Education: 16 to 18 Year-olds

Baroness Walmsley Excerpts

Monday 4th April 2011 Grand Committee

[Baroness Walmsley]

My Lords, it is my pleasure to thank and congratulate the noble Lord, Lord Fink, on his maiden speech. Like myself, he comes from the north of England and therefore he and I are very modest. Modesty forbad him from telling your Lordships how successful he was in business. I read that in the 12 years that he was managing director of his Man Group, he managed to increase its assets under management 70-fold. That may be the reason why he was appointed the treasurer of the Conservative Party in October 2010.

Apart from being a committed business person, the noble Lord is also a committed philanthropist and a very successful fundraiser. He has told us about his chairmanship of ARK; he has also worked on the Mayor of London’s charity and Guy's and St Thomas' Charity and was chairman of the 2009 Lord Mayor’s Appeal. But his most successful fundraising was £10 million for the Evelina Children's Hospital Appeal. Your Lordships will have noticed how very passionate he is about education and health, and I am quite sure that it is on those subjects that we will hear very much more from him.

I congratulate my noble friend Lord Willis on his groundhog day speech. He explained with great cogency and passion the point that he makes about the financing of student support for 16 to 18s. I welcome the statement on the EMA replacement and I do not believe that it was a U-turn, as some are saying. Some £110 million was put aside immediately the abolition of the EMA as it stood was announced. Simon Hughes was commissioned to work out how to target that money better, and he has been working on it for months. I do not believe that the EMA had been well targeted. Even Labour acknowledged that it had planned to restructure 16 to 19 financial support anyway in 2013 once participation became compulsory up to 17 and, two years later, 18. It also planned to use the EMA as a replacement for child benefit for 16 to 19 year-olds. I welcome the fact that the poorest students will be better off under this more targeted system and that schools and colleges, which know their students’ needs better than any centralised system, will be charged with distributing the enhanced discretionary funds.

As to the groups included in roughly the 1,200 of the poorest young people who will get a bursary as of right, can the Minister tell me whether they include asylum seekers?

Transport was cited as the greatest issue of concern by many students and colleges. It could be a real attraction if colleges were allowed to guarantee that free transport would be provided to students within their catchment area. Can the Minister confirm that they will be able to do this under the new arrangements?

Colleges need information as soon as possible about how the new system will work so that they can communicate with their students and potential students, who are, at this moment, considering whether they can afford to stay on. Can the Minister say how soon colleges will get the details of the operation of the new system? The consultation is out now but when will the conclusions be drawn?

Although financial support is very important, I should like to take the question posed by the noble Lord, Lord Willis, somewhat wider to include curriculum and careers advice, partly because I could not have addressed the financial issues as well as he did. Two recent reports have commented on these two issues—the review of vocational education by Alison Wolf and the recent report from Demos and the Private Equity Foundation, called The Forgotten Half, about the 50 per cent of young people who do not go to university. Both reports have important points for our consideration in this debate.

There are to be changes to careers advice with the establishment of an all-age service. Schools will have a duty to provide independent advice and Connexions will be scrapped. I am concerned that there will be a 12-month gap between the scrapping of the one and the establishment of the other—a hole through which some young people could fall. Can the Minister say how the Government will avoid this?

Careers advice should be high quality, comprehensive and timely. I think that there should be an entitlement to careers advice which is available face to face and not just online. Alternative paths to work and work with training need to be explained to these young people. Advice about apprenticeships must be given to all young people as of right. An entitlement to this was dropped from an earlier Bill under the previous Government. Do this Government plan to reinstate it?

Work is currently being done on the curriculum. Schools are very affected by the various ways in which they are measured. The latest of these is the EBac. I have concerns in relation to young people aged from 14 to 19 who are disengaged and are more likely to be engaged by a more practical and vocational curriculum. I do not want to see schools making it impossible for young people to choose a combination of courses to suit their needs. Of course, it is important to provide a foundation in core subjects but my view is that the EBac categories are too narrow and will suit only the half that go to college or university. Yes, all our children should study a humanity, a language and a science subject, as well as English and maths, but is it really necessary for them to take a GCSE in all of them? They will already have had eight years of all those subjects before they start on their GCSE courses as part of the school curriculum from age five to 13, so it can hardly be said that they have studied no history if they do not take history GCSE.

