Technical and Further Education Bill

Baroness Morris of Yardley Excerpts

2nd reading (Hansard): House of Lords
Wednesday 1st February 2017 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Morris of Yardley (Lab)]

My Lords, I draw attention to my entry in the register of interests. I chair the education advisory board for McDonald’s, which oversees its apprenticeship programme. I too welcome the Bill and hope it is not just optimism that at last, we are going to do something about this: I hope this is the time for legislation that really moves apprenticeships and technical education forward. Like my Front-Bench spokesperson, I will want to look at some of the detail of the Bill, but we wish it well and hope it changes the world for a huge section of our community.

I share a previous speaker’s analysis of why the Bill is so badly needed, in terms of the productivity rate and how we have let down so many young people and adults who wanted to succeed. For all the strength of our education system, we have failed to get technical, vocational—I do not mind that word—and apprenticeship education right. It is the only area of our education system where we used to do better years ago than we do now. I do not buy into the idea that education used to be better 20 or 30 years ago, but this area probably was better 40 or 50 years ago. We need to rediscover the good things that happened then and shape them for the world in which we live.

The concern I would like to explore with the Minister today and in Committee is whether the Government are absolutely sure about how these proposals differ from previous attempts. It is not that Governments have done nothing for the last 20 years—they have put resources, leadership, energy and legislative time into trying to make things happen, but it has not been good enough. The success has not been there, such that we can say, “The job is done”. Looking back at my role at the Department for Education and Skills, and at what we thought the sector skills councils would do when we launched them towards the end of my time as Secretary of State, I would just pick out these words from 2002 to 2006. The councils would be “employer-led industry or business sector-based”. They would be “charged with identifying the sector’s present and future skills needs, ensuring that qualifications and training meet these needs” and “place employers and workplace centre stage”. There is not a world of difference between those words and the publicity for this Bill, which I have heard the Minister—believing it—say out loud.

I do not want us to get this wrong again, and it behoves us to be clear about what is different now. This is not the first time we have had an employer-led skills programme, tried to do apprenticeships, or let business work out the framework for technical and vocational qualifications; but previously, we did not do it well enough. I want to be sure that we learn from that during the Bill’s passage. I hope the collective memory of the Department for Education is still strong and that it and the Minister have gone through what was successful and what did not work, because he does not need to start from scratch. He needs to build on what we have learned and our successes.

One thing that makes me optimistic is that there is a helpful national climate. As we all know, sometimes in politics, timing is everything. You introduce something at one point and it does not fly. You introduce it at another and it has wind behind its sails and makes a real difference. In the world at large, I think there is now a greater acceptance that technical and apprenticeship routes to employment, and life chances, are good and could be better. We have not got to the stage where everybody wants their children to do that rather than go to university, but there are now chinks in the argument—it is a good choice for young people.

I acknowledge the Government’s support: they have put this issue high on their agenda. From what I hear from the Minister in the House today, his boss the Secretary of State, and others, they mean to get this issue right. It is not an also-ran in the Department for Education, and that is important. Established organisations such as the university technology colleges, founded by the noble Lord, Lord Baker, were not around when we tried this 10 years ago, and I hope they will enable us to get it right.

So I am optimistic, but we have to be rigorous in asking ourselves some difficult questions. This might be an opportunity to get this right. If the noble Baroness, Lady Woolf, thinks this is a better chance of getting it right than we have ever had before, then I feel optimistic, because her judgment and wisdom in this area have been second to none. I am glad that she feels that this could provide a good way forward.

I welcome the institute, but it is nothing more than bricks and mortar, and I want to better understand how it, the people who have been employed to do a job, and a mission letter from the Secretary of State will bring reality to our dreams, visions and hope for change. The Minister will know that if we have learned anything over the years, it is that setting up a building and a structure and naming something does not change anything. If there was a failure of the academies programme, it was believing that if you made a school an academy, it would change what happened there. The success was that over 10 or 15 years, we have learned that you have to do more than change the name and create a new structure or organisation.

In Committee, I want to explore the nitty-gritty of what the institute may be. These are not big-label items, but I always worry when we open new organisations and do not close old ones. If you read the White Paper, there are an awful lot of players on the field. I have this picture of a power struggle: who has the power, who has the influence? Even without that, there is the treading on each other’s toes in an effort to do good. Who will be off the field? If we have a new body that is costing money and leading apprenticeships and technical education, who has lost responsibility? Who will not do what they were going to do before, and what is the nature of the relationship between them?

