Institute for Apprenticeships and Technical Education (Transfer of Functions etc) Bill [HL]

Baroness Wolf of Dulwich Excerpts

Committee stage
Thursday 21st November 2024 Grand Committee

[Baroness Blower (Lab)]

My Lords, in rising to speak very briefly in this debate, I apologise for the fact that I was not at Second Reading. Most of the points that I sought to make have already been made. Therefore, I do not need to repeat them, save that I am sure that there is an absolute commitment in this Room that what we need is high-quality skills training and education and that no one would demur from that. The differences—or possibly the similarities—across the aisle are that we want to make sure that it is done effectively and as speedily as possible while ensuring it is done properly.

I am very sympathetic to the view expressed by my noble friend Lord Knight about the consideration that might be given to a statutory body. Some noble Lords who know my history may know that I have not always been a great fan of everything being held in the hands of the department or the Secretary of State—obviously, it depends on the Secretary of State. In this case, we can afford, if we to make a move, to think about making the appropriate move. From the discussions that I have had, it seems that the appropriate move from where we are would be to a statutory body, for all the reasons that a number of speakers have outlined. That may well confer a greater sense not just of stability but of consistency, which is where we need to be if we are to carry with us young people, their teachers, their parents and employers, who are all extremely concerned, and to ensure that we have excellent skills provision and skills acquisition in this country.

[Baroness Wolf of Dulwich (CB)]

My Lords, I too apologise that I was unable to be at Second Reading, although I have read all the contributions made by noble Lords, including those here, at the time. I add my general support to pretty much everything that has been said, including on Amendments 21 and 33. I have considerable sympathy with the proposal to get rid of Schedule 1, and specifically with those noble Lords who have said that we really need a statutory body. Just putting everything inside the Department for Education in an extremely unclear way is really unsatisfactory.

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[Baroness McGregor-Smith (Non-Afl)]

My Lords, I would like to talk a bit about Amendment 1 in the name of the noble Lord, Lord Blunkett, to which the noble Baroness, Lady Barran, has added her name. As the outgoing chair of IfATE, I have listened carefully to some of the words expressed both today and at Second Reading. There are a small number of things that I would urge everyone to consider here; I say that to the Minister in particular.

Today, we have not yet discussed what really sits at the heart of the skills system with IfATE. We talk about the technical side of it, but we need to talk more about the employer voice. Yesterday, one of our board members, Robin Miller, who is one of the most famous music producers in the country and has been there from day one of IfATE—I have not—said something really interesting to me. He said that it took five years to get employers on side and to believe that IfATE could do really good things. Nothing is perfect. No arm’s-length body is ever perfect. Everyone can have their criticisms. I wish Skills England well for the future—I really want it to build on the momentum that has been built up in the skills system, as fragmented as it is—but I urge us to do more than just holding webinars with employers. Employers sit at the heart of the system; I can say that having myself been a very large employer in this country.

We need to understand how momentum will be built around the critical skills that this country is going to need in future. While this transfer is going on and all this is happening, behind the system sit employers with skills gaps to fill. They need urgently to make sure that everything they are doing in terms of the new apprenticeships, new qualifications and new, high-level technical qualifications that they need is done quickly and brilliantly. I genuinely do not understand how putting it into an executive agency that is part of a bigger department will necessarily do that; I would love to believe that it will, but we are going to need more evidence of how that will be done. I am, and many other people are, here to support that but, frankly, the quicker we can do it, the better.

Speed, momentum and delivery are what really worry me. The noble Lord, Lord Blunkett, asked whether Skills England might be swamped by the very technical things that it may have to do now. Yes—that will be the case. Does Skills England really want to sit there with the Secretary of State and be the awarding body, as the noble Lord, Lord Knight, said? I do not necessarily think so. We need to look closely at how these functions will move and what will be done so that employers understand.

Even more importantly, let us talk about the learners. Let us talk about the young people doing T-levels today. Yesterday, we spoke to one of them for half an hour about what she was doing in her journey. At the age of 16, her journey is fantastic. She is doing a T-level. She is heading towards an apprenticeship degree. She wants to be a chartered surveyor, as one example of many young people’s aspirations in this country. However, she said that too few people understand T-levels, career pathways and so on. There is so much work to be done. I simply urge us all not to forget during the passage of this Bill that the employer voice and the learner voice need to be heard more highly.

