Future of Work

Baroness Morris of Yardley Excerpts

Thursday 12th October 2017 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Morris of Yardley (Lab)]

First, I congratulate my noble friend Lord Knight on bringing this debate to the House. He is a leading thinker in this area, which was reflected in his opening remarks. I am always grateful to him for the thinking that he does in our shared area of interest of education. I shall return to that later. I also congratulate and welcome the noble Baroness, Lady Wyld. It was a lovely speech, and I very much enjoyed it, with its mix of wisdom and common sense, which is relatively rare. We look forward to hearing more of that in future and hope you enjoy your time here.

We are not the first generation of people in this House to talk about a revolution in terms of workplace and jobs, but I accept the argument that what we are in the midst of now is probably different from many previous such revolutions, partly because it is more complicated and coming about more quickly, partly because we cannot foresee the future, and partly because it is wrapped up with a series of other changes, such as globalisation, changes in communication, political uncertainty and changes to the environment, which makes it all very different from the technological revolution, which was a hallmark of my early days at work. There is no doubt that part of our population is excited by the changes, but it just makes others feel less secure—and we have witnessed the consequences of that. For myself, I experience both those thoughts at different times, depending on what it is and how I feel.

We can learn lessons from previous workplace revolutions—and I wanted to mention some of those. Too often, we talk about policy as it should serve the economy and jobs, but in this revolution we have to learn from previous mistakes. The policy has to serve individuals, too. While we talk about change in the workplace and employment, every previous workplace revolution has affected individuals’ lives. It has affected how they see themselves and their family and community; it has often caused greater differences in wealth and opportunities in our society. Public policy tends to chase up and mitigate those disadvantages decades after policy changes have brought them about. My first plea is to look at the impact on the individual as well as on the economy in looking at this revolution.

I wanted to pick out education and training as an area to comment on. In describing the education scene that we think will deliver for the world that we are getting into—and my noble friend Lord Knight did that, so I shall not repeat it—as much as I am an admirer of our schools, universities and colleges, I cannot hand on heart say that it is fit for purpose. I share my noble friend’s view on this. Our education system has always served the economy and society well when it has been a gatekeeper. When it has kept people out and only allowed a few in, it has always done that very well—but when it is invited to be a gate opener and let lots of people through, it is less sure of how to do that. Comprehensive schools serve the economy less well in some ways than the old grammar schools did for the economy that they served. We still have differences in ability and attainment. The biggest difficulty that colleges went through was when they moved from high-qualification courses to having to include courses for people who were unemployed. As for universities, they seem to be in some sort of crisis now, which has coincided with the 50% target and having to be less selective and more open. That is a problem, because if we do not have a school and education system that can effectively serve the economy and serve individuals well, at a time when it has to be a gate opener and keeper, we have a problem. I am not sure what the answer is, but part of the issue is that, at schools, we have a system that treasures top-down change and we are good at measuring progress on a narrow range of subjects at fixed points. I sometimes feel that with our school system we are really good at training people to pass and getting people qualifications to do a job, but we have become far less tolerant of the rebel and the person who does not fit in and far less able to be flexible about somebody who wants to work outside the formal structures.

When I was a teacher, we used to say that they were a pain in the back but really streetwise and would do well. I just have a feeling that that sort of person might have exactly the skill set and attitude needed to flourish in a digital world. I have often thought that what an education system needs to do in a digital economy is to use skills, place and people in a different way. Apart from the Open University, I cannot cite many educational institutions that have managed to do that over the decades of my life. My contribution, in inviting comments from the Minister, is to ask: what can we do to bring about that change in education? That will help us to serve both the economy and individuals in the revolution in which we find ourselves.