Assessment looks similarly messy. The fact that you can ask myriad people to assess your apprenticeship and technical education outcomes makes me nervous of the market approach that the noble Baroness, Lady Woolf, and the Sainsbury report criticised. Are we sure that that system, which seems to have more than one assessor, will be tight and robust and will play high, not low?

I am not sure what the technical education certificate is and what currency it will have. Who will get it and for what reason, and who will know what it means? That is something else I would like to look at in Committee. One point about which I feel strongly and which has not been raised before is the contradiction between courses that are flexible and courses that have clarity. Our probably most successful exam systems, such as A-levels and GCSEs, are really clear and incredibly inflexible. They are clear because we know what they stand for. People know what they have to do. They know what the certificate is. It has currency and people can say, “I’ve got an A-level; I’ve got a GCSE”. Everybody knows what that means.

The minute flexibility is put into that, we lose some of the clarity. One of the problems over the years for those of us who have tried to make progress in this area is that we have tried to bring in flexibility but have lost the clarity. We have not built a common language for the wider community. When I read the Sainsbury report I thought that it had gone for clarity, and said, “Wow, at least it is settled: we are going for clarity”. But according to the background commentary, there is potential to move between the two—the academic route and the technical route. That is going for flexibility, so I want to explore with the Minister in Committee exactly what the Government intend and whether they have managed to square the circle, which no one else has, and have flexibility and clarity at the same time.

My other question is very much for the Government as well. Do they intend to place a responsibility on the new institute to deliver apprenticeship targets in terms of numbers? At the end of the day, we always have to trade quality for quantity when setting ourselves a target. I cannot think of many examples where the Government have set a target and reached it without compromising quality. That tends not to happen. We know that targets determine behaviour and some of those behaviours threaten quality.

If the institute comes back to the Government and says, “Well, Minister, we have delivered exceptional quality but we have not reached your numerical target of 3 million”, what will the response be? Putting my cards on the table, I would go for quality and would not complain about the quantity. I would not stand up and complain about not hitting the target, but I would be furious if the target had been achieved and quality had been compromised.

I shall finish by describing what is missing from the Bill. It is a strange little Bill—an oddity. It looks as though it has lost its best friends, and I feel really sorry for it in that sense. I am smiling, but in a way, that is the error we have always made with this sector of education. The Minister will know what a disaster stand-alone academies were. Stand-alone vocation courses and apprenticeships will be a disaster as well, unless we link them into schools and higher education. That is about progression and a route through.

The Government have missed a chance here. It would have been great to have this as part of the Higher Education and Research Bill—we could have seen the link through to degree-level apprenticeships and university. I know that the noble Lord, Lord Baker, will agree that it would have been great to seize the opportunity to end the national curriculum at age 14 in schools and open up a proper, coherent, cohesive, exceptionally well-funded, really high-status 14 to 19-year old education system in which a lot of the concerns I have raised would cease to exist. We have some bold ideas, but the worry is that we are making them fit into a structure where they are not at home. An approach for 14 to 19 year-olds has been made to fit for 16 to 19 year-olds and it does not, quite.

I wish the Bill well, and I hope it does what we want it to do. There will be interesting Committee and Report stages, and I do not doubt the Minister’s determination and wish to handle things well. Importantly, there is no great political divide on this issue. In the light of our experience and commitment, I hope the Bill will leave this place in a better state.

Technical and Further Education Bill

Baroness Morris of Yardley Excerpts

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

[Lord Watson of Invergowrie (Lab)]

My Lords, as we embark on three days of Committee on the Technical and Further Education Bill, I must admit that I have been caught slightly unawares by the changed groupings that have been issued, further to those circulated yesterday. So I may have to edit as I go along on some of those to which I shall speak.

Be that as it may, the first group comprises Amendments 1, 4, 5 and 19—though not Amendment 17, as I had thought—and is mainly about the quality of outcomes. That concerns not only the input to but the outcomes of the apprenticeships that are a central part of the Bill. I say “outcomes” because outputs and outcomes are not necessarily the same thing, a point we want to stress with Amendment 1. Despite some progress in recent years, the situation for those young people who remain not in employment, education or training remains of some concern and we cannot be complacent about the job that still needs to be done to deal with many of the 16 to 24 year-olds in what is known as the NEET category.