[Baroness Wolf of Dulwich (CB)]

My Lords, I rise to speak to the two amendments in this group in the name of the noble Lord, Lord Aberdare, to which I have added my name. More broadly, I want to speak to the general thrust of the group. I think that our joint amendment was not specific enough. It is not so much that we need criteria; we need to know that employers will be there and who else will be there. It is not just that we would like some criteria published.

It is important that some of this is publicly and legislatively specified because, as the noble Baroness, Lady Garden, alluded to a little, things start very well, people know exactly what they are doing and then they slide. It might seem inconceivable to anybody involved in setting up Skills England that apprenticeship standards would, in the future, be written without really consulting employers. All I can say is, “I wish”.

I have been looking back at the history of skills policy and implementation in this country, as I do periodically when I decide to write something, and it has reminded me how easy it is for harassed and busy civil servants to just get things through and for powers given to a department, which do not require them to go out beyond the department, to be used by it. It is not that anybody means badly, but that is sort of how it goes. That is why, on repeated occasions, we have ended up with disastrous skills policies and approaches, in essence, for which there is equal-opportunity guilt across the parties. They became just a small group—harassed, busy, pulling very few people in—not putting down the infrastructure to ensure that what you get reaches out into whole economy. We need to do that.

I was staggered when I was working as an expert adviser in government to discover, for example, that most people in the apprenticeship division in the DfE had been in their jobs for only a couple of years. There were some wonderful people, but there was no real collective memory of why things had gone wrong before. That is why you have to make it clear in legislation that, as Skills England goes forward and as, particularly in this context, its apprenticeship functions go forward, it has to involve everybody, even though it takes longer, it is awkward and sometimes it does not work out well.

IfATE has not been perfect. I think more than 700 standards is mad, actually, and when I was involved in the Sainsbury review, I expressly asked that there should be fewer of them. It is not that what we have is perfect, but we have to be aware of the lessons that come from previous mistakes. It is very risky to put everything inside the department without anything that, in effect, says, “You’ve got to do this. You’ve got to do that. You’ve got to talk to employers and the key organisations”. Yes, it takes longer, it is awkward and you do not always think they are very good, but it has to be there. The general feeling coming out of these amendments is that we need Skills England to be better than what we have at the moment and not be set up such that the institutional structures invite a repeat of the things that went wrong in previous decades.

[Lord Knight of Weymouth (Lab)]

I agree with the noble Baroness, Lady Wolf, on the importance of consulting employers and that 700 standards might be a little “mad”. I reinforce the sense that it is important to consult not just large employers as, for small and medium-sized employers, that granularity is really challenging.

I am glad to see the noble Lord, Lord Willetts, in his place, because he and I did a little work with EngineeringUK looking at apprenticeship take-up. We heard quite strongly from the SME community that it needs more sectoral standards, with more modularity for the specificity that you see in the 700. There is an opportunity attached to more modularity which could address the problem of English and maths requirements within apprenticeships, as it would then be more possible to think about sector-specific English and maths at level 2 and 3, as appropriate, so that the relevance of the learning to the English and maths content could be made much clearer and much easier for those learners. In that context, I support what the noble Baroness and most noble Lords have said. I listened very closely to the noble Baroness, Lady McGregor-Smith, and my noble friend Lord Blunkett.

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[Baroness Smith of Malvern (Lab)]

My Lords, like others, I welcome the fact that my noble friend Lord Blunkett has both attended and made his usual well-informed and passionate contribution in this debate. It appears that very little in the way of ill health or accident will prevent him from making his contribution. We all hope that he recovers as soon as possible. He rightly made an argument about the centrality of skills for everything that the Government are trying to achieve. He is exactly right about the role of skills in delivering all the missions that this Government have set out: growth, opportunity for individuals, rebuilding the NHS, delivering a green superpower, providing opportunities for young people as part of the contribution to keeping our streets safer, and building new homes. I completely agree with him about that and I hope that his words will help our efforts with the Treasury in the way he identified to ensure that that is recognised there as well.

The debate on this set of amendments has been interesting. I will talk about the relatively narrow nature of Clause 4 in a moment, but noble Lords have understandably also taken the opportunity to argue for the significance of a broad range of inputs into the activity of Skills England. I agree with the overarching argument about the importance of the involvement of a wide-ranging set of stakeholders. That is how Skills England has already set off in its work. It has already begun to engage with a wide range of employer representative bodies, individual employers and education and training providers. As I said, it will work closely across government and, in working on the industrial strategy, it will work in partnership with business, devolved Governments, regions and other stakeholders in developing the industrial strategy sector plans.

