Apprenticeships and T-Levels

Damian Hinds Excerpts

Wednesday 20th November 2024 Westminster Hall

[Damian Hinds (East Hampshire) (Con)]

I beg to move,

That this House has considered apprenticeships and T Levels.

It is a pleasure to see you in the Chair, Sir Christopher.

UK productivity is well below that of the United States, Germany and France. That is not a new thing; it has been true in every year I have been alive. If we were able to fix that productivity gap, we could have higher living standards, lower tax and more tax revenue. There are multiple reasons for the gap and much academic literature has been written on it, but the level of skills in an economy is fundamental to productivity and therefore to growth. How we run our skills system is also important, because there is a cadre of young people who are less orientated towards pure academic study but have talent and flair in technical pursuits, and they deserve just the same opportunities and life chances as those who take the academic route.

In this country, although we are famous for aspects of our education system, including for our higher education—our universities—and increasingly for aspects of our school system, we are not, I am afraid, famous for technical and vocational education and training. When foreign Ministers come to Europe to look at vocational education, they tend to go to Germany, and if there is one thing we do not like in England, it is losing out to Germany.

It is right that successive Governments have been troubled by this situation and sought to fix it, but perhaps sometimes they have been a bit too quick to look for a fix. The story of our organisational infrastructure for technical and vocational provision is not one of stability. We have had industrial training boards, the Manpower Services Commission, the Training Commission, and training and enterprise councils—TECs. But those TECs were different from another TEC—the Technician Education Council, which existed alongside the Business Education Council, BEC. The two would eventually merge, of course, to give us BTECs. There were national training organisations; the Learning and Skills Council; sector skills councils; the UK Commission for Employment and Skills; the Skills Funding Agency, or SFA, which would later be the ESFA—the Education and Skills Funding Agency—and, most recently, local skills improvement plans and the Institute for Apprenticeships and Technical Education.

The infrastructure has been mirrored by a panoply of qualifications and awards. We have had traditional apprenticeships and then modern apprenticeships; the youth training scheme; the City & Guilds system; the technical and vocational education initiative; the National Council for Vocational Qualifications; NVQs, which are still in use; and GNVQs, which evolved into BTECs and diplomas. There were the 14 to 19 diplomas, which were not quite the same thing as the Tomlinson diplomas; the skills for life programme; and traineeships. Altogether, today, there are somewhere between 100 and 200 recognised awarding organisations, excluding those that only do apprenticeship end-point assessments.

Now, just at level 3—the equivalent to A-levels—we have the following qualifications: tech levels as well as T-levels; applied generals; level 3 ESOL; level 3 NVQ, and access to higher education diplomas. There is a level 3 award, a level 3 certificate and a level 3 diploma—or someone might prefer a level 3 national certificate or a level 3 national diploma. There is also an extended diploma, a subsidiary diploma, and a technical introductory diploma. There is no official count, but by the mid-2010s someone had counted up what they could find and said that, together with other, non-level 3 courses available to 16 to 18-year-olds, there were at least 13,000 possible qualifications that someone in that age group could do. It is not surprising that when the Independent Panel on Technical Education was created in 2015-16, it found that vocational education and training had become “over-complex”.

[Sarah Dyke (Glastonbury and Somerton) (LD)]

I thank the right hon. Member for securing this important debate. Some 6.9% of young people in Somerset are believed to be not in education, employment or training, which is higher than the national average of 5.5%. Does he agree that the Government should not only improve the quality of vocational education, but strengthen the careers advice and links with employers in schools and colleges, to enable more young people to get into education on the right courses?

[Damian Hinds]

Indeed—the hon. Member is absolutely right. Part of the point of careers advice is knowing which course to take and which qualification to pursue. The panel that I mentioned found that if someone was considering a career in plumbing, for example, there were 33 different qualifications that they might seek to take. It also found that in general the various qualifications were not providing the skills needed; they had become divorced from the occupations they were meant to serve, with no requirement, or only a weak requirement, to meet employers’ needs in those occupations.

The panel’s report, which came out in April 2016, became a blueprint for a major upgrade of technical and vocational education in this country. The panel was determined to address both the productivity gap and very clearly also the social justice gap, whereby some young people were being left behind. I stress that although the report was a blueprint, it was also a “redprint”: the panel was chaired by the noble Lord Sainsbury, the distinguished Labour peer. The report called for “a fundamental shift”, with

“a coherent technical education option…from levels 2…to…5”.