As my noble friend Lord Hunt and I said at Second Reading, the focus for the Government’s target of 3 million apprenticeships must be high standards, not simply a concentration on meeting what was, after all, rather an arbitrary figure. Ministers must now choose either to honour their pledge to increase the quality of apprenticeship training or allow themselves to be consumed by the need to hit those targets. Last year the Public Accounts Committee emphasised the need for the Government to be unrelenting in their focus on the quality of apprenticeships and we believe that this is very much the key. While the temptation may exist to water down apprenticeship standards to hit the 3 million target, such short-termism would ultimately prove counterproductive. Unless there is an increase in quality, people will continue to look down their noses at apprenticeships and technical education when they should be viewed with the same respect as other forms of further education, such as university degrees.

Young people themselves are very keen to ensure that their apprenticeships are marked by quality. In last year’s Industry Apprentice Council survey, their main concern was quality because industry apprentices rightly see their apprenticeships as badges of honour—as, it is to be hoped, do their employers. It was satisfying to learn that nearly nine out of 10 level 2 and 3 apprentices were satisfied with their apprenticeships, but with such an increase planned it is essential that the satisfaction rate is maintained.

Given the new routes and standards for technical education and apprenticeship expansion, it is vital to track the outcomes for each group. The last two years’ apprenticeship evaluations showed small increases in the proportion that had completed their apprenticeships and were in work, but monitoring those trends is important. Related to that is monitoring progression and pay, which is not just important but very important. Apprentices have talked about a number of positive impacts in the workplace, but that does not always translate into pay or promotion benefits. Some 46% of apprentices received a pay rise after completing their apprenticeship and 50% had been promoted. Both figures represented an increase, and we certainly hope that trend will continue because it is important that young people who have worked hard to complete their apprenticeships are made to feel that it has been worth while. If they do not have that sense, perhaps because they feel that they have to some extent been exploited, demoralisation can set in, and that can dissuade the next cohort.

This issue was highlighted in last month’s report by the Low Pay Commission, which revealed that 18% of apprentices were being paid less than their legal entitlement. It is vital that these headlines do not act as a deterrent for non-graduate groups going into professions, and do not deter future young people from taking up apprenticeships. We believe that when the apprenticeship levy comes into force in April, tackling issues concerning exploitation should be a priority for the new Institute for Apprenticeships and Technical Education.

Preventing such misbehaviour will require a strong regulator with power to punish instances of non-compliance on minimum pay. I repeat: this is a legal entitlement and there should be no exceptions under any circumstances. I accept that the Government very much hold to that view and I am certain that the institute will be told that it is an important part of its operation. Without that, the potential for further long-term harm to the reputation of apprenticeships is considerable. Research undertaken last year by the Association of Chartered Certified Accountants showed that apprenticeships face something of an image problem among many 16 to 18 year-olds. More than half the young people polled thought that apprenticeship routes would lead to their earning less over the course of their careers than if they studied at university. Apprenticeships are still seen as the poor relation when compared to traditional forms of higher education. If the Bill achieves anything by helping to reduce that perception, it will, in that sense alone, have been something of a success.

The duties that we place on the institute by the amendment are not onerous. Surely the Secretary of State would expect nothing less than an annual report from the institute on the quality of outcomes of completed apprenticeships. My question is: why not include that provision in the Bill? It follows, particularly while the Government are in pursuit of the 3 million target, that Parliament should have the opportunity to receive and debate the report. If the Government are serious about quality trumping quantity—I have done it again and I no longer feel comfortable using that word; I should have said “quality triumphing over quantity”—we should ensure maximum transparency in that regard.

Those sentiments dovetail with our Amendment 4 on standards and are a natural fit with new Section ZA11 on page 22 of the Bill, which sets out how the institute should publish standards in relation to the 15 occupations highlighted by my noble friend Lord Sainsbury in his seminal report. It is, of course, important to differentiate between quality and standards—terms that are often wrongly used interchangeably. It will be for the institute to set and maintain standards, while Ofsted and, in respect of maths and English, Ofqual, will have the task of ensuring that quality is widely established and then maintained. It is to be hoped that all the organisations charged with oversight will not overlap too much. I say “too much” because some overlap is preferable to gaps being allowed to develop through which who knows what might fall. To a significant extent, this is a question of resources and it will be the Government’s duty to ensure that staffing levels and resources of other kinds are not held at levels that restrict the effectiveness of any of the oversight bodies, particularly the institute.

