Lifelong Learning (Higher Education Fee Limits) Bill (Second sitting)

Gill Furniss Excerpts

Committee stage
Tuesday 21st March 2023 Public Bill Committees

[Sir David Evennett (Bexleyheath and Crayford) (Con)]

Q Your comments so far have been very interesting. There are two things I would like to raise. First, you mentioned publicity, and a lot of firms do not know what training is available. That obviously needs to be addressed by employers, politicians and the Government.

Secondly, one of the things we find when going around the country in various roles is that businesses complain that they are not getting people trained to have the skills they require. Do you think that the Bill will encourage more businesses to get more involved with universities and colleges, so that they can work together to make sure that they are encouraging colleges and universities to have the courses to fill the skills shortages? Subsequently, the firms will be able to participate in the upskilling, as well as individuals, or the Government.

Matthew Percival: I completely agree with the sentiment and the objective of how we get employers more involved in the system; I am not sure this is the mechanism we are pinning our hopes on for that. You would expect more of that objective to be achieved through a reform like the local skills improvement plans, which try to get that employer voice out to provide us with that bit more, rather than this being the specific mechanism for it.

To your earlier comment about employer engagement with programmes, the job we really have to do is not just to say, “Let’s make employers aware of the LLE”, but to ask whether we actually have a coherent story to take to employers and say to them, “This is what is valuable for you about engaging in this process and why you should do it.” If we have that story to tell, we can be a lot more effective in helping to engage people.

Often the way it comes across to employers is that there is a whole plethora of initiatives and they will say, “I am confused as to which one”. I know part of my job, as a representative employer, is to hold a bit of that challenge back to them and say, “Well, you can’t say both that you need it to be dead simple and there to be only one option, and when there is only one option say, ‘There isn’t an option that works for me.’”

We need a plurality of different initiatives and options, but we also need to challenge and support employers to navigate that environment. Rather than just saying, “Let’s try to raise awareness” and getting them to tick the box that says, “I’ve heard of the LLE”, because they might have heard about it as individuals rather than as employers, it is about how much we can get to the objective of them giving us quite a consistent message that, “This is the value in it for me, and I am confident that I know that element of it”, rather than just brand awareness.

Simon Ashworth: We refer to our members—providers —as the sales force. I think there is absolutely a role for Government to do with engaging employers. Our members—independent training providers, colleges and universities—deal with employers all the time. It is important to harness their links with industry and employers around awareness of the LLE. Ultimately, the LLE and the entitlement is about the individual as well. There is the employer demand and the employer support, but there is also the individual because, at the end of the day, it will be the individual who takes out the loan entitlement. There is a role for organisations such as UCAS to help promote that.

I would certainly encourage the Government to work with stakeholders and providers, which could do some of the heavy lifting around awareness. I do not think it is just the Government’s role to try to reach a million employers. I think they need to pull on all the different stakeholders that can promote the programme and make it a success.

[Gill Furniss (Sheffield, Brightside and Hillsborough) (Lab)]

Q I am glad that Matthew referred to the local skills improvement plans. I would be interested in hearing what your view is as to what connectivity they should have with the system that is coming forward. That is one question.

My other question is probably to Simon. I started work in the ’90s, and we definitely had a skills shortage then. It seems that we have always had a skills shortage, so why is that? What have we learned or not learned from it? What is wrong with the current system? How will this solve the problem?

Matthew Percival: I will answer both. On the way businesses are thinking about the LSIPs programme, the best model is if it is adding an employer voice into the system for those employers that are currently struggling to have a voice. A lot of employers that feel they are confident with their existing provider relationship—they are understood and are getting what they want—are taking a backseat from LSIPs, because LSIPs are not a skills plan for the area with the totality of all skills needs. It is an extra source of information to try to give a voice to the businesses that are struggling most for a voice at the moment.

If that was to feed into the LLE through a consideration of how we make that information available to learners to make informed choices—I spoke about the LLE being less about someone who is in a job already and how they progress with the current employer, and more about how they navigate the labour market—and we were able to say, “Actually, there is a demand in the local area,” it is the LSIPs that would help work out what the job opportunities are.

What LSIPs will not be able to do, and where there would need to be some extra support in the LLE system, would be giving advice on what training someone would buy that would get them to the point of readiness for an employer to hire them with training, rather than their being fully competent. That is an element to add. That would be the interaction between LSIPs and the LLE for me.

