted in certain areas now. I hope that I can prevail on her, and through her to the Secretary of State and to the skills Minister, that in the course of rolling out the local skills improvement partnerships, we should not undo what is already there.

As the noble Lord, Lord Patel, said, careers education is of critical importance. It gives a strong underpinning to the Bill; although it is not mentioned in the Bill, it was mentioned in the White Paper, where there was a commitment to careers hubs. Careers hubs have improved careers provision by 92% in the two years since they were started. They are a central plank of the White Paper, they are set up and delivered through the Careers & Enterprise Company and they are designed to bring together employers, schools, colleges, apprenticeship and training providers and others aligned to national skills and local jobs. They have already established themselves as anchor institutions in local areas, not just as careers programmes in schools and colleges but also as the link with the local economic strategy, because they are tailored to be responsive to local economic need.

I hope that Ministers are aware that careers hubs offer the Bill three things. The first is that they are the key route for local businesses of all sizes into schools and colleges. I know from my time both as a local Member of Parliament and as Education Secretary that that is often the missing link. Schools and colleges want to work with local employers and businesses but are unsure how to make those connections. I entirely take the points made by the noble Baroness, Lady Morris of Yardley, that those who run businesses are not educationalists—but many of them obviously have a great interest in working with young people and learners locally. But again, bridging that gap into schools and colleges is often tricky, and that is where the careers hubs come into force.

The second way in which careers hubs can underpin the Bill is by renewing the emphasis on vocational and technical learning and building the right level of skills into our economy—hubs can be an enabler for these reforms—and the third way is by helping the Government’s levelling-up agenda. So I am pleased to see that employers and providers are being directed to work with the Careers & Enterprise Company’s network and careers hubs when establishing local skills improvement plans. Can the Minister say in her remarks at the end how the Government intend to keep careers hubs at the forefront of their thinking as they develop trail-blazing local strategic improvement plans and roll them out across the country?

I turn briefly to the Bill’s definition of “employer representative bodies”. It would be helpful now—or certainly in Committee—for Ministers to explain who they think the employer representative bodies are. This ties in with the future role of the LEPs and what their responsibilities will be. Clause 2 of the Bill talks about an employer representative body as being

“reasonably representative of the employers operating within the specified area”.

“Reasonably representative” is very broad, and I wonder who will decide how the members of an employer representative body are indeed reasonably representative.

I also draw attention, as others have done, to the local need point. Of course, exactly as my noble friend the Minister said in her opening remarks, we want people to stay in their local areas, to have jobs and to improve their prospects locally. There is also a need to identify future jobs—particularly in relation to future technologies, for example, or industries such as the growing industry around green jobs—and emerging skills needs and to see those on a national level too. Again, I hope that the Minister will be able to clarify how the local skills improvement plans feed into a national overall skills strategy and how that is then communicated back to the colleges and providers.

Briefly, on lifelong learning entitlement, as others have said, it seems somewhat confusing. We recognise that many people will have several careers now. The Bill is trying to address the long-held policy ambition of helping people to reskill throughout their working lives. A big argument advanced by the Association of Colleges is that level 3 should also be eligible for the lifelong loan entitlement. So can my noble friend say what the process will be for determining which courses will be eligible for the lifelong loan entitlement?

We welcome this Bill across the House, I am sure, and I hope that we will be able to enhance it as it goes through future stages.