Some surprise has been expressed by organisations in the sector at what Amendment 5 is intended to achieve. Let me be clear: first and foremost, it is concerned with achieving the best quality of teaching in further education institutions. No one would gainsay that, but before one can claim quality, one must have a means of measuring it. That is not to say that no measurement is currently undertaken, nor have there been suggestions that teaching quality in further education is poor. However, the detail we have is less than is available in higher education and, as noble Lords will know, when the teaching excellence framework is introduced in universities, the level of scrutiny will increase. We believe simply that, warts and all, the use of some sort of metrics would be advantageous, and Amendment 5 is not prescriptive as to what they might be. We simply call on the Secretary of State to bring forward a scheme to be operated by the Quality Assessment Committee of the Office for Students to ensure good-quality teaching in the further education sector. We also advocate a simple pass/fail outcome, with no suggestion of the cumbersome and ultimately unhelpful gold, silver and bronze scheme suggested for higher education. This would assist in achieving consistent levels of quality, with a broader aim of allowing the sector to build a relatively focused group of qualifications that carry the recognisability and acceptance of GCSEs and A-levels. People know what they are getting with those qualifications and the ultimate aim should be for something similar to develop with technical qualifications.

Finally, Amendment 19 would require the institute to publish apprenticeship assessment plans for all standards. Recent analysis of real-time experience shows that number-crunching on the government figures published last October suggested that there are no approved awarding organisations for over 40% of learner starts on the new apprentice standards. That is surely a matter for concern, although moving from a framework to standards involves moving down a road that will not, by any means, always be smooth. But apprentices on the standards will have to face end-point assessments for the first time and those assessments have to be carried out by organisations that have been cleared for the task by government or Skills Funding Agency-registered apprentice assessment organisations. Is the Minister confident that this will happen and that it will happen evenly across the country?

There is a degree of uncertainty about how this will evolve and what role the institute will have in relation to, say, Ofqual. Because of that it is important that we have transparency on who is being cleared and who is doing the clearing. As this process strengthens and multiplies, as it needs to do to meet all the government targets, the Government will have to pay close attention to the issue of capacity; otherwise, they will find themselves in a logjam of standards approvals as early as the middle of next year. That is the point at which any Government of any political persuasion, when they have the Opposition and other stakeholders bearing down on them, might be tempted to cut corners. Clearly, we do not want to see that but, like other stakeholders, we want to see what progress is taking place in real time. That is why we have tabled these amendments. I beg to move.

[Baroness Morris of Yardley (Lab)]

My Lords, I was not going to speak this early but I support these amendments. The desire across all parties in the Committee to achieve high standards in apprenticeships is unquestioned. We know that is what needs to be done. We know that is what we have failed to do in the past. I think the jury is still out on whether or not the Bill will achieve that.

We know from experience that new structures do not always achieve the ends that we want. There is a real danger in politics that because structures are the things we can control, that is where we put our emphasis. It is the one thing we can do. We do not teach, we do not mark, we do not assess; we can give funding and we can build structures. Sometimes there is a danger that we persuade ourselves that as long as in our mind and on paper the structure looks right, all will be well and things will be delivered. The education system is littered with gaps between the intentions of the structures and the reality of what is being delivered to children and young people. If you look at any part of our education and skills system, nowhere is that more the case than in skills and apprenticeships. We do not have a strong basis on which to build. We are not building on a record of high standards.

To be honest, you have to be as old as I am to remember the day when apprenticeships were generally thought of by the public as being high-quality training that did young boys and girls good in terms of the opportunities they had for life. Anyone a bit younger than me has an impression of an apprenticeship as being second best, not wanted—perhaps okay for someone else’s child but certainly not for mine.

Throughout the Bill the testing of whether we have done enough to ensure high standards is crucial to what happens in the future. The Government have a real quandary about how to deal with it—whether to go for the 3 million target or for standards. I feel certain that at some point along the line those two really good ambitions—nothing wrong with either of them—will come into conflict with each other. It is important as we go through the Bill that we put in some measures to make sure we are monitoring the standards and outputs of these new structures that we are putting into place.