The university technical colleges have the right idea. They offer technical training opportunities for 11 to 19 year-olds. Today we are considering 16 to 18 year-olds, in particular, but it is important that they have had the right range of opportunities further down the school.

However, there is no doubt that vocational education requires revision. Alison Wolf quoted it to be,

“sclerotic, expensive, centralised and over-detailed”.

We need to look at the courses that she described as dead-end courses which lead nowhere and which are sometimes currently ascribed as equivalent to several GCSEs. Crucially, we need to listen to employers as to what they need from young people starting work, and it is clearly not just GCSEs that they are looking for. The CBI welcomed Wolf’s focus on English and maths, ensuring that young people continue to study them beyond 16 if they have not achieved a grade C GCSE. I agree with that proposal, but do the Government plan to accept it, too?

The Demos report also focuses on the importance of literacy and numeracy, but it adds three additional “proven labour market premiums” which, it says, provide the best insurance for young people against becoming NEETs. They are: a character premium, which is basically acquisition of the soft or wider skills; a technical premium, essentially a level 3 qualification; and a graduate premium. It calculates that, if you have all five, you stand the best chance of progressing in the labour market. It is on the soft skills that I want to speak finally.

There are many young people who do not get from their home environment communication skills, problem-solving, punctuality, perseverance, conscientiousness, the ability to work in a team, social and emotional maturity, drive and energy, initiative, ability to adapt to change, the skills needed to learn new things et cetera—all the things that make a successful employee. It is important for those young people that schools and colleges provide opportunities to develop all those. This is where PSHE comes in, as well as courses such as the Certificate of Personal Effectiveness, Wider Key Skills and other qualifications developed by ASDAN and other providers. Last week, I was at a function where employers told how, when they interview, they look for young people with these skills as well as the appropriate academic qualifications. That is why these courses are as important to making a child life-ready and work-ready as English, maths et cetera. That is why I would like reassurance from the Minister that the department will discriminate carefully between these high-quality courses and qualifications and those dead-end, over-equivalenced courses that Alison Wolf was talking about. Schools must continue to be credited for these qualifications in the league tables. If we are dedicated to improving social mobility in this country, and this Government are, we must ensure that the most disadvantaged young people, as they approach the end of their compulsory schooling, are given the skills for life that the more advantaged children learn at home.

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[Baroness Hughes of Stretford]

My Lords, I, too, congratulate the noble Lord, Lord Willis, on securing this debate. It is an extremely important time to be talking about these issues. He has a reputation from the other place and from his earlier career of being a terrier on these issues, a real champion of young people in education. It is good to see him continuing that.

I also thank all Members for their contributions, particularly the noble Lord, Lord Fink, for his maiden speech. I was very pleased to hear that his priorities as a new Member of the House are the improvement of children’s health and education. They are very fine objectives and I very much look forward to hearing his contributions to future debates.

Among Members right across the House and among teachers, parents and others working with young people up and down the country, there is a growing concern about this generation of young people, particularly those aged 16 to 25. That concern, which in some ways is unintentional, is none the less the cumulative effect of many of the cuts being brought in by the Government and they are falling hardest on that age group. We have seen dramatic cuts in youth services, in Connexions, in services to address teenage pregnancy, NEETs and so on, limitations on the school curriculum, on sports, music and enrichment activities, tuition fees and rising unemployment for young people and for their families. In this context it is even more important that as many as possible of the subset of the 16 to 25 group, the 16 to 19 year-olds, can stay in education or training as long as possible. There are in fact a range of cuts that, taken together, make it more difficult for thousands of young people and they fall disproportionately on disadvantaged young people affecting their ability to stay on. We have seen the scrapping of the September guarantee, the abolition of the diploma entitlement, the abolition of the apprenticeship guarantee, mentioned by the noble Baroness, Lady Walmsley, and the abolition of the EMA. I want to touch briefly on the apprenticeship guarantee before talking about the EMA, as most Members have done.

