Deregulation Bill

Baroness Perry of Southwark Excerpts

Thursday 6th November 2014 Grand Committee

[Lord Young of Norwood Green]

I welcome that clarification and apologise to the Committee for any confusion caused.

My Lords, Amendment 69A seeks to amend Schedule 14 to ensure that teachers at further education establishments have specified qualifications. It seems that there is a dichotomy in government policies: on the one hand, they stress the importance of vocational careers and apprenticeships—we heard the Minister pointing out the difficulties in some areas, such as construction—and the need to enhance public perception of young people, parents and teachers, yet the schedule seeks to remove the requirement for teachers at further education institutions to have a specified qualification.

The Opposition are not alone in their concern. The City & Guilds institute, in written evidence to a consultation on the proposed revocation of further education teachers’ qualifications, said:

“City & Guilds wishes to see further exploration of the impact of removing the statutory requirements for Further Education (FE) sector teachers to have specific teaching qualifications at the same time as other changes resulting from the establishment of the Education and Teaching Foundation. The Sector faces uncertainties about the expectations for staff qualifications … The Coalition Government’s Skills for Sustainable Growth made clear that a strong FE system should play a key role in social mobility. Qualitative evidence suggests that the 2007 Regulations had a big impact in relation to the FE sector. There has been a year-on-year increase in the proportion of staff with a teaching qualification at Level 5 or above and an increase in the overall proportion of teaching staff in FE colleges holding a recognised teaching qualification (at whatever level) since the introduction of the Regulations (an increase from 74% of staff in 2005-06 to 77% in 2009-10). The majority of teaching staff in FE colleges are either qualified or on the way to becoming qualified according to the most recent data (from late 2010, but including earlier returns for 25% of providers). The Deregulation Bill now puts responsibility on the FE sector to consolidate and improve this momentum, so the sector will need to define and establish clear direction on how it will sustain and enhance its professionalism … City & Guilds is keen to ensure that the quality of FE teaching is maintained. ‘The quality of an education system cannot exceed the quality of its teachers. If we are committed to high quality vocational education, we must have teachers with the experience and skills to deliver it.’ It is vital for FE providers to strike the right balance in relation to teaching skills and industry/subject expertise within their workforce”.

Those closing points about striking the right balance between having specific qualifications and “industry/subject expertise” lie at the heart of this. I applaud the Government’s commitment to vocational training, but we question whether the schedule’s act of removing the need for teaching requirements is a step too far.

I go further and refer to the proposals of Labour’s independent Skills Taskforce, led by Professor Chris Husbands, director of the Institute of Education, and comprised of leading business and education experts. The work of the task force informs Labour’s shadow business and educations teams. It feeds into Labour’s work and business policy commission, and its education and children policy commission.

Under the proposals put forward by the independent Skills Taskforce, colleges will apply to become institutes of technical education, specialising in technical subjects suited to their local labour markets and focusing on offering high-quality technical education to young people. Gaining a licence should be contingent on three core criteria: demonstrable specialist vocational training and expertise; strong employer and labour market links; and high-quality English and maths provision. I would add IT to that. Having a licence would allow these institutes to access funding streams to deliver the technical baccalaureate and off-the-job apprenticeship training. They will consult on the process for licensing colleges.

One option recommended by the Skills Taskforce is to give the UK Commission for Employment and Skills responsibility for determining the full criteria and method for awarding the licences. The report goes on to recommend that, under Labour, college lecturers would be required to obtain a teaching qualification to ensure that standards are high. This is in contrast to the policy of the previous Minister, Michael Gove, of allowing unqualified lecturers, and it is consistent with Labour’s position of insisting on qualified teachers in schools.

All further education lecturers will have to become qualified to minimum standards, determined by the Education and Training Foundation. FE lecturers will need to have at least level 2 English and maths, which is surely not an unreasonable requirement. As part of a new agenda for the professional development of FE lecturers, they will also be required to spend time in industry to top up their skills and expertise. Again, I think that strikes the right balance—requiring a qualification plus the need to know what is going on in their particular industry.

Despite calls from industry, the Government have refused to back these steps. We believe that these bold new policies will build on Labour’s agenda for those young people who choose not to go to university. It may not be an either/or decision; they may well go on to qualify for a degree later as a result of their technical education. These announcements follow a commitment made by Labour to dramatically increase the number of level 3 youth apprentices over the next five years. We will ask all firms that want a major government contract to provide high-quality apprenticeships for the next generation, in contrast to this Government’s attitude of allowing public contracts to have no requirement for apprenticeships.