Amendments 1 and 4 do that. Why would we not want to know what is happening to people who have taken the initial apprenticeship route? Why would we not want to know what employers think of people they might recruit? Why would we not want to know what the students themselves thought of their apprenticeships? I do not doubt for a moment that the Government have plans for how to get that feedback. Indeed, I know that to be the case because they are not silly; of course they will want feedback.

My noble friend on the Front Bench made a crucial comment: this is as much about building trust with the public and the people involved in apprenticeships, both employers and users, as it is about anything else. It is not enough for the Government to collect the statistics and then amend structures or legislation on the back of them. This is not a highly charged Bill politically and there is a great deal of good will across both Houses of Parliament to make sure it succeeds. Our joint endeavour is to build confidence and trust among teachers, parents, employers and learners. Even if the Minister wants to amend it in some way, because we could have lots of arguments about the detail of the information to be collected, this is a reasonable amendment. Its aim and thrust would stand us in good stead in the Bill we are now considering and I support it.

--- Later in debate ---

It is really important that we bear in mind that our schools are hugely stretched and that at 16 to 19, and indeed at other ages, they are clearly underresourced. This is something that officials and Ministers will agree is not going to change in a hurry. Therefore, before we pass anything like this into law, we really need to think about what needs to be made very clear and where we want schools and colleges to place their attention, and not create artificial barriers to following through on the intent of making sure that every young person gets the advice they need, by diverting more attention and resource into meeting formal requirements, which, because they are in primary legislation, we will not get rid of for at least a decade, if ever.

[Baroness Morris of Yardley]

My Lords, I support the amendments in this group, particularly Amendment 11, to which I have added my name. I have some concerns about Amendment 61 in the name of the noble Lord, Lord Storey, which I will mention. I do not want to go over the arguments again except to add weight of numbers to the strength of the arguments we have heard from other Members today. I do not disagree with anything that has been said, I just want to make two or three points which perhaps have not been made or have not been made frequently enough. I hope I will not speak for long.

First, I hope the Minister will be really clear about when this careers strategy is about to appear. We have been promised it for a very long time and I think I saw something by his colleague who leads in the department for this piece of legislation about it coming later in the year. Given that it is about two years since a careers strategy was promised, I am not sure why a Bill such as this, which will fail unless there is good-quality careers education, is coming so far in advance of the careers education strategy. They should go hand in hand. We would not be having this debate if we had the careers education strategy. I think a lot of these amendments have been tabled in sheer frustration. We almost panic because we know it is such a weak area of our system and we are about to pass the Bill with no effective careers education system. We need to know when the strategy will arrive and we need to understand why it has been delayed. If there is a problem, we need to know about it. I worry about that.

Secondly, I agree with the information bit but that in itself is not careers education. There are two parts to this. We need the information but then we need to make the decision. As a young person—or even an older person—just having information is not sufficient. The skill of making the right decision is far more complicated. You can let as many people into the school to give information about as wide a range of jobs as you can, but when they leave at the end of the day, it is the teacher who is there with the young person when the decision is made. That is a very important other part of this situation. Information by itself will not necessarily change the young person’s mind—it might but it might not.

There are three big influences on the child in making the decision: their parents, their friends and their teachers. The strategy must encompass and reflect that. We cannot squeeze teachers out of careers education. We can bring people with a wide range of knowledge and experience into the classroom, but teachers will have an important impact on the decisions reached because they are the pastoral carers and they spend an awful lot of time with young people. We have been critical of teachers, and rightly so, but we need a careers strategy that supports them in the job they are being asked to do. We do not want to give them the impression that we want them out of this business. They have an important role to play in supporting young people to make the right, effective and appropriate decision.

Thirdly, we are moaning about schools—I do not disagree with a word my noble friend said; he made this point brilliantly—but the incentives the Government have put into the system are causing the problems. What do we do? We moan at the teachers. We are complaining about the schools responding in an entirely predictable and understandable way to the incentives that we have put into the system—including me in my time. The answer to that is to change the incentives, but we want to leave the incentives in place and change the behaviour. That will not work. Where is the discussion about changing the incentives because that is the surest way of changing behaviour? I agree absolutely with the noble Lord, Lord Baker, that the UTCs are a force for good. They had a difficult birth and baptism but they are still a major player in the field. In a way, they encapsulate the problems of the incentives in the system. Their very existence is threatened because we have the wrong incentives, and I say that collectively of politics and Parliament. The case he has made about having access to young people is strong, but other things need to be done as well.

