Skills and Post-16 Education Bill [HL]

Baroness Wolf of Dulwich Excerpts

2nd reading
Tuesday 15th June 2021 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Wolf of Dulwich (Non-Afl)]

My Lords, I add my congratulations to the noble Baroness, Lady Black, for a fantastic and fascinating maiden speech. Secondly, I need to declare rather a list of interests. As the noble Lord, Lord Storey, kindly pointed out, I have become an adviser on skills to the Prime Minister. I was a member of the Augar panel, which reported to the review of post-18 education and funding, and I am also a professor at King’s College London.

I am delighted that the Government are introducing this Bill. A system which offers all adult citizens the chance to obtain high-quality education and training is not just fundamental to our economy; it is central to our future as a country committed—I hope—to opportunity, second chances, openness and making the whole idea of shared citizenship a reality. I believe that the measures incorporated in this Bill are an important step towards creating such a system.

I have argued for many years that our post-18 education and training system is indefensibly lopsided. The gap in spending and the tension between higher education and vocational provision has widened and become even more entrenched. But the Prime Minister last year announced reforms in which two concrete objectives were set. I think these are fundamental, and this Bill will contribute to meeting them. They are about the need to bring higher and further education closer together, and about tackling the great divide which has opened up between the well-resourced and well-signposted opportunities for young people leaving school to go into full-time higher education, and the world of part-time and adult retraining—an area in which we used to be global leaders. As other noble Lords have already pointed out, the last decades have seen us go backwards in a way that it is vital we correct.

When the Augar review reported two years ago, the first recommendation we made was:

“The government should introduce a single lifelong learning loan allowance”


for adults. The Government accepted this and consequently are working quite hard to transform the whole student higher education funding system. The clauses in this Bill are only part of what will be needed to deliver the new system, but they are fundamental foundation stones for what I hope—and I know other noble Lords also hope—will genuinely transform the system of higher and further education in this country in a way that will be good for everybody.

As well as a very divided system of post-18 education, we have managed in this country to create an extraordinarily complicated one. This is reflected in the Bill, which contains a number of specific reforms designed to clarify and simplify. In my remaining time, I would like to comment on two in particular: the regulation of post-16 education and training providers, and the clauses which deal with education and training for local needs.

In 2017, along with other noble Lords, I was quite involved in the passage of the Technical and Further Education Act, which included provisions to protect students in the event of college failures. However, there were no equivalent provisions in the Act for independent training providers. The need to protect all students, trainees and apprentices has been evident for a long time. While the independent training provider sector contains many truly excellent, innovative and effective organisations, that part of our system and its overall reputation have been bedevilled by regular failures and scandals. In 2017, the Government declared they were unwilling to amend the Act then and there but would consider the issue. The mills of government grind slow, but they have considered, and what we now have proposed is a single unified system of protection for learners which I hope other noble Lords will join me in welcoming.

I will comment very briefly on the proposal to create local skills improvement plans. These have attracted a lot of attention this afternoon and I look forward to further comment and discussion. As many noble Lords will be aware, our college network was in large part created by local businesses and employers. Colleges therefore responded very directly to changing local business needs because they talked all the time to individual local employers.

Over the years, those organic links have in many places withered away. Of course, there are a number of fantastic colleges, but it is very much individual principals and employers who make them as excellent and responsive as they are. Far too often, colleges—for very good reasons —spend most of their time and energy focusing on their relationships with public funding bodies and not with local employers. The White Paper’s fundamental goal of bringing employers right back in and making this part of the infrastructure seems to be absolutely correct.

Clearly, just creating LSIPs is not going to revolutionise everything; there are other important reforms in the White Paper which will, for example, give colleges far more autonomy. But putting employers in the system in a structured way—not via other public bodies where members are selected and appointed centrally, but as a group of local employers—is a necessary part of creating that responsive system we all need.

It has been an enormous pleasure to speak today. I hope that the Bill and our discussions on it will take us forward into a new era and we will look back on this as an important and major part of what this Government have done for the skills, education and future of this country.