In closing, I ask the Minister whether there will be any guidance or criteria for FE colleges to consider when appointing teachers in the FE sector and encouraging their career and personal development. Surely all of us in this Committee know that we face a real challenge in meeting shortages of those skills that are vital to the development of industry and the growth of the economy. Quality further education which inspires students, parents, teachers and industry surely lies at the heart of the solution. I look forward to the Minister’s response. I beg to move.

[Baroness Perry of Southwark (Con)]

My Lords, I hesitate to contradict anything said by the noble Lord, Lord Young, because I know that his heart is absolutely in the same place as mine so far as vocational education is concerned. I also hesitate very much to go against anything said by the City & Guilds of London Institute, having been its vice-president for many years and then the chair of its quality and standards committee. However, on this occasion I think that the amendment has got it wrong, and the way the Bill is currently drafted is right.

Let me explain why I think that. I started my own career teaching in further education, so I have worked alongside many people who taught courses in mechanical vehicle repairs and so on who were not qualified teachers and had no teaching qualification. However, they had a passionate commitment to the education and training of the young people for whom they were responsible. Very recently, I visited a further education college and went to see the construction course. I talked to a young man who I think was about 16 or 17. He told me quite openly that he had been truanting from school for many years and was not at all interested in it, but then he saw this course and decided that he would have a go. He absolutely loved it, and he was learning and upping his skills in maths and English and so on.

I then talked to the tutor on the course, who did not have a teaching qualification. He told me that he himself had been very much like the young man who was now his student. He had played truant from school; he had “messed about”, as he put it. Finally, he had got himself an apprenticeship in the building trade, had worked his way up and become a foreman and had decided that he would go to night school and do some A-levels and so on. He had then sought and obtained a job as a teacher. He was not a qualified teacher but he was a highly self-educated and aspirational young man, and deeply aspirational for the young students he was teaching.

We would deny to principals of further education colleges the freedom to offer jobs to people like that, who have all the right experience in terms of their knowledge of the industry and a deep commitment to bringing other young people along the path they have themselves followed. The 2002 Act says that it would prohibit the provision of education by a person who does not have that specified qualification. To insist that they have a teaching qualification, as well as all the other qualifications of experience and vocational qualifications, would make for a very sad day for further education. I beg the noble Lord to think again. I pass to him.

--- Later in debate ---

[Lord Clement-Jones (LD)]

My Lords, tourism is a vital component of the UK economy, and is predicted to be a key part of our economic recovery and of future job creation. The tourism industry is predicted to grow at an annual rate of 3.8% until 2025, which is significantly faster than the overall UK economy. The sector supports more than 3 million jobs, which is 9.6% of all UK jobs. The benefits are spread around the UK. They are driven by domestic tourism spending at places including attractions and the seaside.

The British Association of Leisure Parks, Piers and Attractions represents this sector, and it helped me put together this amendment. Most of the tourism spend comes from domestic tourists on day trips, which is the demographic that visits BALPPA’s attractions. In 2012, the expenditure on overnight domestic tourism trips in Britain was valued at £24 billion, and a further £57 billion was spent by domestic tourists on day trips. Summer holidays are crucial to this, but other holidays in the warmer months with longer days are also very important. This is because takings at attractions are much better when days are longer and, of course, when the weather is more pleasant.

These times are also crucial because they are the only ones when families, who are the core part of these attractions’ business, can go away together. This period is vital, because attractions and seaside areas then have to survive the winter, when tourism falls away. Many attractions close during that time, and so their takings in the winter are nil. If the weather is bad over just one or two weeks in the summer, that can be the difference between making a profit or a loss.

In April last year, Michael Gove made a speech at a conference at which he said that he wanted to reduce summer holidays from six to four weeks. A few weeks later, on 1 July last year, the Deregulation Bill was published and included a clause enabling this. Clearly, the Department for Education would not be advocating this clause if it did not expect some schools to use it. It would cause chaos for families with children at different schools that have different holidays. Even a single group of schools changing term times in a single area would have an impact on the tourist industry. Clause 51 and Schedule 15 are of deep concern to the tourism industry.

Where similar schemes have been introduced in the US, the evidence clearly shows that moving school holidays reduces tourism spending, which is not made up elsewhere. In Pennsylvania, moving the school year to start before Labor Day—which is the first Monday in September—had a dramatic negative impact on economic development and employment, costing the Pennsylvanian economy more than $378 million annually. In South Carolina, the move was estimated to have a $180 million impact on the state, and more than $8 million was lost in tax revenues. In Texas, returning to later school start dates resulted in higher direct tourism expenditure, estimated at $251.9 million per year, and 6,635 more permanent jobs. This is despite the actual number of instructional days staying similar. Eleven US states have now seen fit to introduce laws which mandate school years because they appreciate that there are economic benefits.

