Skills and Post-16 Education Bill [HL]

Baroness Young of Old Scone Excerpts

2nd reading
Tuesday 15th June 2021 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Young of Old Scone (Lab) [V]]

My Lords, I declare my interest as chairman of the Royal Veterinary College and former chancellor of Cranfield University and my various environmental interests. It is really great to be number 50 on a speakers’ list; everything that could be said has been said, but unfortunately I have not yet said it, so I will try to be brief.

I welcome the Bill in principle for its provisions on technical skills education and lifelong learning opportunities for all, but it misses a real opportunity that has already been raised by a number of Peers. The twin challenges of climate change and biodiversity decline are the biggest existential threats globally; the Bill needs to respond to that and to take an ambitious approach to developing the wide range of skills to meet our global climate and nature goals and to exploit new UK and global markets and jobs that these goals are already creating.

We need to move to a prosperous zero-carbon economy and society with the help of the Bill. It should be a catalyst for building the wider public understanding and behavioural change fundamental to meeting net zero and reversing biodiversity loss, such as in the case of those challenges driven by our rising consumption across the globe. This is not just my view—businesses, educators and learners have all expressed their views and provided strong evidence that climate and sustainability considerations need to be embedded into our post-16 framework.

Local skills improvement plans have been raised by many noble Lords; they must not just be driven by local employers but take account of government priorities and strategies, such as the industrial decarbonisation strategy, the energy White Paper, the nature strategy and the heating and building strategies. This Government appear to have quite a lot of strategies. With skills for nature-based solutions, ecosystem management, drainage and even tree planting, we will need to think of the future. A child starting school this summer will leave in 2035 and will move into labour markets that will be largely zero carbon. The Bill also needs to offer support to workers transitioning out of high-carbon sectors or intensive agriculture who already possess level 3 qualifications but will not be able to access the lifelong loan entitlement. That needs to be changed.

Along with many other noble Lords, I want to voice my comments about the mood music around higher and further education at the moment, which might well impact on this Bill and on post-16 education. I agree with the noble Lords, Lord Willetts and Lord Johnson, that there should not be a false conflict between further and higher education; they should work in collaboration and not compete for resources. Ensuring parity of esteem is important, but it should be by investing in further education, not by taking funds away from higher education and levelling down.

At times, the Government are almost hostile to higher education, with the result that courses are being judged on student outcomes defined partly by getting degree-level jobs, whatever they are, and earning appropriate incomes. It seems to be obligatory at this point to declare your education, so here I go: I have an MA in Classics from Edinburgh University, a highly relevant degree, but not exactly job orientated in some people’s views. For reasons best known to myself and a complete mystery to my mother, I took a job as a secretary for two years post graduation, which would have screwed up Edinburgh’s outcome measures, had they existed 50 years ago.

I believe that we need careful scrutiny of Clause 17 on quality assessment for higher education. Metrics of quality need to take account of contextual factors, if they are not to jeopardise widening access for the less advantaged. They must take account of how students define their success and the flexibility that they will need in the fast-changing job market.