Oral Answers to Questions

Debate between David Johnston and Barry Sheerman

Monday 29th January 2024 Commons Chamber

[Mr Barry Sheerman (Huddersfield) (Lab/Co-op)]

9. What steps she is taking to improve early years education.

[The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Education (David Johnston)]

This Government are rolling out the largest expansion of childcare in England’s history, doubling the amount we spend now. This will enable more children to benefit from higher-quality early years education and childcare more of the time, building strong foundations for every child and enabling more parents to work.

[Mr Sheerman]

Why has it taken 14 years for the Government to get around to having a plan? They got rid of children’s centres and Sure Start centres, and they have not replaced them with anything until now. Now we see chaos: people cannot get the code; they do not know what money they are getting from local government; the National Day Nurseries Association says it is a mess. What is the Minister going to do to clear up this mess?

[David Johnston]

There was a lot in that question. On the Sure Start point, we are rolling out family hubs, which will be a lot broader than the Sure Start centres were and will cover children with special educational needs up to the age of 25. As for the codes issue, as the hon. Gentleman will already know, we have worked with His Majesty’s Revenue and Customs to provide a solution to that issue for all parents so that no parent will miss out as a result.

--- Later in debate ---

[The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Education (David Johnston)]

My right hon. Friend is absolutely right. This is a highly competitive training scheme. Between 2017 and 2019 the Department filled all 160 of its funded training places per year, and since 2020 it has filled all 200 of the funded places each year. We have now committed to training a further 400 educational psychologists.

[Mr Barry Sheerman (Huddersfield) (Lab/Co-op)]

Does the right hon. Lady agree that we need highly qualified, excellent teachers in every school? Is she worried, as I am, that so many highly qualified, gifted teachers are leaving the profession after just a few years?

Oral Answers to Questions

Debate between David Johnston and Barry Sheerman

Monday 11th December 2023 Commons Chamber

[David Johnston]

I thank my hon. Friend for her work championing the early years workforce and join her in the tributes she pays to them. The total number of paid early years staff has remained stable in recent years, and between 2021 and 2022 the number of staff increased by 2%, or 5,900 people. We will publish updated statistics in the coming weeks.

[Mr Barry Sheerman (Huddersfield) (Lab/Co-op)]

Is it not a fact that after 13 years of the Conservatives in government, our country is in a situation where preschool and out-of-school care is the most expensive in Europe and beyond? We have so many talented people—especially women, but men as well—who are not coming back to use their high skills to recharge the economy, because they cannot afford childcare. What is the Minister going to do about it?

Lifelong Learning (Higher Education Fee Limits) Bill

Debate between David Johnston and Barry Sheerman

2nd reading
Monday 27th February 2023 Commons Chamber

[David Johnston]

I completely agree with my right hon. Friend. Part of the reason why that has happened is that young people feel, “I’m making an investment here. I’m paying £9,000 a year. I’m not doing that for you to give me a 2:2 or a third at the end of it.” There has therefore been this pressure on universities—often, unfortunately, with the threat of legal action from parents who can afford it—to inflate the grades people are given. This is another unintended consequence.

People will say, “Look, it’s not just about the money you can earn after your degree,” and that is the case, but because we as individuals are making that investment at that age, we understandably want to see an impact on our earnings. However, another problem is that lots of people will never pay back the money they have borrowed, and that is a huge liability for the taxpayer. Some taxpayers have been to university themselves, and some have not, but they will all incur this cost. We lend money to people to go to university, but if they do not earn enough to be able to pay it back, the taxpayer will not get a return on that investment. At the moment, we are on course for only a quarter of people to fully pay back their student loans. That is a huge amount that the taxpayer is investing unnecessarily in something that I hope we will change through this Bill.

As has been touched on, it is also the case that the three-year, full-time model for people aged 18 does not suit every young person. Lots of the young people I used to work with at the charities I ran had caring responsibilities, either for younger siblings or ill relatives. Perhaps a member of their family had unfortunately died, and those young people therefore had greater responsibilities, or they needed to work alongside study in order to supplement the family income. As such, again, we need greater flexibility, and that is before we come on to the technological change that we are expecting. We will see some of the most radical technological change that the country has ever known, and lots of the jobs that we train people for today will become obsolete. A person might make a decision at 18 about the particular course they want to study for a particular job, and in 20 years find that that job is obsolete and that they need to retrain for something else. That is why the Bill will be so important.