Surely all the above merit some consideration in detail about what the impact of these changes would be, yet no assessment has been made. The Department for Education, in advocating Clause 51 and Schedule 15, has singularly failed to engage with the tourism industry which feels strongly about this. The DCMS has admitted that there has been no evaluation of the policy’s impact on tourism. On 30 October, Kate Green MP asked,

“the Secretary of State for Culture, Media and Sport, what assessment his Department has made of the potential effect of deregulating school holidays on (a) tourism jobs in seaside areas and (b) seaside economies”.

Mrs Helen Grant replied:

“There has been no specific assessment of the impact the Government’s proposals in the Deregulation Bill will have on tourism jobs. However, impact assessments have been completed on the overall impact of proposals within the Bill. Government is confident that tourism jobs and seaside economies will not be adversely affected overall. Whilst the measures will extend an existing flexibility to a greater number of schools, this does not mean that all schools will change their term dates. This Government believes that decisions about term dates are best made locally. The Department for Education is working with the British Association of Leisure Parks, Piers and Attractions and others to ensure the Department’s advice to schools on their new freedoms is clear that term dates should be set in the interests of pupils’ education and should also consider parents and local businesses”.

That is quite a miraculous statement. We all know that the Government are confident that they will not be adversely affected overall. That is an answer that does not exactly fill me or the tourism industry with confidence. Throughout the Bill’s progress, tourism representatives have been raising strong objections that their concerns have not been addressed. The unintended consequences associated with passing these provisions are enormous. They should not be included in the Bill until their impact has been properly evaluated. I beg to move.

[Baroness Perry of Southwark]

My Lords, I shall defend paragraph 3(3) for many reasons. First, it is only right that maintained schools should have the same freedom as academies and free schools. A vast number of secondary schools and an increasing number of primary schools already have the freedom to determine their own term dates. It seems quite invidious that we are not allowing maintained schools to have the same freedom.

Secondly, my noble friend made an impassioned plea on behalf of the tourist industry, and we have all seen the lobbying material it has sent. I should like to make an impassioned plea on behalf of parents. As we all know, there is plenty of evidence that if parents can take holidays only in the one prescribed period when all schools are closed, they end up paying two, three or, in some cases, four times what it would cost them to have the same holiday at a slightly different time. I am just as interested in the finances of parents and their wish to be able to take their children out at different times because schools would not all be taking their holidays at exactly the same time.

My noble friend mentioned that it would be chaos for parents if they had children in different schools. For those of us who live in London, that is already the case. Different boroughs in London have slightly different term dates and many parents have children in one borough for primary school and in another for secondary school and they cope with that. It is not chaos; it is a perfectly simple thing that parents deal with in the small amount of time for which the schools coincide.

Over the years, various learned think tanks have come up with all sorts of suggestions about changing school terms. Some have suggested that we should go to four terms or that we should split the year into two semesters, each with a break, rather like American universities. They have adduced all sorts of psychological learning reasons for why this would be better for children than the very long gap that we currently have in the summer. I should like to think that this freedom given to schools would enable some of them to experiment in that way, based on very good pedagogical evidence.

I am for freedom. I think the tourist industry would not only cope very well—as it does; I have great confidence in the tourist industry—but would find that its period of busy activity would be extended if there were slight overlaps with some schools closing early in July and others going on to early August and so on. The freedom would enable parents—who, heaven knows, are strapped enough at present in the very grim times we have been going through—to take their family holidays over a slightly more extended period when the prices would not be double and treble what they are in the very compressed period when all schools take their holidays at the same. I think the tourism industry would adapt, and perhaps prosper, in this country.

[Baroness Thornton]

My Lords, I shall take the opportunity of this amendment to ask two other questions. What was the problem that the Government felt needed to be remedied with these provisions? Is it to reduce administrative costs to schools? I should also like to ask the Minister about reports and the dissemination of information by electronic means, particularly websites, which is included in this part of the Bill. What do the Government think will happen to streamlining the information that is available to parents from schools in areas where there is a digital divide? For example, in Bradford, there are lots of people who are not online and would not be able to receive those reports.

Term times is one of the really difficult problems that I know my Government struggled with, but I would like to know whether the Minister has consulted organisations in the education sector, including teachers, trade unions and head teachers’ representatives, to see what they feel about this.