Colleges and Skills: Covid-19

Ben Bradley Excerpts

Tuesday 20th October 2020 Westminster Hall

[Ben Bradley (Mansfield) (Con)]

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Betts. I thank my hon. Friend the Member for Waveney (Peter Aldous) for obtaining this important debate.

Further education is hugely important not only for the economy and for the levelling-up agenda post-covid, but for the long term. Skills and education are the key to the long-term shift if we are to truly bring some of the most disadvantaged parts of our country up into line with everyone else and give people the opportunities they need and deserve. My hon. Friend the Minister is ably leading some hugely positive work in the Department for Education right now, including shifting the dial around further and higher education and the balance of what we advocate for our young people––where we push them in terms of education.

We know that HE outcomes are not as good as we would hope in many cases. There is a huge opportunity through further education and technical and vocational skills to advance and to get better qualifications and earning power at the end of it all than many young people get from HE. That includes the new T-levels and the better access to apprenticeships for SMEs that was in the recent lifelong learning announcement. That plan also includes the level 3 entitlement for adults. For communities like mine in Mansfield, where a huge proportion of adults do not have level 3 qualifications, that will give them the right to go back, for free and funded by the Government, and access skills and retraining that will help them get a better job or get back into work post coronavirus. The lifelong learning loans element will help adults to access higher levels of qualifications if they wish. That is hugely important.

It is very welcome that West Notts College in my constituency has had its first capital funding for a very long time. That has gone down very well. My hon. Friend the Member for Waveney rightly pointed out the connection between the wider regeneration piece––town deals––and the skills and retraining agenda. We hope Mansfield will invest some of its town deal money in things like student accommodation, new skills and retraining commitments, and new premises to supplement the work being done by Nottingham Trent University and West Notts College in partnership, which is bringing better FE, better technical qualifications and HE degree qualifications to Mansfield so that young people can access them on their doorstep. That is all hugely positive for the future.

The Government are doing good work in this space and we can add to that post-coronavirus things such as the kickstart scheme and additional funding to support apprenticeships and promote those opportunities to business. There is some really good stuff, and it is key to the regeneration piece, to levelling up our country and to supporting communities like Mansfield.

The Secretary of State is bang on when he says that FE needs that boost and to provide an equal level of opportunity to the HE sector, into which young people are so often pushed whether or not it is the right thing. We need to make the case from this place, from Government and from business that FE presents a huge opportunity for young people to get into work and to get the skills and help they need for good employment opportunities.

My ask for the Government is to work with good college leaders on local priorities. I keep raising the example of West Notts College and its work with Nottingham Trent University, which is a really positive example of what could be done elsewhere. It would be great to have the Minister along, as we have discussed before, to see that when it is possible.

We need to look at the apprenticeship levy. We have made it easier for SMEs to access that funding to bring apprenticeships into smaller businesses. The regular feedback on the levy is that it is complicated and that businesses need help to access that money.

On age, I have never understood why we think FE and technical and vocational skills are so brilliant post-16, but are so averse to letting 15 or 14-year-olds have a go at these subjects. That would be really positive and help a lot of the most disadvantaged young people who are disaffected at school to find a reason to stay in education. There is some really good stuff happening in this space and I thank the Minister for all the work she is doing. I look forward to working with her in future.