As an aside, lots of jobs should not need a degree anyway—we have slipped with the 50% target, I am afraid. In order to make the lives of employers easier, we have applied a higher and higher degree threshold to weed out people when we make selection decisions. If everybody has a degree, we end up starting to ask for master’s degrees, so we have entry inflation, not just grade inflation. Above all, that target has contributed to the disparity of esteem between academic and vocational courses. As has been touched on, this is a limited, smallish Bill, so giving people the equivalent of £37,000 in today’s money to enable them to train themselves across their lifetime, at some point in the future when they decide that they need to study for qualifications that they do not yet have, is so important for what we are trying to do: create that parity of esteem.

The Bill will promote lifelong and modular learning, and set limits on course and module fees based on credits. It will also achieve subtle things. Going back to the point about the whole system being geared towards one particular model, changing from an academic year to a course year is hugely important, because when everything is geared towards academics, we are continually reinforcing the message that the academic model is the only one for people.

We know that lifelong learning has a huge number of benefits. We know it will help with earnings; for some considerable time only about one in eight of the people who are in low pay have escaped that low pay a decade later. That has been true for decades, and part of that is about progression. By the way, that is partly the job of employers —they need to have good strategies for progression —but it is also about allowing adults to train in things they are not able to do, so that they can get more skills and therefore get more money.

[Mr Barry Sheerman (Huddersfield) (Lab/Co-op)]

I came into the Chamber after the hon. Gentleman had started his very good speech, so I hope he will forgive me. Is he trying to reinvent the individual learning accounts, which were an early attempt by Tony Blair’s Government to create that lifelong pattern of learning and open up opportunities? I was Chair of the Education Committee at the time, and unfortunately that Government found out very quickly that that scheme could be scammed, and it collapsed. Everyone said that the Government should have brought it back, even Mr Deputy Speaker, who used to be one of my students. Even he believed in that scheme, but it has never been resurrected.

[David Johnston]

I am grateful to the hon. Gentleman for his intervention. I am a politician, so I would never try to reinvent the wheel, but I think what we are trying to do in this Bill is learn from some of the problems that the Government at the time had with that situation, because lifelong learning is so important and people will need to retrain. People cycle in and out of work, and we will need to train people for jobs that none of us has even considered. Developed economies such as ours are historically bad at retraining people for new technology—it is not just a UK problem; it is a US problem too. All the developed economies find that difficult, so the Bill is an important way in which we can help people. That is before we consider the health and wellbeing advantages of lifelong learning, which are also well documented.

The Bill is set in the context of a couple of problems with which my right hon. Friend the Minister for Skills, Apprenticeships and Higher Education is familiar. One is access. It is still the case that access to certain universities is not what it should be. Disadvantaged young people find it difficult to get into certain universities, and we have to make better progress on that—some universities are still dominated by those from private schools, and that matters for everything we are training people for—and ditto the situation with international students. Some universities have made much better progress on getting international students rather than low-income students. They do that because it gives them a lot more money, but universities need to be making a good contribution to social mobility at home.

With this lifelong learning entitlement, I hope the Minister will, as with everything else, be applying two tests. First, what are the outcomes for people who undertake certain courses? I am agnostic about whether it is level 4 or level 8 and whether it is academic or vocational; the thing I care about most is whether the course helps someone get a better outcome than they otherwise would have had if they had not done that qualification. That unfortunately has not been the case with lots of the university courses that people have done at 18. The second test is simply this: do disadvantaged young people or older people who have been disadvantaged get their fair share of the courses that will really help them to have those better outcomes? Across degrees and apprenticeships, too often it is the most affluent and the most privileged who take most of the spaces on the things that will give the best outcomes. All that being said, this is an important Bill that is trying to get us to that parity of esteem, and I am very pleased to support it.