My only concern about Amendment 61 is that it is too easy to say, “Leave it to Ofsted. It cannot be a good school unless it has good careers education provision”. We always say that, and then every 10 years we have to prune what we ask Ofsted to inspect. We pile so much on to Ofsted. With every new initiative that is introduced we say, “Let’s get Ofsted to inspect it”. That is how the relationship between schools and Ofsted breaks down; the inspectors are always seen as the bearer of the big stick. I want to turn the amendment the other way around. We are saying that if a school does not have good careers education, it will go into “requires improvement” or “special measures” because those are the only two categories left. There are implications in that for a college that we ought to be aware of if Ofsted is to be used as the lever in this. It is a bit mean, or premature, to put a college into the “requires improvement” or “special measures” category because it has not got right a plank of policy that we have not got right either. It behoves us to get our bit right before we say to any educational provider, “If you don’t get this right”—despite the fact that we have not—“you will go into ‘requires improvement’ or ‘special measures’ and the consequences will be big”.

I say to the Minister that we would not be having this conversation if we had more information about the Government’s plans for the careers strategy. It is a big and dangerous hole at the moment and therefore I strongly support the amendments, with the caveat about Amendment 61.

[Lord Lucas]

My Lords, the incentive I would like to see is schools being allowed to take credit for the performance of the children they let go into technical education. If a child might get only Ds in history and English but they are good for an A* in BTEC business, and the school can get credit for that, the school’s interests will align with the child. It would also be a good thing for the performance tables. We have superb data because it is easy enough to collect them, but why should a school be penalised for a kid who arrives in the year before GCSEs, having had a dreadful education beforehand? That is not fair; nor is it fair that a school which has really looked after a child and brought them on to the point where they have the get up and go to attend a UTC then gets no credit for it. If a school feels that the best interests of the child will align with the way it is going to appear in the tables, there is a real hope for making progress in this area. We should be doing this anyway to ensure equity between schools, so I hope that this is a direction we might consider going in.

I like the amendment about a technical version of UCAS, which is immensely helpful to schools. Everything is in one place and it would all look and feel the same. You know how it works and what is required and it becomes easy to provide support and advice for the children using it.

Apprenticeships are a great challenge. Companies have a horrible habit of not admitting they have apprenticeship places until about two weeks before they want people to apply. They suddenly appear, enough people apply, and they disappear again. This is not the way in which a school can work or how young people should be asked to work. We have to discipline companies to make it clear in good time that they are open to apprenticeships so that people who are interested can see what is on offer year round and put their names down. I know that it will never be a regular cycle such as UCAS, but we need to discipline the system so that it works in the interests of children, and something like UCAS would help. A UCAS system would also provide a place to find all the information. If someone is looking for an apprenticeship they might not cotton on to who the education provider is, who to go to, which Ofsted report applies, where to look to find the outcomes, and other data that will tell them whether a particular apprenticeship is worth while. Something like UCAS would draw all that together. I would not actually use UCAS. It is a horrible institution that believes in making as much money as possible from the students passing through its system and it is run in the interests of universities rather than kids. But as a concept it is great, and we really ought to see whether we can do something along those lines.

It is high time that Amendment 11 was brought in. We all know how badly schools can behave. The noble Baroness, Lady Morris of Yardley, says that it is a matter of incentives as well. Let us have a structure which provides the stick and the carrot—this is the stick. Let us have a system where schools know that they are expected to do things. I presume that access means physical access. It cannot just be, “Well, we’ll pass your emails on”. Clearly the access will be moderated by the school and the teacher will sit down with the kid afterwards and tell them where they need to be really careful about such and such. However, at least it is progress in the right direction.

I hope that we might look at expanding subsection (3). There are some really important intermediary organisations which perform a function in this area. To name just one—Women in Construction. It performs a specialist job and looks after a particular subset of pupils, and it is doing that in a co-ordinated way, which makes it much better than your average local FE college, let alone a building company that happens to have some apprentices. Giving access to some of these collaborative organisations is a very useful supplement to the direct education and apprenticeship providers.

