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.