As my noble friend Lord Blunkett emphasised, there needs to be a sectoral approach to the way we develop skills across the economy. That has been an early focus for Skills England. It will work with employer representative bodies and directly with employers. It will work with education and training providers and with mayoral combined authorities. My right honourable friend the Secretary of State and I had a good meeting just last week with mayoral combined authorities on skills, and Skills England has been meeting regularly with them. On the point raised by my noble friend Lady Blower, one of the important elements of Skills England has been the engagement of unions, in a way that was not the case previously in the development of the skills landscape. I hope that I can give noble Lords some assurance that that is already the approach that Skills England is taking.

Narrowing the discussion down more specifically to the nature of the intention behind Clause 4, I make it clear that this is to provide the Secretary of State with greater flexibility in the minority of circumstances where preparing occupational standards using a group would be disproportionate or unnecessary for the limited scale or nature of the change or where the system needs to move particularly quickly to respond to employer demand. With over 700 standards currently in place, this clause ensures that the system for preparing and reviewing standards is fit for the future.

[Baroness Wolf of Dulwich (CB)]

Can the Minister give an example of what might spark that off? I am finding it hard to imagine a situation in which it might occur.

[Baroness Smith of Malvern (Lab)]

I will be delighted to, and I was coming to that.

Before I do that, I note the comments of the noble Baroness, Lady McGregor-Smith, and repeat from Second Reading my gratitude for her contribution to the development of IfATE. I recognise her point about what is necessary to get employer engagement in some of the detailed work that IfATE has been engaged in and that will be transferred under this legislation to Skills England. She is absolutely right about that; it needs consistent work. But it also needs, as employers have told us, appropriate flexibility and agility to enable those standards to be developed in a way that reflects changing developments and does not put too onerous a responsibility on employers in terms of their engagement.

Let us be clear that the default position will remain that a self-forming group of persons will prepare a standard. It is probably worth noting that this definition of “a group of persons” also legislatively guided IfATE in its engagement on occupational standards and apprenticeship assessment schemes. Our proposals do not weaken legislatively the engagement of employers. When a group does not convene itself to prepare a standard for an occupation which the Secretary of State is satisfied requires a standard, the Secretary of State may convene a group to prepare one. In both circumstances, we would expect that such a group would normally, but not exclusively, include employers that are representative of that occupation. Only when the Secretary of State is satisfied that it is more appropriate for them to prepare a standard than for a group of persons will the Secretary of State then do so.

To come to the noble Baroness’s point, scenarios in which it may be appropriate for the Secretary of State to use this power to prepare a standard are those where using a group would be disproportionately onerous for employers or other stakeholders; unnecessary because only minor adjustments or revisions were required; or where it could create undue delays. This might include—I say for illustrative purposes—updating standards to align with changes to mandatory qualifications within the standard; creating or updating standards to align with industry-recognised qualifications or statutory requirements; or creating or updating standards more efficiently where employers do not have the capacity. We envisage that the Secretary of State may also use the power to create and update standards for emerging or rapidly developing occupations, such as those in the digital sector. The clause also enables the Secretary of State to ensure that standards are developed or updated quickly to respond to acute skills needs or urgent regulatory changes required in an emergency, such as the updates to the level 3 community fire safety adviser following the Grenfell disaster.

Finally, employers themselves tell us that current processes for preparing standards can feel slow, bureaucratic and time-consuming. This is not a criticism of IfATE; it is a criticism of a requirement currently in legislation that we want to use this opportunity to make more flexible. It is a barrier to their engagement. We want to focus their input where it has the most impact.

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[Lord Addington (LD)]

My Lords, I rise just to give my much wiser noble friend a break. The assessment plan for any qualification is of the essence. If you get that wrong, you might as well not bother doing it. When you have a group of people looking at this, you stand a better chance than you get from one centre. There are a series of clichés about Secretaries of State, and I will try not to kick and wring every one of them, but the basic one is that if the Secretary of State has spoken to somebody who just does not understand or gets it wrong, the whole thing can go wrong. If you have a group, you stand a better chance of getting a correct result. Nothing is guaranteed either way, but that is what it is about.

