Skills: Importance for the UK Economy and Quality of Life

Baroness Wolf of Dulwich Excerpts

Thursday 9th May 2024 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Wolf of Dulwich (CB)]

I, too, thank the noble Lord, Lord Aberdare, most sincerely for securing this debate and for his wonderful speech. I add my congratulations to the noble Lord, Lord Marks, on his inspiring maiden speech, and I look forward to hearing the maiden speech from the noble Lord, Lord Elliott. I declare an interest as a professor at King’s College London who teaches students and, one hopes, develops their skills. I have been actively engaged for many years in skills policy, including as a government adviser.

At one level, I am delighted at the great interest in this debate on all sides of the House. But, alas, as the old saying goes, “Fine words butter no parsnips”. If we do not get precise commitments on non-university skills spending and on individual access to skills training in forthcoming party manifestos, in my opinion we will continue to deliver inadequate and inefficient skills policies that fail repeatedly and systematically to solve our main skills problems. This is not because politicians and advisers, let alone Peers, are insincere—it is because not just underfunding but repeated short-term upheavals and repeated unpredictable cuts and changes in skills provision are currently hard-wired into our system.

Skills spending always ends up in the Treasury’s and indeed the DfE’s sights when deficits are looming or a bright new initiative is being marketed—so round we go again. Why skills? In common with other developed societies, absolutely rightly we guarantee all children a free education from the age of five to 18 or 19. We offer free early education to three and four year-olds. We quite rightly have legislative obligations to children with special needs and disabilities and, in England and Wales, we offer support to everyone over 18 who is accepted on to a course in a registered higher education institution.

These are clear entitlements and are clearly understood by the population—and, because they are transparent and stable, people can and do plan ahead to use them. Institutions are also able to plan and deliver. But when it comes to mid-level skills—the sorts of skills we are mostly talking about today and the ones for which our economy is currently desperate—clarity is replaced by confusion and repeated, inefficient, expensive and often destructive change. I shall give noble Lords one example. If you stay at school until you are 18 and you are moderately successful, you will be offered a free education up to and including a level 3 award. Level 3 is the skilled trades level, as well as the usual university entry level; it is the one where our skills shortages in this country are the most glaring.

If you leave school without a level 3, our society turns its back on you. As a citizen, you have a right to a free education while you are 18, but not when you were 20, 25 or 30. This is a travesty—it is a travesty in terms of equal treatment of citizens and a travesty in terms of any coherent skills policy. In the Augar review, on which I was privileged to serve and contribute, we strongly recommended that every citizen should have a right to a free level 3. So have many others, including the Economic Affairs Committee of this House. The current Government, back in 2020, did not make a formal commitment to an entitlement, but they acted fast in launching a new funded program which in practice made this available, on terms that made it feasible and attractive for colleges to plan and launch new courses, which is always a high-risk decision. Why did they do so? It was not because there was a sudden blast of light one day, but because earlier there was written into the manifesto a new £3 billion skills fund to be spent over the Parliament, which Treasury could not just wave away. I am 100% sure that without that manifesto commitment nothing would have happened.

Crucially, access to this programme was simple. If you did not have a level 3 qualification, it was open to you—just as now, if you are offered a place at a university, you have a right to Student Loans Company support. Normally in our skills system, working out what you can access at this middle level, and whether you have to pay and what you have to pay, is a moving minefield. Not surprisingly, most people walk away. It is not that people do not want to train or upskill, but the system is completely non-transparent. In other words, it is designed to cut off our skills pipeline at the ankles. Of course, one programme did not transform things, but it was a major step in the right direction. I say “was”, because now the DfE is announcing new restrictions that will make most of these programmes completely unviable. Why? Well, some poor official has written the usual guff about better targeting, but it is actually because the DfE needs to find some money and it is looking for things to cut. As always, the simplest place to look is skills programmes.

This Government have, in my view, done some very good things for skills—and not only when they were listening to me—but I want to emphasise that these things happened because there was a ring-fenced pot and a very clear commitment in a manifesto. No Minister and no Front-Bench spokesman is going to make a commitment of that sort to me today, so I am not even going to ask the Minister to do so. However, if we enter the next election with only high-level uncosted aspirations and with no clear commitments to access to those mid-level skills for people who do not already have a level 3, five years from now we will be making the same speeches—and, if anything, things will be worse.