Skills and Post-16 Education Bill [HL]

Baroness Morris of Yardley Excerpts

2nd reading
Tuesday 15th June 2021 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Morris of Yardley (Lab)]

My Lords, I first join others in congratulating the noble Baroness, Lady Black, on her maiden speech. Not only was it an excellent speech but she gave us a glimpse of her background, which is so fascinating that, had I been in charge, I could have let her go on for ages and listened to more of it. I know it will be a very good background for the contributions she will make to our debates in future, and I wish her well.

I also join others in generally welcoming this Bill. A lot of people have said that we have not done enough about skills before; that is why we welcome the Bill. We need to be really careful about this. We have tried to do a lot about skills, but we have never got it right—there is a big difference. Over the last 30 years, 70 pieces of legislation or government interventions have tried to make our skills provision and training better than they are. Anyone here who was a Minister would possibly say, as I do when I look back on my time in office, that they are not satisfied with what was able to be done on the skills agenda. Doing something for the first time is good but it is different from trying to get it right this time. That is how I will approach my contributions to this issue as we go through.

Two things have been done wrong in the past, and they were referred to by my noble friend Lord Puttnam. One is a lack of persistence: Governments have started along this track, then dropped it. Secondly, it has never been a priority for money; they have given some money but never enough, and lessons can be learned there as well.

I want to say briefly—this has been touched on by my noble friend Lord Puttnam and the noble Lord, Lord Johnson—that the division between creative and technical is a false one. If ever in our history there was a time when we could separate creative subjects and the humanities from technical subjects and the sciences, it is not now. We need to drop that language and those thoughts, because success will lie with the people who can bring those things together. That goes to the argument about the lifelong loan entitlement, which I broadly welcome. I have two questions on that. The first is that I am not sure for which subjects the grant will be available. I hope it will not exclude creative subjects, because that would not be good for the agenda before us.

I welcome modular learning with some caution: it is not as easy to organise or do as linear learning. Something we have done wrong in the past with vocational studies is to make it modular but not give students and learners the opportunity to link one module with the other. The joins are where it goes wrong, so my advice to the Minister is: watch the joins and mind the gap. We have to make sure that people can move from one module to the other.

I want to spend my time on the local skills improvement plans, which I gather are going to be called LSIPs, so that is how I will refer to them. The Government have said that employers and businesses are at the centre of the creation of local skills improvement plans. I cannot disagree with that; I cannot say that they should not be at the centre or not be listened to. They are important, but I am worried about how much emphasis the Government are placing upon the leadership of employers and businesses at the centre, at the heart, or in the driving seat of these LSIPs, depending on which words you choose to use. Although they are important to this plan, so are others.

Learners are at the centre of what we want to do, as are providers and our locality and its needs. The local economy in that area is also at the centre, and whoever can guess what the skills of the future will be also needs to be at the centre of these LSIPs. It is a more complicated Bill than just being about putting employers and businesses in the driving seat. At the moment, I am not sure that the Bill really recognises that complexity or gives some indication of which route the Government will wish to take. That is what the Committee and Report stages will be about. I hope that we will have the opportunity to flesh it out then.

We are asking employers to become partners in the education process, and that is a big ask; it is not their core job. It is not what they worry about in the middle of the night or get up in the morning thinking about. We are asking them to become educationalists while they have other worries, especially now; they have other things to prioritise. I am not sure what happens and what powers the Government will have when it goes wrong: when the businesses do not lead us in the right direction or take a back rather than a front seat.

The challenge here is to get the partnership right between the providers and employers. I worry that the Bill is written almost as a customer/provider relationship. There is an invitation to employers to lead the show and a legal obligation on the providers to provide the learning courses. The Government will be taking a power to sack colleges or hit them over the head if they do not deliver on the local plans. It is not imaginative or creative, or the sound basis for a meaningful partnership, so I want to look at that as we go through the Bill.

I know that having too many people in the driving seat can lead us nowhere; I understand that, and that leadership is important. But we want partnership with a purpose in which everyone has a role and a responsibility, and everybody needs to be held accountable in that. How we write that into the detail of the Bill will be vital in making sure that the wish across this House for the Bill to be a success comes to fruition.