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.