Skills and Post-16 Education Bill [HL]

Baroness Wolf of Dulwich Excerpts

Report stage
Thursday 21st October 2021 Lords Chamber

[Lord Storey (LD)]

My Lords, I rise to speak on the issue of essay mills and contract cheating. I thank the Minister for tabling this amendment. There have been four Private Members’ Bills, three of them from me. The first time, I drew number 2, and then there was then a general election. I then drew number 50, which never got debated, and then I drew number 3—and we have the Private Member’s Bill up and running. I thank Chris Skidmore for putting one in the Commons as well.

More than 45 vice-chancellors and heads of UK higher education organisations wrote to the Secretary of State in 2018. The support and briefings of the Quality Assurance Agency for Higher Education have been fantastic. I also pay tribute to two professors who started this whole thing off before I got involved: Professor Newton and Professor Draper at Swansea University.

When I looked at a particular independent college in Greenwich and saw the effects of contract cheating and essay mills, I realised that this was a very serious problem that we faced not just in further education but in higher education and, increasingly, in schools as well, although this amendment does not deal with that. Some 15% of our students admit to using contract cheating services. Oxbridge Essays claims that it has produced, for cheating, 70,000 essays. This is not just about students being drawn into this situation—many of them are worried about their well-being, their mental state et cetera—it is also about the academic credibility of our higher education system. If we allowed this cancer to grow, it will affect our universities and colleges.

I pay tribute to the Minister’s legal team, which has nailed this properly. I showed the amendment to a number of people, and, as you can imagine, I got some quite important replies. They said that the proposed strict liability offence—whereby there is no need to prove intent—is really important because it means that essay mills will not be able to rely on disclaimers, although they do have a due diligence defence. Getting strict liability offences through Parliament is extremely rare, but it is absolutely critical to this offence having any impact.

I would also like in passing to congratulate the Minister’s press department or PR department. The Minister very kindly emailed me her intended amendment and it said, “Strictly embargoed for four days”. I thought after the third day I would tip off the Times Higher Education Supplement or FE Weekly so I might get a little bit of credit, and they said “Oh, we got it four days ago”. The Government obviously have an eye on publicity as well.

I thank the Government for this amendment. Students, vice-chancellors and universities up and down the country will be very grateful. This is not the end of it, in the sense that we have to make sure that we look at Wales and Scotland, because that is important, and we will at some stage need to look at secondary education as well. When the Minister winds up, will she consider saying that if breaches occur, we will look at how we can tighten up the situation? I am sure that these essay mills, which form a £1 billion industry, will be looking at ways around this, and we need to see whether we can find ways to stop breaches happening in future. I hope the House does not mind, but I am going to depart.

[Baroness Wolf of Dulwich (Non-Afl)]

My Lords, I, too, strongly welcome the amendments tabled in the names of the noble Baroness, Lady Barran, and the noble Lord, Lord Storey, which seek to address the pernicious effects of essay mills. I must declare an interest as an adviser on skills to the Prime Minister and as an academic employee of King’s College London. That is why I want to take this opportunity to say how important and welcome these amendments are. I pay particular tribute to the noble Lord, Lord Storey, who has been passionate and determined. Without his recognition that this is a major and serious issue which can be tackled, I am sure that these amendments would not have been tabled tonight.

There are a number of reasons why cheating has become a major problem for universities. It is partly to do with the pressure on people to get formal qualifications, the scale of universities and the temptation—you can do things you could not do before. There are two major sources of this. One is plagiarism, where we can fight software with software, and one is essay mills, where we cannot. I am quite sure that there will be a major improvement as a result of these measures: the firms will be unable to operate and students will take much more note of the risks attached to doing something illegal with these measures in place. The noble Lord, Lord Storey, has escaped, so I will send thanks in his direction. I say on behalf teaching academics all over the country that they will be extremely happy to see these amendments to the Bill, because it is almost impossible to know if somebody has used a commissioned essay.