Simon Ashworth: On local skills improvement plans, we have been fortunate to be involved in some of the pilots. Some of the findings for us were that employers are just keen to get individuals with really good basic skills—maths and English—and who turn up on time. They are quite happy to support them with the technical skills. There is almost an acceptance now of getting people in and being willing to invest in them and train them. We should not lose sight, certainly on the local skills improvement plans, of some of those key employability skills.

The question on skills shortages is key. Some of it is a lack of coherence around the skills system—a lack of progression. Apprenticeships are a really good example, where the reforms started with the development of high-level programmes, and lower-level programmes tended to come later. Having progression pathways is important. We also rely too much on imported labour. We have seen that coming back again in the imported skills in construction announced recently.

We see a lack of synergy between some of the Government Departments—the Departments for Work and Pensions, for Education, for Business and Trade—and some conflicting programmes. They are very complex for employers to understand and for learners to access, whether it is the Skills Bootcamp or the Restart programme. They just operate in silos. We need a much more integrated system that does not overlap, which is less complex for employers, and a lack of reliance on foreign labour; those are some of the challenges that we would say are holding things back, as well as having those skills shortages.

[Andy McDonald (Middlesbrough) (Lab)]

Q Picking up on Toby’s point about the squeezing out of small and medium-sized enterprises, has the CBI done any thinking or work about any fiscal advantages in favour of SMEs to encourage employer engagement in training? It seems that may be a block.

Clearly, we want employers to invest in training as best we can. If SMEs are being excluded, should we be considering, in addition to these measures, some fiscal settlement for SMEs to give them an advantage over the larger employers?

Matthew Percival: You mean outside of the consideration of the LLE—a broader question around skills investment?

--- Later in debate ---

[Matt Western]

Q You mentioned that you would like to see, as I think we all would, greater progression from levels 1 and 2; what more should be done to encourage progression from those levels to level 3 and maybe level 4?

David Hughes: The investment in adult education has plummeted over the past 12 years, so there are fewer opportunities now than there were in 2010. That is a major problem. The funding rate for colleges has not changed for 10 years. That is a major problem. We need more investment in colleges just so that they can recruit the skilled staff to be able to deliver.

There is an investment question, then, but there is a pathway issue as well. We need to make it much more straightforward for people to understand how they can get from wherever they are—whatever level—through to the sort of skills acquisition that really works in the labour market. Adults with children, mortgages, car loans and whatever other responsibilities need to see a return on their investment. The LLE is a fantastic opportunity, but it is not going to be taken unless it is super clear that getting that level 2, level 3, level 4 or level 5 will actually make a difference to a person’s chances in the labour market and, let’s face it, to their income to help with the cost of living crisis.

[Gill Furniss]

Q You have more or less answered quite a few of my questions. My concerns are about the disparity in pay between school and FE and between FE and HE. It worries me that this proposal cannot be successful unless the Government put in some investment to make it more equitable, because, as you say, recruitment and retention is a massive difficulty, particularly in specialist subject areas where people can earn far more in business. Do you agree?

David Hughes: I completely agree, and it looks as though it might get worse in the short term. The Government are negotiating with the teachers’ unions at the moment; if teachers get a better settlement, the gap between schoolteacher pay and college lecturer pay will get wider. It will get even more difficult. I know that the Minister is aware of that; I have talked to him about it. It is a difficult one, but we absolutely need college staff to be paid the right wage to attract and retain them.

[Lloyd Russell-Moyle (Brighton, Kemptown) (Lab/Co-op)]

Q Following on from that, given the modulisation and the ability for people to draw down things and then use the credits in other institutions later on in life to build up a portfolio of higher education, is there a danger that some universities will be less willing to take on students who need additional support and will wind up pushing them into the Association of Colleges members to do the work that sometimes they have to do? We see that a bit in the American system. People go to a community college, which is where the heavy lifting is done to get someone ready to learn, and then they go off and do their final year at an institution, and the institution gets all the kudos. Is there a danger of something similar happening with this?

David Hughes: I think it is happening now. It happens as part of the system. We have a system in which if you have good level 3 and good A-level results or BTEC results, you get into a university. If you are an adult and you have not got quite the same simple set of results, it is much harder to get into a university, and colleges open their arms to that group of people. So we already have that schism between a university sector that does not include those people and a college sector that does. It might get worse. A lot of adults need to build their confidence and learn how to learn, and colleges are very good at doing that. Often universities are not as good at doing that. They can teach someone a subject and can teach the research. Colleges are experts at teaching and universities are experts at research. Somehow we need to accept that and applaud it and use it to deliver to the right people.