The additional funding for more apprenticeship places for young people is very welcome, but I wonder whether the Minister understands that in this regard funding is the easy bit. From my experience in government, it is much more difficult to secure high-quality places, engaging employers and matching young people to those placements. The guarantee was designed to put the onus on local agencies and the providers to ensure that the apprenticeship placements were there and to give a guarantee to a young person. I am concerned that if this guarantee is abolished as the Education Bill proposes—the previous Government did not abolish it, they introduced it; the current Government are proposing to abolish it—then, despite the funding, we will not see a substantial increase in apprenticeships.

[Baroness Walmsley]

The noble Baroness has slightly misunderstood what I said. It was the guarantee for information about apprenticeships that was dropped, not the guarantee of an apprenticeship if suitably qualified.

[Baroness Hughes of Stretford]

I thank the noble Baroness for her clarification but my point remains valid: there is a proposal to abolish the guarantee itself, which is arguably more important. What are the Government going to do to ensure that there is a sufficient supply of good placements?

Secondly, on the abolition of EMAs, despite repeated promises from the Prime Minister and the Secretary of State before the election that they would not abolish them, and despite the independent evaluation from the IFS, to which my noble friend Lord Watson referred, that EMAs increased participation and boosted grades, even if you accept the Government’s dead weight costs, which are dubious, the cost of EMAs is still outweighed by the financial gain of getting young people into training. Despite all this evidence, there was a rush, without consultation and without any alternative plan in place, to abolish them.

The bursary scheme that has now been announced after fierce public protest and the threat of legal action from students in the middle of courses is not only much reduced, with about a third of the previous level of funding, but also has a number of questions about it which I hope the Minister can clarify. First, on the guaranteed bursary of £12,000 for a tiny minority of the most vulnerable students—less than 2 per cent—the Secretary of State made much of the claim rehearsed by the noble Baroness, Lady Walmsley, that this is more than those students would have received under the EMA. It is more—it is 77p per week more. Does the Minister agree that it is only 77p more per week than those students would have received under the maximum EMA to which they would have been entitled?

Secondly, the Secretary of State also announced two other elements—a discretionary pot of the balance of £165 million for colleges to pay out, as well as transitional protection for those students already receiving EMAs to the end of the course. However, he did not make clear whether both of those elements are to be paid out of the £165 million that is left after the bursary for the vulnerable students. Can the Minister clarify this matter? Does he agree that the transitional protection for existing students at the level announced by the Secretary of State will come to about £130 million, as my noble friend said? Does that mean that there is a balance of only £35 million for the discretionary pot for colleges? They already receive £26 million, so if that is the case it is not much of an increase. If these two elements are not coming out of the discretionary pot, where is the £130 million for the transitional protection coming from and what other services have been cut to pay for it?

Thirdly, the Secretary of State claimed that the poorest students on free school meals would receive more than they do at present, with a potential under the discretionary pot scheme of £800 per annum. Does the Minister agree that with a household income of under £17,000, as the noble Lord, Lord Willis, identified, to qualify for free school meals, these students would be entitled now to the maximum of £1,170 of the EMA and that therefore, under this scheme, they would face a reduction of over £300 a year?

Fourthly, does the Minister agree that many thousands of young people, whose hard-up families have an income of more than the threshold of just under £17,000 for free school meals but less than the threshold of £21,800 for the maximum EMA—let alone the £30,800 to get any EMA at all—will not be guaranteed anything under this scheme and could end up with nothing?

Finally, as the IFS pointed out, after the proposed discretionary scheme—and this is a very important point, notwithstanding the limitations that we have already identified—young people will not know from their colleges whether they qualify for any support from the discretionary pot before they decide to apply for courses. My big concern is that, unless many young people from very hard-pressed families have some certainty that they will get some financial support, they may well not take the chance and sign up for the course.

The noble Lord, Lord Willis, has made an interesting suggestion of diverting child benefit to preserve a larger budget for EMA under the scheme proposed by the Government. I think there were any number of ways, with the right commitment, that the Government could have approached this differently, with careful consideration and a real attempt to keep the main benefits of the scheme for more of those who qualify. As it is, I feel that the Secretary of State acted very rashly and irresponsibly on this, reneged on those pre-election promises and created a great deal of uncertainty and potential hardship for many hundreds of thousands of young people.