[Baroness Sherlock (Lab)]

My Lords, I thank the Minister for introducing the government amendments and all noble Lords who have spoken. I shall say a brief word on government Amendments 58 and 72, on religious academies. When my noble friend Lord Touhig raised this matter in Committee, my noble friend Lady Wilcox made clear our support for his endeavour, so it is good to see the Government responding positively by bringing forward on Report their own amendments to address the problem. I congratulate my noble friend Lord Touhig. Given how long this has seemingly been worked on, I hope that at least one academy, the Lord Touhig catholic academy, will be appearing any day now to mark his success. I am going to ask him to put his name to my amendments in future, in the hope it will have a similarly positive effect on the Minister on future subjects. I look forward to his support. These amendments are very welcome.

Turning to the remaining government amendments in this group on essay mills, as I made clear in Committee, we fully support the outlawing of cheating services. Having had to research this matter for one of the many Private Member’s Bills proposed by the noble Lord, Lord Storey—I had only just taken the brief on—I was shocked to find how comprehensive the available services are. I think I have regaled the House more than once with my story about commissioning imaginary essays on Augustine and the problem of evil and various other things, and being astonished to find the precision with which one could request services. There was even a “comparethemarket.com” for it. The whole thing is extraordinary.

I have a small number of questions, and I apologise, but given the amendments have been brought forward on Report, we have not had an opportunity to ask about them, so I hope the Minister will bear with me.

First, one of the conditions is that material provided to a student has to have been prepared in connection with the assignment, rather than published generally. One of the abuses of the current system has been essay mills selling the same essay to more than one student, as the same topic comes up again and again. If material had been prepared for one student and was then resold to 15 more, is that one offence or is each sale an offence?

Secondly, the policy note talks about committing offences in England and Wales. What does that mean? Does it mean that the website is hosted in England or Wales, that the company that owns it is registered there or that the owners and essay writers live there? Who commits the offence? Is it the person writing the essay, the one promoting the service, the staff, the owners or all of them?

I have two other quick questions. We are told that enforcement of the law will fall to the police and the CPS. Given the pressures on both, do the Government have a sense of how many prosecutions, if any, are likely in a typical year or will this rely on deterrence as a way forward?

Finally, the penalty on conviction is a fine. I sought clarification offline as to the likely scale of this and was told simply that this will be determined by the courts in accordance with Sentencing Council guidelines, with no cap on the powers of magistrates to issue fines. When I have had to deal with these things on Bills before, I have normally been given some kind of heads-up about the likely tariff or scale from the Government Benches, so can the Minister give us an idea? Are we talking about £50, £5,000, £50,000 or £5 million, or something relating to the profitability of the company? Can she give us some sort of heads-up or a rough benchmark?

I commend the Government for acting on both these points and look forward to the Minister’s reply.

Skills and Post-16 Education Bill [HL]

Baroness Wolf of Dulwich Excerpts

Consideration of Commons amendments
Thursday 24th March 2022 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Wolf of Dulwich (Non-Afl)]

My Lords, I declare an interest because, as the noble Lord, Lord Blunkett, pointed out, I am currently working as a skills adviser at No. 10. I was therefore quite involved in the skills White Paper, which led to much of the legislation today.

I very much appreciate the interest the House has taken in this Bill. Like the noble Lord, Lord Baker, and many other noble Lords, I have been bashing away at skills and vocational education for many years. It is wonderful to see that it is now a subject of such importance to so many of you.

I will say something about the local skills improvement plans and Motions 4, 4A and 4B. There is a danger that we are losing sight of what these were meant to be, can and should do, and what the White Paper set out to do. They were meant to be a simple way to create a stable mechanism to make sure that local employers’ voices and insights would be brought together and made available to providers. Colleges do not have to follow these plans in detail; they just have to take note of them. I am concerned that, with the best of motives, we are in danger of creating a vast, complex and bureaucratic process that will not do what it was meant to do, which was to take employers into account but also to reverse the 20-year trend of colleges and providers generally spending all their time worrying about ticking boxes for Whitehall and whether they have met regulations and requirements, but far too little time looking out to their local communities.