There would be 15 clearly defined sector routes, covering 35 different career pathways. Three of those routes would be available only through an apprenticeship; the other 12 would be available either through an apprenticeship or a college track, and there would be common standards for both. Both the apprenticeship and college-based routes would result in

“the same or equivalent technical knowledge, skills and behaviours”

to take into the workplace. The report said that this path

“needs to be clearly delineated from the academic option, as they are designed for different purposes. But, at the same time, movement between the two must be possible…in either direction”.

The report also recommended expanding the then Institute for Apprenticeships into an Institute for Apprenticeships and Technical Education, so as to cover both apprenticeship and college tracks. It added:

“Specifying the standards…is not a role for officials in central government but for professionals working in…occupations, supported by…education professionals.”

It recommended that there should be improvements to apprenticeships and a new, largely college-based qualification, which would become known as the T-level.

With T-levels, the knowledge, skills content and required behaviours are set not by somebody at the Department of Education but by employers. There is the core technical qualification, but there is also content in English, maths and digital. Crucially, there is a 45-day industrial placement. There are also more college hours than with traditional vocational qualifications and indeed more taught hours per week than for A-levels.

For the upgrade that we needed in our country, in both productivity and opportunities available to all young people, T-levels had to become the principal college-based option—not the only option, but the principal or main college-based vocational qualification. And the T-level could not be grafted on to a market that already had thousands of qualifications; there was an incumbency advantage and even commercial interests attached to some of those. It had to replace a number—a lot—of qualifications. Gordon Brown, the former Prime Minister, has been speaking about this quite recently.

The other thing that was always going to be difficult about T-levels was finding enough industry placements. Lord Sainsbury found that we might need up to 250,000 industry placements for 17-year-olds, and that, of course, is hard to achieve. We could say that it is too hard and give up, but if we did that we would be giving up on advancing our competitiveness.

The alternative is that we change culture in our country and say to companies that if they want to be a great success in their sector, and their sector to be a great success in our country, and our whole country to be a success in the world, we all have to invest both the resource and the time in the next generation.

[Melanie Onn (Great Grimsby and Cleethorpes) (Lab)]

I do not disagree with the right hon. Member on that point; I just wanted to highlight that in my constituency of Great Grimsby and Cleethorpes there is an apprenticeship provider called CATCH. Local businesses have come together to invest in a brand-new welding apprenticeship facility that will deliver 1,000 apprentices over the next few years. Is that the kind of partnership working that he envisages, which works well for local communities, young people and business?

[Damian Hinds]

I am sure it is. I will come to apprenticeships in a moment, but I was just talking about industry placements in T-levels.

From speaking to young people who are doing T-levels, colleagues will know that their most popular feature is probably the fact that young people get to do a real role in a real workplace. The placements are also popular with the employers that provide T-levels: first, the employers are investing in the next generation and helping develop all the things the lack of which they sometimes complain about—soft skills and workplace skills—and secondly, the placements are the most fantastic, longest-ever job interview, when employers get to see the people who may come and work in their company over an extended period. I appeal to Ministers to carry on the great work of shouting about T-levels and talking about these great opportunities and the upgrade they represent.

There were two big changes to apprenticeships. The first ensured that there were minimum standards. Previously, as colleagues will recall, some apprenticeships were so thin and flimsy that the apprentices did not know they were on one. After minimum standards came in, apprenticeships would last at least one year and involve at least 20% of time off the job. As with T-levels, there would be an end-point assessment, which would feature standards set by employers.

The second big change was the introduction of the apprenticeship levy. That has always been controversial with some employers, but it was there to do two things. First, it raises the funds needed to pay for a big upgrade in apprenticeship provision. Secondly, it deals with the free rider problem, with which we will all be familiar: some companies in a sector have always strongly invested in young people, but three years later those young people leave to work for another employer that can offer to pay more but has not made the investment in the first place. The apprenticeship levy deals directly with that free rider problem, as economists call it, so that every sizeable company contributes properly.

The new Government plan to change the scope of the levy and to introduce two new types of apprenticeship, which it is fair to say we do not know a huge amount about: foundation apprenticeships and shorter apprenticeships. There is an argument that we already make the word “apprenticeship” do a lot of work—it covers a wide spectrum. Arguably, there are three types of development of self and training, which have different needs: someone may be a career starter, career developer or career changer, and the specifications of the courses and qualifications are different. For example, a 50-year-old who is changing career does not need to learn as many things about what it is like to enter a workplace for the first time as an 18-year-old does. In truth, only one of those types of training is what a normal member of the public associates with the word “apprentice”: we think typically of people who are young and starting out on their working journey.

