Skills and Post-16 Education Bill [HL]

Baroness Whitaker Excerpts

Committee stage
Tuesday 6th July 2021 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle (GP) [V]]

My Lords, it is a pleasure to follow the very clear introduction to this group from the noble Lord, Lord Lucas. Having listened to his explanation, I rather regret not having attached my name to his amendment, as the noble Baroness, Lady Garden of Frognal, did. He really has nailed the key problem with this Bill and the reason for many of these amendments: the Government’s focus on employers, presumably existing employers, fails to explain how a local skills improvement plan can actually help an area to improve. By focusing on potential students, Amendment 1 really helps us to think about how people might also want to get the skills to be part of communities, to run community groups, to be involved in cultural activities or to be voters or parents. All of these are areas in which people might want to improve their skills. It would also help communities that are subject to the Government’s levelling-up agenda, which are often lacking in social capital. We are talking about skills that pretty well every community is short of. Any community group that any noble Lord has ever known has had to find a treasurer—someone who is prepared to take on doing the books, even if there is not much money in those books. These are skills that every community needs, but they might not actually be a business need.

However, I shall speak chiefly to Amendment 2, which is in my name. It tries to get at another aspect of the Bill addressing the so-called economy by adding in to consult in the skills improvement plans

“potential employers, start-up businesses and the self-employed.”

Looking at recent figures from the pre-Covid time, there were 5 million self-employed in the UK, up from 3.2 million in 2000. They are a very major part of our workforce and, if they are running a business, what they may need to help them find work, and improve the work that they find, is not necessarily going to be reflected by the employers in a town. I think here of a very old-fashioned term, perhaps—the “company town”.

A few years ago, I visited Barrow-in-Furness where the top employer, by a scale of many thousands, is of course the shipyards. The next two biggest employers, of around 1,000 each, are the largest supermarket and the local hospital. Barrow-in-Furness, as I said when I was there, clearly needs to diversify its economy and develop things such as local food-growing and tourism businesses, through all kinds of objectives. How are those three top employers going to provide advice on the skills needed for that?

At the moment, the Bill feels really half baked. I am in a difficult position in speaking before many of these amendments have been explained, but I support the sentiments behind them all. I shall pick out a couple briefly. As the noble Lord, Lord Lucas, said about the two amendments in the name of the noble Baroness, Lady Whitaker—particularly, perhaps, Amendment 81, which has broad support—the focus on the attainment gap is crucial. There are many people whom schooling has failed in the past; they need support with the right kind of courses, the right way to improve and lift their skills, not just for their jobs but for their lives.

I also particularly support Amendments 20 and 21, both of which address, in different ways, distance learning. We are not going to be able to put into every village and town every course that might be of use to everyone. It is crucial that we have, in the Open University, a very successful and important structure; something that people can use to advance their knowledge, as well as their skills, and get into the practice of lifelong learning. That is such a crucial skill that we are going to need for the coming decades. The number of amendments tabled to this clause really shows that the Government need to go away, having listened to today’s debate, and think about how they can improve not just the Bill, but their thinking about how we provide the skills needed for a very different age.

[Baroness Whitaker (Lab)]

My Lords, I shall speak to Amendments 11 and 81. I also support the first three amendments spoken to, and I am grateful for the support of the noble Lord, Lord Lucas, and the noble Baroness, Lady Bennett, for my amendments. I declare interests as a fellow and former chair of the Working Men’s College, chair of the education department’s stakeholders’ group and other relevant interests as in the register.

The rationale of my amendments is that this potentially most useful Bill will not have the national impact it might, unless more provision is made to get a very large number of young people and others to the starting block. Amendments 11 and 81 are designed to do just that. I am most grateful for the support of the noble Lord, Lord Bourne of Aberystwyth, the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Durham and the noble Baroness, Lady Greengross. The reason they are not speaking is entirely due to the complexity of arrangements, which I fervently hope will be simplified in September. They all tried to put their names forward. I also thank the Association of Colleges for its helpful advice.

At Second Reading, I set out the fact that more than one-third of young people in secondary school do not achieve the requisite GCSE grades in English and maths to qualify for entry to the further education and training so enticingly proposed in the Bill. I asked the Minister what provision had been or could be made for this very large number who, for various reasons, among which lack of innate ability has not been cited, could not access the educational opportunities in the Bill. She was not able to give me an answer, nor did one appear in the letter she helpfully sent to Peers after Second Reading, and nor have I had a reply to a request I made to her team for an answer. As this is unusual for the noble Baroness, I conclude that there is no answer and there are no such comprehensive arrangements in place.

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[Baroness Berridge (Con)]

My Lords, I was smiling at the noble Lord because I asked this precise question about a national plan. There is a balance here between not dictating from the centre, drawing a map and chopping things up and allowing economic areas to define themselves in our complex local geography. This has not been an issue with the trailblazers, but that was obviously a small number of areas—but, yes, we will ensure that there are no cracks between the areas and that every area will be covered by a local skills improvement plan.

