Future Skills Programmes: Universities

Debate between Ed Davey and Jim Shannon

Wednesday 26th February 2025 Westminster Hall

[Ed Davey (Kingston and Surbiton) (LD)]

I beg to move,

That this House has considered Government support for future skills programmes at universities.

It is really a pleasure to speak in your presence, Sir Desmond. I also thank the Minister, who knows that my aim in this debate is to give the Government a present—a present in the form of an idea that would revolutionise higher education, boost skills across our economy and be an engine of real growth. But it is more than that; it is an idea that could enhance the quality of life of millions of people, as it is also about social mobility and social justice—equality of opportunity in action. It is an idea that has already been fully and professionally researched, with thousands of businesses across the UK inputting into the completed research. This well researched idea has also been piloted and tested on real, live students. Moreover, it is an idea in its third year of practical roll-out. This is happening now, and it is being fully evaluated as it is put into action. It is a present that is, shall we say, oven ready.

[Jim Shannon (Strangford) (DUP)]

I commend the right hon. Member for bringing forward the debate. I was saying beforehand that Queen’s University in Belfast is already doing this. It runs these online skills courses and programmes, through shadowing and other incentives. Does the right hon. Member agree that greater Government support could only help even more students to give those few hours per semester to achieve greater personal growth and better foundational skills—the very objective that he is trying to achieve?

[Ed Davey]

It is always a pleasure to take an intervention from the hon. Gentleman, but I am going to push back a little bit, because I do not think any university is doing what Kingston University is doing—it might be partially —so I hope that he will listen to the rest of my remarks.

I think that this idea can be rolled out across England and, indeed, the whole UK and that it has the potential to help our schools, too. If that is not enough to intrigue and interest the Minister, I am not sure what is, but here is the icing on the cake: it will not cost very much. I hope I have got the Minister’s attention now. It is an idea that is very affordable. I am super-proud to say that this idea has been researched, developed, piloted, tested and rolled out in the fabulous university in my constituency—Kingston University.

I am about to unwrap this present, but in advance of the reveal, let me be clear that I have one main, simple ask of the Minister today. Please can she or her ministerial colleagues come to Kingston University to hear more from the academics involved, but above all to listen to the inspiring students who are already benefiting? And please come soon, before decisions are made in the spending review later this year, because I think students across the country can benefit from this.

Here is the present. Kingston University has developed a programme that it calls Future Skills, with the future skills being ones identified by business through a major research programme. There are nine skills in all. They are creative problem solving, digital competency including AI, adaptability, having a questioning mindset, empathy, collaboration, being enterprising, resilience, and self-awareness—something we could all do with in this House. The Minister will recognise, I hope, that these are essential life skills, but they are rarely taught, at least not directly. There is no undergraduate course with all these skills in the curriculum, yet they are the future skills that businesses say they want people to have.

Some people in other higher education institutions might say, “Well, we do that. We teach those skills, but in other ways. There’s nothing special to see here.” They would be wrong. Kingston University has developed modules for all these skills and insists that every single undergraduate takes these modules, whatever their main subject. They might be studying engineering or fashion—Kingston University, by the way, is in the top five in the UK, and is top in London, for fashion and textiles; I thought I would just get that in. They might be studying computer science or cyber-security, or nursing. Whatever the degree, students at Kingston University now study these nine future skills as well. What is more, Kingston University has structured the teaching of these future skills across three years of undergraduate study in phases called navigate, explore and apply. A first-year undergraduate will experience those future skills in a programme called navigate, which is designed to support the student’s transition into university life. It involves workshops that show that these future skills are not abstract but real skills with huge significance.

These workshops help students to navigate how they match up to the skills already. Are they naturally empathetic? Have they mastered AI? Are they good at collaboration and problem-solving? I guess the first-year undergraduate experience of the navigate phase of future skills could be described as self-assessment, where the student is offered relevant guidance and learning resources to develop all those skills. That first-year navigate phase was rolled out, after testing, for all Kingston University students in September 2023, reaching 5,300 students this academic year.

This September’s Kingston freshers will be the third cohort to experience navigate and future skills. Students in their second year take future skills forward in a phase called explore. That involves students working directly with employers to build their knowledge of these future skills and an understanding of what they mean in practice. They do that in a variety of ways: in mock assessment centres and live projects, and through placements and site visits. Some people would say they do that already, but they do not.

Explore has been tested for two years and rolled out for one. The full second year of Kingston students have been experiencing explore from last September, reaching more than 4,400 students. To take one example, an exercise developed with the John Lewis Partnership focused on Waitrose. Waitrose worked with Kingston students on actual questions and challenges that the business is facing, working with 600 second-year students from the university’s faculty of business and social science and the faculty of engineering, computing and the environment to help them to solve real problems.

Students are devising a system to make it easier for Waitrose to capture and interpret data from its suppliers. Other students are shaping a business-to-business marketing communications strategy for Waitrose to encourage suppliers to adopt appropriate use of artificial intelligence to support data insight.

Carer’s Allowance

Debate between Ed Davey and Jim Shannon

Wednesday 16th October 2024 Commons Chamber

[Ed Davey]

For carers who can receive carer’s allowance, which does not include young carers, it is a lifeline. Carer’s allowance is the main financial support available but, frankly, as the main way that we support family carers, it is not fit for purpose.

[Jim Shannon (Strangford) (DUP)]

I commend the right hon. Gentleman for his endeavours in the debate, which we support, and on his compassion for carers given his own experience. Someone who cares for their parents all day and then works a couple of hours in the evening is precluded from receiving carer’s allowance. Does the right hon. Gentleman agree that those people, who do not get carer’s allowance because they happen to work a few hours, should qualify?

[Ed Davey]

I am grateful to the hon. Gentleman for that point. That should certainly be part of the review, but one or two other issues, which I will talk about, are critical to reform probably even before that.

At just £81.90 a week, carer’s allowance is the lowest benefit of its kind. For someone doing 35 hours of caring a week—the minimum period for eligibility—that is just £2.34 an hour. It is not just the low rate of the carer’s allowance that worries me but the fact that the eligibility rules are inflexible and very badly designed, chief among them being the earnings limit of £151 a week. Even for someone on minimum wage, that is just 13 hours and 20 minutes a week. The earning limit operates like a cliff edge. As soon as someone makes £151.01 a week, they lose the whole carer’s allowance—every penny of the £81.90. It acts as a significant barrier and a major disincentive to work. It means carers on low incomes cannot work a bit more to help make ends meet, so it is bad for them, bad for the person they are caring for, bad for their employers and bad for the economy.

But here is where things get worse. There are tens of thousands of carers who go slightly over the earnings limit, mostly without realising it. Maybe they pick up an extra shift, happen to get an end-of-year bonus, or understandably do not realise the way carer’s allowance operates in such a daft way. Even though the Department for Work and Pensions gets regular alerts from His Majesty’s Revenue and Customs when people go over the earnings limit, it has not been telling carers and it keeps paying carer’s allowance until one day, out of the blue, the carer gets hit with demands to repay those overpayments, which may have built up over months and years due to the DWP’s own inaction.

Back in July, I told the Prime Minister about one of my constituents, Andrea, who lives in Chessington. She is a full-time carer for her mum. Back in 2019, Andrea decided to go back to work part-time in a charity shop—mainly for her mental health, she told me. She informed the DWP at the time and it continued her payments. Five years later, it wrote to her and said that no, she now had to repay £4,600. Andrea says she feels “harassed, bullied and overwhelmed.” She now does just six hours’ unpaid work a month to avoid going over the earnings limit and getting into more debt. She says the whole thing makes her “want to give up work and give up caring.”