Turning to the carrot element again, there are other ways of doing this, and that is what my Amendment 34A seeks to achieve. It would allow money to flow to schools and organisations and would open up in a positive way the pipeline between what is going on in the creation of technical opportunity and the kids in schools.

There is a lot beyond what appears in Amendment 1l and schools are doing much that is positive. They invite people in to talk, and make arrangements for internships and work experience placements for their children. A lot of organisations are helping, but it is an immense burden on a school at a time when we are facing something like an 8% cash reduction for schools over the next three years. It is a hell of a thing to ask a school to add to its functions without in any way adding to its budget.

Technical and Further Education Bill

Baroness Morris of Yardley Excerpts

Report stage (Hansard): House of Lords
Monday 27th March 2017 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Garden of Frognal (LD)]

My Lords, I will speak to Amendment 21 in this group, which is in my name and those of my noble friend Lord Storey and the noble Lord, Lord Lucas, and add my support to Amendments 2 and 3 to which the noble Lord, Lord Watson, has just spoken. Our amendment came out of discussions with the CBI, which has a great deal of interest and expertise in the future of apprenticeships—indeed, its engagement is vital to the success of this scheme. It expressed the concerns of its members that the new institute will need monitoring and overview, particularly in its early days.

The amendment aims to ensure that there is regular reporting back to the Secretary of State on the quality of apprenticeships and technical education, calling for,

“a response … containing any actions to be taken as a result”.

Those “any actions” are particularly important because having action plans in response will surely make the difference. There needs to be ongoing communication. There is a weight of responsibility on the institute and high expectations that it will be a real engine for change and will counter generations of undervaluing practical, work-based skills. We need to ensure that there is transparency and accountability from the Government over the quality of technical and further education, and this amendment would help to ensure that the very welcome focus on the technical and further education sector is not lost after the Bill passes into law. I look forward to a positive response from the Minister.

[Baroness Morris of Yardley (Lab)]

My Lords, I support these amendments. They are very reasonable and it is difficult to find too many reasons for opposing them other than bureaucracy. When you weigh it up, the argument comes down very much on the side of the amendments on this occasion and not on the side of bureaucracy.

This is primarily about delivering good-quality apprenticeships for young people and adults. We all know that one of the challenges is to change the public discourse about apprenticeships and vocational training, and we are going to have to work really hard if that is to happen. When I look back at the reforms in schools over the past two decades, one of the changes that enabled us to have a more effective public discourse and empower people to ask the right questions, both for members of their own family and in general, was the availability of data. I hear good-quality conversations now from parents, teachers and young people about education, and that is because they have the information to ask the questions and have the debate.

However, I do not think it is there with apprenticeships and technical education. We do not have it yet, and we have a responsibility, if this system is to work, to build up the data and language so that the public can have a proper conversation and monitor what is going on with apprenticeships. Certainly in the medium term, this amendment would help deliver that. It would put information in the public domain every year, and in time, if not immediately, that would lead to discussion and debate. That has to be good for raising the profile of this area of education as well as holding the institute to account for what it is delivering.

I accept that entirely, but also want to emphasise a different point. Has the Minister wondered whether this does not in some way reflect the annual HMCI report, which is laid before Parliament and on which there is always a public debate? It gets on the “Today” programme, bits of information get into the newspapers and the media, and it becomes part of the national conversation that we have about schools. So having this information in the public domain is the right thing to do for accountability. But it would also help with the cultural change that we have to bring about to have a public debate about this area of education. This is not unreasonable. I can see that in years to come—say, in five years’ time—we might want to review the minutiae and the details. I do not think we ought to be committed to this for ever and a day, but I cannot see that the value of starting the practice of having an annual report, monitoring progress and building up confidence and awareness, would be outweighed by any bureaucratic burden that it might place on organisations.

