Technical and Vocational Education

Damian Hinds Excerpts

Wednesday 9th July 2014 Commons Chamber

[Ian Austin (Dudley North) (Lab)]

I am very pleased that the shadow Secretary of State called for this debate, because we have to make education and skills this country’s No. 1 priority. The biggest question that we face, as a country, is how we can bring new, better-paid and more secure jobs to places such as Dudley, which have lost their traditional industries. The only way our country will pay its way in this century, let alone prosper, is by equipping the British people with the skills that they need to compete. There is no more urgent priority or task.

Children who are at school today will spend their adult lives working with technologies that have not yet been invented, and that we cannot even imagine. On average, those who leave school today will have more than a dozen jobs over their lifetime. The key thing that they have to learn is how to adapt and acquire new skills. However, the CBI’s education and skills survey in 2013 found that nearly a third of employers were dissatisfied with school leavers’ basic literacy and numeracy. Too few students have good English and maths GCSEs by the time they reach 18.

Germany has three times as many apprentices as the UK. The number of young apprentices—those who are under the age of 19—is falling, as is the number of apprentices in information technology and construction. It is good that the Minister has introduced degree-level apprenticeships, but they account for less than 2% of apprenticeships.

Britain is also falling behind our competitors in basic numeracy and literacy. In basic skills, we now lag behind not only countries such as Finland, South Korea and Germany but even Estonia, Poland, Slovakia and the Czech Republic. England is the only country in the developed world where the generation approaching retirement is more literate and numerate than the one entering the work force.

[Damian Hinds (East Hampshire) (Con)]

And when did that happen?

[Ian Austin]

If I may say so, that is a narrow party political point. I believe that the last Government took many great steps in education and skills, and if the hon. Gentleman bothers to listen, he might discover that I am saying some things that he and his party’s Front Benchers actually agree with. He ought to sit down, listen carefully and then perhaps contribute later to a serious debate about what I am saying should be the No. 1 priority for every political party.

We should agree as a country—all parties, Government, schools, universities, the teaching profession and businesses—clear long-term targets to transform education and ensure that we have the skills that we need to compete. We should set an ambition for Britain to produce the best-educated and most highly skilled young people in the world. Someone is going to do that, so why can it not be us? We have to drive up standards in our schools and get behind head teachers and teachers who are working to improve standards. If we recruit good teachers, motivate them, set high aspirations and tough targets, focus on standards and discipline and make the kids believe in themselves, the sky is the limit.

--- Later in debate ---

[Damian Hinds (East Hampshire) (Con)]

ATMs and self-checkouts have already taken over jobs that we assumed would always be there. It is difficult fully to take in the potential structural change that will come from driverless vehicles and 3D printers, let alone from cleaning robots and Amazon drones delivering what is left and cannot be transmitted through the ether. More and more markets become more contestable, and more and more things can be offshored. We will never again make T-shirts cheaper than China can.

As we look to the future, we need to focus not only on high-value sectors, but on areas where we have competitive advantage. Those are things for a debate on another day, but we need to note that those two forces—technological change and globalisation—are accentuating the hollowing out of the labour market that we are already seeing, with more jobs at the bottom of the scale, more at the “knowledge economy” top and fewer in the middle. That has serious implications for social mobility and progression.

We know that the way in which those forces impact on people will depend on whether the particular job is enhanced by technology and the computer or competes with them, and there are major social justice questions attached to that. There will, of course, always be jobs that have little or nothing to do with technology—in care, retail, hospitality and so forth. For all employment sectors, however, we need a significant improvement in skill levels in the economy.

What skills will be required? We are going to see a merging of the academic and the vocational, the intellectual and the practical, and a further emphasis on some skills that we are not used to considering in either group. The Wolf report was right to talk about the primacy of English and maths—the skills for which employers look before all others. We need more attention, as the shadow Secretary of State mentioned, on character and resilience skills and on workplace skills. They are not the same thing but they overlap. Character and resilience skills are about what is in you—self-belief and the ability to set realistic goals, for example. Workplace skills are primarily about how people interact with others—customer empathy, including the ability to smile and make eye contact, teamwork, organising tasks, leading and motivating others. At the intersection of the two are perseverance and the ability to bounce back, which is, of course, so important throughout life.

Our success as an economy will depend on how we adapt to those new realities, and on how quickly we adapt. One benchmark is probably South Korea, whose story of change is dramatic. The youngest people in its work force have materially better basic skills than those approaching retirement. It is a shame that this country must currently contend with the opposite position.

I fear that a great error in the first decade of this century was the overriding obsession with the “five-plus C-plus” target for GCSEs. I say that not just because this is an Opposition-day debate and this is what happens in the House of Commons, but because we owe it to young people not merely to file recent history, but to learn from it. The system found increasingly clever ways of helping schools and helping itself—the system as a whole—to find their way up the league. Half-courses, double awards, modularisation, early sits and retakes all helped, but the daddy of them all was “equivalents”, which helped to perpetuate the diet of low-value qualifications. The 350,000 young people of whom Alison Wolf spoke were let down by courses with little or no labour market value, and that in turn contributed significantly to the terrible rise in the number of young people who were not in education, employment or training.

The other big target was the 50% target for the number of people who should go to university. The Opposition now talk about the “forgotten 50%”, but we only talk about that 50% because of the first 50% target which they introduced. Actually, I am not sure that 50% is a bad target. I think it is the rest of the sentence that we need to look at. The target should be not just about the proportion of young people who go to university, but about the proportion who finish university courses that will be of use to them later in life. An increasing number of those courses—degree courses—will be vocational, and many careers that used to involve a vocational route straight after school have themselves become “graduatised”. The number of people embarking on undergraduate degrees more or less matches the number of occupations that now require people to have degrees and did not do so previously.

I rather welcome what the Opposition have been saying about tech degrees. I think that that is a direction of travel that we see on both sides of the House. However, it is the Government who are grasping the nettle and doing what it takes. The importance that my right hon. and hon. Friends attach to vocational education and training is exemplified by the fact that the Wolf report was commissioned at the very start of the Government’s tenure, before the completion of some of the other reforms that we have had plenty of opportunities to debate in the House. I think it right to move away from that “one target that trumps all others”, the “five-plus C-plus”, and towards measures that reward and value the progress made by all young people, whatever their abilities. I also think that we should take into account not just the results those young people achieve at the end of their time at school or college, but where they go after that, and where they end up.

This Government are determined that all qualifications will have rigour, because with rigour come respect and value. I welcome tech levels that involve local employers, and I welcome the tech bac, including the core maths qualification and the extended project. I also welcome the massive increase in the number of apprenticeships—it is up 86% in my constituency—the higher apprenticeships fund and the huge growth in UTCs. This goes further than that, however. It is about employers being in control of apprenticeship training budgets, it is about more young people studying maths after the age of 16, and it is about getting 3D printers into schools and enabling more young people to study coding and app design.

You are indicating that I should stop at this point, Mr Speaker, so I shall do so. Let me end by saying that, as we heard from the shadow Secretary of State, this is a matter of social justice and economic efficiency.