I put it on record that I am also bemused by why six pages of dense text are needed to put this simple idea into legislation. I am genuinely concerned that, in trying to enforce something that says, “You must take account of schools, and of this and that”, instead of creating a simple mechanism for employers to be part of the thinking about what is provided in a locality, we will create a new series of tick boxes.

I raise a question particularly on independent training providers, because I simply do not see how this will work. Independent training providers range from huge national providers, which are dominant in apprenticeship sectors, to tiny commercial companies of literally two people in a room above a chip shop. I tried to get my head around how you would take their views into account, when many of them are commercial concerns in determined competition with each other. I really wonder whether this will achieve what people want it to.

As I said, I take this opportunity to say, first, how very much I think the Bill and the support expressed for its purposes show how this country has moved on and really understood the importance of this, but also that local skills improvement plans are meant to be simple. They are meant to be not tick-box or expensive bureaucratic exercises but a way to ensure that employers are part of a process. They are something of which to take account, not an attempt to introduce central planning into what colleges decide to put on.

[Baroness Blackstone (Ind Lab)]

My Lords, it is a pleasure to follow the noble Baroness, Lady Wolf, who has fought so hard for the skills agenda. I associate myself with much of that fight and I very much welcome a great deal of what is in the Bill. However, I will say a few words in favour of Amendments 15A and 15B. All the key points on these amendments have already been made very eloquently by my noble friends Lord Blunkett and Lord Watson, and the noble Lord, Lord Baker. I strongly support the arguments they put forward and I will underline three points.

First, it is true that too many qualifications can be confusing. I have no doubt about that, so I understand what the Government are trying to do here. Nevertheless, I think they have got it wrong. There is no confusion about BTECs. They have been going for nearly 40 years. They are long established and well tried and tested. They play a really important role in the range of qualifications at level 3. It is particularly important that they combine the development of skills with academic learning. They are the only qualification focused entirely on that.

For all the positive aspects of T-levels, they do not do this. They are mainly designed to help those enrolled on them to become successful in specific occupations. Again, I do not want in any way to criticise their introduction—that is an important role—but BTECs allow those who are successful in completing them to go into higher education and in particular to take applied vocational degrees, of which there are many, or into the workplace, or, in some cases, into both, because there are quite a lot of part-time students at BTEC level. Therefore, they should not be ditched to try to bolster T-levels. It is not necessary to do that. I know the Minister has indicated that there are certain niche areas where they will survive, but they should survive as a whole. Moreover, as the noble Lord, Lord Baker, said, we need some time to see how T-levels bed down, who they are successful for, who is attracted to them and whether they are really working for employers.

That is my first point. My second is that the Government seem to have ignored the results and outcomes of their own consultations. Some 86% of respondents to its level 3 consultation disagreed with the proposal to remove funding from qualifications deemed to overlap with A-levels and T-levels. As has been said by the noble Lord, Lord Baker, there is a big issue about what is meant by “overlapping”. The fact their content might be the same does not mean that the approach to teaching and learning is the same. In fact, they are profoundly different. Neither of the two reviews the Government have cited, one undertaken by the noble Baroness, Lady Wolf, favoured the Government’s approach. In her review, the noble Baroness recognised the value of BTECs, and the Sainsbury review did not cover BTECs at all because they were not part of its remit.

My third point is that abandoning BTECs is likely to severely damage social mobility. It will block a route to university or skilled employment for large numbers of disadvantaged young people. This is reinforced by the evidence of the Social Market Foundation that 44% of white working-class students who entered universities studied at least one BTEC. I am familiar with this from my past role as a vice-chancellor. Many of these students do extraordinarily well when they get to university, often better than those who come in with rather poor A-level qualifications. As I think the noble Lord, Lord Baker, mentioned, 37% of black students went to university with only BTEC qualifications. Surely we should not block the route of these young ethnic-minority students into our higher education system by taking away a qualification deemed valuable for them.