Young People: Alternatives to University

Baroness Taylor of Bolton Excerpts

Thursday 23rd October 2014 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Taylor of Bolton (Lab)]

My Lords, it is a great pleasure to follow my noble friend and I echo and endorse the comments of the noble Lord, Lord Baker, about my noble friend’s contribution. When he was speaking, I agreed with just about everything he said, although I flinched when he mentioned the word “tripartite”. However, we have moved on sufficiently, especially when we are talking about 14 to 18 year-olds, to talk about technical schools without all the horrors of the old tripartite system. We have added something that is increasingly accepted.

I, too, congratulate my noble friend Lord Monks on initiating this debate. It is very appropriate that someone with his wealth of experience should be taking a lead on this. However, like him and others who have spoken, I find it somewhat depressing that we have not made more progress on this issue in the past 20 or 30 years. I have been speaking on it, mainly in another place, for a long time and although we think that we are making progress, somehow it does not happen.

It is a long-term and, as we have heard, increasing problem. While, like my noble friend Lady Morris, I am proud of many of the things that the Labour Government achieved, I am sorry that we have not made more headway or had the breakthroughs in these areas that many of us had hoped for. We have seen other countries doing things differently and tried to learn from them and look at what they are doing but have not actually made a breakthrough, despite all the welcome initiatives.

One of the problems, which was touched on earlier, is that we are talking not just about education reforms but cultural problems as well. My noble friend Lord Monks talked about young people in the 1960s thinking that other things were more glamorous than apprenticeships. A lot of people find university life more attractive and grown up, and more of an expression of freedom, than an apprenticeship. I have looked at the proposals that our party has put forward to improve the situation. My noble friend talked about our plans for apprenticeships. We have been talking about the idea of a gold standard, technical baccalaureate for 16 to 19 year-olds and looking at how employers’ accreditation can work, the quality of work placements and how you can build them into a credit system. It is an impressive package.

We have also said—and I am sure that the noble Lord, Lord Baker, would be interested in this—that we would like to transform some of the higher-achieving further education colleges into institutes of technical education to underpin the kind of education that so many people want. We also want to see new technical degrees as a pinnacle of vocational education, not just as something that people talk about as second-rate. I am very happy to support all those proposals, as I am sure my noble friends are. However, I have to say that their delivery will be extremely challenging. It is a problem, as my noble friend pointed out, and cultural factors have undermined past attempts to make progress.

That brings me to the core of the problem, which was touched on earlier—the status of different types of education. In the United Kingdom, this is far more of a problem than it is in many competitor countries, and it costs us dearly. There is a clear and unfortunate distinction, a real division of esteem, between university education at the pinnacle and absolutely everything else. That gives a false assumption about the relative importance of different sectors. This is one of the things that is so difficult to counter if we are to make real improvements. Many problems spill over from the whole issue of status. We have a hierarchy in funding as well as in status. If we are going to give young people more choice, we have to find some way in which to break this down. As I say, it may be the university image or peer-group pressure, but there is a certain snobbishness in education that says that universities are okay and everything else is second-rate. It is really difficult to counter this.

I want to mention one factor that could make a difference and help counter this problem of a lack of parity of esteem. We need a unified qualification structure, including a credit accumulation system based on modular courses, as my noble friend Lord Bhattacharyya mentioned. That could be done using the best practice of existing qualifications, whether they are academically oriented or geared to vocational skills. It could allow for credits from either sector to contribute towards a final qualification. That could help us to break down the barriers, challenge the difficulties that arise, help to meet the skills gap and give real choice for many individuals. We need individuals to have choice, which is not only in their interests but a really important issue for our whole economy.