As far as I am aware, there are no plans to change the National Careers Service and the Careers & Enterprise Company, which have different roles. The noble Lord is correct that we obviously need to make sure that all of this is joined up. Previous noble Lords have asked me about how this will join up with people on universal credit—this is a work in progress, but I was pleased to learn from DWP Ministers that there have been some slight changes to UC to make sure that those people could take up the digital skills boot camps, for instance. So we are aware of the need, with all of this, to make sure that this is one system that is working together.

One of the issues that I spoke of in preparation for this is the need for the job coach to understand which job requires which level to get those competences. Everyone needs to be able to understand this. I am sure that a job coach would understand that to be a translator you need GCSE French—but, to be a crane driver, what do you need? So we get that currency of understanding for employers, learners and job or work coaches sitting in DWP, who can advise people on what qualification to go away and do. That will make sure that you have the competences to walk through the door at that interview, in the same way as you would in relation to GCSE French, as I have said.

I am afraid I do not have a specific answer for the noble Lord. I think he was referring to Ada college in Manchester and north London. I will write to the noble Lord on how national colleges will engage. Obviously, we are hoping that, under the duty in Clause 5, a provider will not just say “Well, I’m in this LSIP area”. If they are on the border, they should be looking dynamically at where their students come and travel from—so they may end up looking at what the provision and the LSIP are for a number of areas.

[Baroness Whitaker (Lab)]

My Lords, I am grateful for the noble Baroness’s response. I will read it carefully in Hansard. I may have missed something, but I think she said that there were no laid down qualification barriers to entry. I would be grateful if she would write to me about where in the Bill this is made clear, and whether the Bill says that there is scope for enabling access through whatever barriers are locally set.

[Baroness Berridge (Con)]

My Lords, the point I was making was that the Bill does not mention being only at level 3, level 4 or level 2; it does not mention those levels. The only definition in the Bill in terms of the LSIP and relevant providers is around technical education. I will just get the definition; I might as well read from it. It refers to

“post-16 technical education or training that is material”.

For instance, in a sixth-form college, the entirety of its provision might not be relevant under its duty to co-operate with employer representative bodies. That is not linked to saying, “Technical education at level 4, 3, 2 or 1”. The Bill does not talk about that; it is just talking about technical education as defined in Clause 1.

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[Lord Aberdare (CB)]

My Lords, I shall speak briefly on this group to express my support in particular for Amendment 25, in the names of my noble friend Lady Hayman and others, about the requirement for approved LSIPs to take account of “any national skills strategy”. I think the clue is in the “any”. I fully support that idea, and I am wondering how it could actually be met. The noble Lord, Lord Baker, pointed out some of the challenges in the absence of such a plan. I wonder whether the Minister can tell us anything about what sort of national or central co-ordination there will be and how that might work in terms of alignment with LSIPs. What sort of processes or feedback mechanisms will there be to ensure that there is that alignment, and indeed that it is clear what the LSIPs are seeking to align with? My noble friend described it as “joining the dots” with national strategy. What is the flow of communication in reporting and monitoring between LSIPs and the centre?

My noble friend Lady Hayman also talked about a cross-cutting, long-term, aspirational skills strategy, which would be splendid. The word that struck me there was “aspirational”, because the main challenge when I used to work with young Londoners on employability skills was their lack of aspiration and lack of knowledge of what to aspire to—which is why I was so passionate about careers education. Yet it is aspiration that has driven most successful education strategies in the past and created forward movement. This Bill is essentially an aspirational Bill, and that is why I welcome it quite strongly. So I suppose the question—which I am not sure whether I am asking the Minister or myself—is: how will it actually raise aspirations? And how can it build on young people’s enthusiasm, which the noble Baroness, Lady Blackstone, mentioned, for issues relating to climate change and biodiversity to create momentum that will feed in, hopefully, and perhaps through the LSIPs, to drive the objectives of the Bill?

The only other point I wanted to make is that I am rather less enamoured of Amendments 73 and 75 in this group, in the names of the noble Baroness, Lady Sheehan, and others, which would require independent training providers to have a climate change and sustainability strategy and a delivery plan. Many of those independent training providers are SMEs: they can be very small; they tend to specialise in certain areas; they are often operating with limited resources on extremely narrow margins. I am already concerned about some of the other conditions being suggested for them to be on the list, and this seems potentially disproportionate. I would certainly encourage them to have such a plan as far as it is relevant to them, but putting it on the face of the Bill would seem to be overkill.

[Baroness Whitaker (Lab)]

My Lords, as a member of Peers for the Planet, I rise to support all the amendments in this group, for the reasons so eloquently given by the movers and to simply emphasise two points. First, as many other noble Lords have said, students themselves want to take part in reaching our zero-carbon targets. Arguably, they are more committed to this than the generations with power, like ours. These amendments would increase their motivation for further education and training, and their confidence in politics and democratic participation.

Secondly, and perhaps more fundamentally, following the noble Baroness, Lady Hayman, may I say that this potentially most useful Bill seems to have been drafted in ignorance of the most long-lasting world crisis of our time: the climate emergency? Surely, all government departments must play what part they can in avoiding climate-borne disaster and in adapting to climate change. There is scant evidence that the targets set out by the Government have been taken on board by all departments and integrated into all their policies. These amendments would go far to assist the education department in fulfilling this aim.