[Lord Lucas (Con)]

My Lords, I entirely agree with what the noble Baroness, Lady Morris of Yardley, has just said. As the House knows, I run the Good Schools Guide. We do what we can to spread information about apprenticeships, but that is extremely difficult because the amount of information available is not good. For universities, by comparison, there is one single source of information. Now, I do not wish the Government to hire UCAS to do apprenticeships, because UCAS is an extremely difficult organisation to deal with and does not let data out to anyone, but something like it which was a single point of information would really help schoolkids and schools because ordinary teachers, let alone career teachers, do not have time to learn their way around 150 different university apprenticeships, let alone all the others. They need a coherent source of information. There is a habit among employers of letting information out only in the two weeks when they want to hire apprentices, rather than all around the year when potential apprentices want to be looking. They are not adjusted to that kind of marketing yet; they are recruiting in penny numbers rather than the tens of thousands, as universities are. There are all sorts of reasons why we need more information and support.

If you want to know where children have gone on to from school, schools will give you—at least English schools will; Scottish schools are more tiresome—a long list of university courses that their students have got on to. Nowhere can you find those data for apprenticeships. You can get data from the Higher Education Statistics Agency so you can publish information from there if you want, but there is no equivalent available for apprenticeships. That makes the whole business of upping the status of apprenticeships, and of technical education generally, much harder than it needs to be. So while I hold no brief for the exact drafting of the two Labour amendments, I am very much with the spirit of them.

On the amendment that followed from the noble Baroness, Lady Garden, there is scope for upping the prestige of the Institute for Apprenticeships in this way. It gives it that much more visibility in public, that much more right to comment and that much more right to be heard. At a time when there is going to be a lot of change, a lot of difficult decisions taken and a lot of need for what is going on to be in the public eye so that things that are not quite right get caught early and commented on early rather than being relegated to the pages of a few specialist magazines, an increase in prestige, as suggested in this amendment, is an excellent idea.

--- Later in debate ---

[Baroness Morris of Yardley]

My Lords, I would like to ask a question that has just come to mind, mainly because I tabled a similar amendment in Committee. Amendment 17 is far better because it allows a flexibility that we did not have before, and having it in the Bill would help to raise the profile of careers education during Ofsted inspections, so I am happy to support it. No doubt the Minister will let us know what the framework already says, but I think the intent is fine.

I support 100% the point that the noble Lord, Lord Baker, has been making about young people’s access to careers education. I have no problem with the way in which Amendments 8 and 9 were described, and in fact I have supported such amendments on previous occasions. However, it has struck me that although it is the right of the student to have access to the information, it is not the right of the person to go into the school. I know that sounds like a fine difference, but I wonder whether the Minister might reflect on that and give some assurance that, although a head would not have the right to deny the information and access to the school from someone who was giving that information, they would retain their right as head of the school to choose who talked to their students.

The quality of a speaker is very important. If I were a head teacher, I would not want someone who I knew was a bad speaker and did not engage the children successfully or in a professional manner to have access to my school, even if they might be talking about something whose content was very important. Indeed, one of the reasons for not doing that would be because they would put the information over badly. My years of teaching experience might be from a long time ago, but I remember some horror stories of outside visitors coming into schools who just did not have the skills to engage and talk to children and young people. I am not opposed at all to the amendments, but I do not think we have discussed the right of the head to retain control over who is speaking to his or her students. I would like that to be considered, without taking away from the intent of the amendments we have discussed.

[The Earl of Kinnoull (CB)]

My Lords, I had not intended to speak on Amendment 17, but I was on the Social Mobility Select Committee along with the noble Baroness, Lady Morris, and the issue of careers guidance came up very strongly throughout our year of investigations and featured strongly in recommendation 2. Our report came out in April last year and the government response was published in July. I would like to read part of that response and then refer to a piece of evidence that we received from Sir Michael Wilshaw. The response, and I am cutting away a lot of it, says that,

“we will make the Gatsby benchmarks the focus of the statutory guidance that supports schools and colleges to implement the careers duty. This is in direct response to calls from schools to make it clear what government is expecting from them in terms of careers education”.

The tone of the response is pretty clear: the Government are saying, more or less, “Yes, we will do more”. It makes no sense, then, not to measure it, and I agree wholly with what the noble Lord, Lord Aberdare, said. I distinctly remember that Sir Michael Wilshaw made it very clear in his excellent evidence that Ofsted is already carrying out the assessment work on careers guidance, so not to include it in the marking scheme seems not to be using the fullness of the evidence and the data that are being gathered. Accordingly, I completely agree with the noble Lord, Lord Storey, and the whole of Amendment 17.