I hope that we can get some response from the Minister on where we are going to get this expertise in to check on what is happening. That is it, in essence, because we have had Secretaries of State who know exactly what they want and will talk to a certain group that agrees with them. That is very easy to do, and we have all done it. I hope that we will get some assurance that the Secretary of State will talk to a divergence of opinion to go through these things to make sure that they work. If we do not and start to get them wrong, the price will be huge and we will have nothing useful. Being a little slower and a bit more certain is infinitely better than taking the chance of getting it horribly wrong. I hope the Minister can give us a reassuring answer.

[Baroness Wolf of Dulwich (CB)]

I do not have very much to add, everybody will be glad to hear, except to highlight the fact that assessment is not the same as getting to the end of the standards. We have a complex set of awarding bodies and some assessment standards which require an external qualification and some which do not.

It would also be good to be confident that the department has worked through all the ramifications of this. I am conscious that I do not think I have and am going to go back and look through some of the original legislation, but I do not think the considerations are exactly the same as they are for standards. Because we have a rather strange system in this country, with a lot of formal qualifications and a lot of awarding bodies, it is very easy to get the qualifications wrong or suddenly find that you have a huge political fuss on your hands, as I am sure everyone in this Room will recognise from the current BTEC discussions.

I just flag that it is not just the same as for standards. The complexity of many endpoint assessments and standards for which there are required external qualifications means that we need to be very careful that we have not inadvertently stored up some real problems for ourselves by just moving everything wholesale and saying, “But where necessary, the Secretary of State can cut through the bramble patch”.

[Baroness McGregor-Smith (Non-Afl)]

My Lords, I have a little sympathy for this additional request for the Secretary of State to do this if the defaults are not working. Having seen how the current system works, my only observation is: will that be quicker? If it is about speed, I am not necessarily convinced that, as the Secretary of State will be so busy, this will be one of the highest-priority things in the Department for Education, and that concerns me. With more employers and more people involved in the system, there is always a danger that this will slow down. I am not really sure in what circumstances this power will be used. I could probably see it for the odd exception, but I still cannot quite imagine what it could be. However, I have a little sympathy, as long as it is around speed in the odd exceptional circumstance.

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My Amendment 34, which is also supported by my noble friend Lady Evans of Bowes Park, seeks to bring a focus to these regulatory relationships and ensure that there is transparency about how the Bill impacts on them. Given that this is, in the favourite words of the department, a “very small and very technical” Bill, we simply do not have the information we need at this stage to understand how the Government intend the role of other regulators to evolve. This amendment gives them an opportunity to set that out.

[Baroness Wolf of Dulwich (CB)]

I was about to take this opportunity to ask for clarification, but it follows on from something that the noble Lord, Lord Johnson, said earlier, so perhaps he will follow up on it. We have a lot of regulators in this area, and I also am a little concerned. I cannot say that I understand the clause, by the way—I have just looked at it but cannot make head or tail of it—but I will try to get some clarity into my head. I know that, at the time that IfATE was set up, there was quite a lot of discussion between it and Ofqual about who was allowed to do what; the noble Baroness, Lady McGregor-Smith, may be able to elucidate this.

My concern going forward is with the LLE, because the intention was always that these were not just standard university qualifications that one could take but that there would be a mechanism for approving high-quality qualifications at the right levels, for which you could also take a loan. That is critical, and I know that the OfS has been struggling with this on the regulatory side but it does not seem to have got very far. It is critical that we have a clear pattern here and do not inadvertently create obstacles to that approval process again.

It slightly worries me that, as I read it, the Secretary of State would have to give Ofqual instructions on a qualification-by-qualification basis. That again does not sound as though it will be very fast or flexible. I just ask the Minister, if she is totally clear about this, to give us a little lesson now; and, if she is not, whether she could seek clarification, perhaps from her higher education experts as well as from her apprenticeship experts, on whether we are inadvertently making this more difficult rather than easier.

[Baroness McGregor-Smith (Non-Afl)]

Once more, I will say a few words about process and reiterate to the Minister my words on speed. Any changes to any process will slow things down; it will not improve in the short term. Creating constant momentum and change is really important, as is simplification. The more I think about having four regulators, the more worried—traumatised, almost—I begin to feel.

Whether or not we like what the current system has done and whether or not things need changing, it is important for us all to appreciate that the speed point is critical. I have yet to see things speeding up as systems move within government; they tend to slow down. So let us be very careful and cautious. I am nervous about the unintended consequences of change. Through all of this, there should be a delivery plan that talks purely about building momentum for the skills system. At the moment, we do not have that.