It is totally legitimate to look at changing what the levy covers, and it is good to refocus on young people—career starters. It is also reasonable to say that the levy could cover some things that are not apprenticeships, such as management development or traineeships, but there is huge value in maintaining integrity around what we mean by the word “apprenticeship”, and keeping a minimum length and quantity of college or off-work content.

Whatever the Government do with the levy, they need to find a way to deal with the free rider problem. The Government will always be lobbied by companies saying, “We should be able to use the levy for this, that and the other”, but if “this, that and the other” means training that they would have paid for anyway, then the levy will not have achieved its goal. It has to be something that creates a net increase in the amount of training and development available.

That brings me to Skills England. Now, Ministers like shiny new things, and some people will always lobby for things to change. A sweet spot is found in public policy when the two coincide: Ministers get lobbied to do something, and they think they have come up with a shiny new thing that sounds like it will achieve those ends. Skills England is one of those things; I am afraid that, without major design change, it is doomed to failure. I have no doubt that plenty of people who lobbied the Government when they were in opposition said, “We need a different approach to skills. We need to think about them across Government, take the long view, listen to employers, listen to young people and have an integrated approach.” The Government have come up with this thing called Skills England, which they think will do that.

Skills England will be the 13th new skills agency in five decades. If all it took to solve our skills and productivity problem was a change in the machinery of government, do the Government not think that one of the previous 12 might already have managed it? The instinct in difficult circumstances is to break glass and reach for a quango, but Skills England is not even a quango; it is nada—not quasi-autonomous, but a non-accountable departmental agency—and there is no reason to think it will be any better at working across Government, let alone across the economy, in solving these issues.

If the Government were serious about creating something new to join together the Home Office, the Department for Business and Trade, the DFE and everybody else, they would put it in the Treasury or perhaps the Cabinet Office. They would not just make it part of the DFE management structure. Worse than that is the loss of independence compared with the Institute for Apprenticeships and Technical Education.

There is legislation currently going through the other place that ostensibly creates Skills England, but it does no such thing. All it does is abolish the independent institute and move all of its powers into the Department for Education. The Secretary of State will now have responsibility for standards for T-levels. Imagine if that were the case for A-levels. If it is not all right for A-levels, why should it be all right for T-levels?

[Clive Jones (Wokingham) (LD)]

Will the right hon. Member give way?

[Damian Hinds]

If the hon. Member will forgive me, I will continue.

There is also no guarantee that business will continue to be involved in setting those standards. I am afraid that public and business confidence is set to be eroded—rightly, because everybody knows that the easiest way for the Government to increase the numbers of people doing anything in education is to erode standards to get more people through.

I believe the Sainsbury report was—and still is—a good blueprint. Of course, the Government are entitled to evolve it, but they should recognise that the principles remain sound. With T-levels, it was always going to be hard to get sufficient industry placements and to overcome powerful objections that we need to change the system rather than just add to it. With apprenticeships, there will always be, as there always have been, firms that try to game the system. We can argue about what the levy should or should not cover, but it is a good thing and it needs to be designed and maintained to encourage a net increase in investment in this area and to deal with the free rider problem.

There will always be some cost and downside when the bar of minimum standards is raised, as we did. We need to remember where we started, with the need to increase productivity and have higher expectations for all in the interests of social justice. We need to maintain those minimum standards to keep apprenticeships and T-levels equivalent, with the same levels of knowledge, skills and behaviours.

Finally, the independence of the body that sets the standards, working with and for business, is key. The Government will obviously keep Skills England, but I ask the Minister to build into its design proper, full independence from her Department, and a proper, full guiding role for the businesses these occupations need to serve. I want Ministers not just to say that, but to write it into the legislation.

--- Later in debate ---

[Damian Hinds]

It has been a good debate. I thank everyone who took part for bringing their own perspectives. There is just one thing I want to say. We cannot legislate for parity of esteem; we can only earn it. High-quality apprenticeships and T-levels can do that, because young people know that the standards have been set by employers, and they are right for the levels necessary for success in those sectors. Crucially, to have confidence in the integrity of qualifications, they need to be set independently and, in the case of these qualifications, they need to be set with business. The Minister has an opportunity with a Bill going through Parliament at the moment. When the IfATE transfer of powers Bill comes to Committee stage in the Commons, please will the Government table an amendment to write that independence and the involvement of business into law?

Question put and agreed to.

Resolved,

That this House has considered apprenticeships and T Levels.