Technical and Vocational Education

Graham Stuart Excerpts

Wednesday 9th July 2014 Commons Chamber

[Matthew Hancock]

That is certainly true. I want to address an important point sensibly made by the hon. Member for Liverpool, Walton (Steve Rotheram). He asked whether too many apprenticeships are short courses and whether they are not high enough quality. It is true that the Government inherited a system in which apprenticeships could be less than six months. That was wrong, so we have said that every apprenticeship must be for a minimum of a year. We have increased quality while increasing the number of apprentices.

It is good news for the nation that the Opposition have accepted their failure in office—the wording of their motion shows that they forgot half the population— and now back our reforms. Some say that imitation is flattery, and I suppose they are right. On Sunday, the hon. Member for Stoke-on-Trent Central called for a new elite grade of master teachers. That sounds like a good idea, and we have them. They are called specialist leaders in education—top teachers who get dedicated training and share their expertise with other schools. There are 3,800 of them in England. By next year, we will have 5,000.

On improving reforms and driving up standards, the hon. Gentleman mentioned technical degrees, which the right hon. Member for Doncaster North (Edward Miliband) described yesterday. They sound like a good idea, and we have them. More than 200 colleges already teach technical degrees. It is called higher education in further education. I suggest he goes around the country and has a look.

[Mr Graham Stuart (Beverley and Holderness) (Con)]

May I return the Minister to the subject of apprenticeships? Apprenticeships need to be of a decent length, but they also need to be high quality. There have been steps forward on both, but the other vital element of a successful apprenticeship is that it should be income transformative—it should lead to a significant increase in the market value of the person doing it. Has he looked at any mechanisms that could be put in place to ensure that, however worthy in concept apprenticeships are, they are held to account for delivering true market transformation of income expectation for the people who take them, young or old?

[Matthew Hancock]

Absolutely. The evidence shows that apprentices on the existing scheme increase their lifetime earnings, but we are not content to rest, so we are redesigning apprenticeship standards. Four hundred employers from different sectors of the economy are engaged to ensure not only that the training is rigorous, which is important, but that it responds to the needs of employers and gets people into higher-paid jobs. We want to ensure that the money that we, on behalf of taxpayers, put into subsidising apprenticeships, is well spent and that we get value for it. Ensuring that the money helps people to get higher-paid jobs is a vital part of that reform. I welcome any suggestions on how to entrench that link between what is taught to apprentices and the needs of employers. That can lead to higher pay for young people, which is what the policy is all about.

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[Mr Graham Stuart (Beverley and Holderness) (Con)]

What an excellent list of characteristics that was, and it is a great pleasure to follow the hon. Member for Dudley North (Ian Austin). I welcome today’s theme, because too often we focus on the part of our education system in which there are the fewest problems—the more academic routes. We should spend more of our time on the vocational routes that the majority of the population go through, which, as hon. Members have said, are harder to navigate. Those routes need to be made more navigable, and need to be linked closely to the needs of employers and the long-term earnings potential of the people who take them, whether they are young or not.

The Education Committee will soon launch its dedicated inquiry into apprenticeships and traineeships for 16 to 19-year-olds, so this debate is of particular interest to me and the rest of the Committee. Too often, vocational courses have been the Cinderella element in our education system, and denied the limelight given to academic qualifications that are sometimes perceived as more glamorous and socially transformative. This is a timely opportunity for the House to discuss how to change that.

Under the previous Government, getting as many young people as possible into university sometimes appeared to be an end in itself, regardless of whether that was necessarily a good deal for those young people, employers or wider society. I do not think that Ministers then thought of it that crudely, but that was the message that went out. It is important that we get the message right, so that the next generation has the right signals to make choices that will make the biggest difference to them.

It is regrettably true that overall, youth unemployment rose by 40% under the previous Government, and it did not go down in the boom years. That challenge was not new to the Labour Government, but there was a long-standing problem. Other countries such as Austria, Germany—famously—and the Netherlands had the same social problems and challenges, but managed to have fewer people ending up in unemployment, but even in the boom years we had high numbers of people in unemployment.

When I sat on the Children, Schools and Families Committee in the last Parliament, I used to challenge Ministers and ask them what counted as educational success. Was it the PISA—programme for international student assessment—tables, for example? One crude proxy would have to be ensuring that the educational system did not leave anyone completely behind, trapped in poverty for life and without a job. That is exactly what we had. It is so important for whoever is in government after next May that we get this right.

It is a priority to work out how to improve the offer made to the hundreds of thousands of young people who take vocational courses and enter the workplace every year. As I say, if anything, they face greater complexity than those who take academic courses. The Government inherited a remarkable 3,175 equivalent qualifications on offer in schools for 14 to 16-year-olds alone. As Alison Wolf reported, some of them were not worth the paper they were written on, so it was right to change that.

[Nic Dakin (Scunthorpe) (Lab)]

Does the Chairman of the Select Committee recognise, however, as Alison Wolf did, that the most widely used qualifications, such as BTEC first and BTEC national, were valuable and necessary to the overall panoply?

[Mr Stuart]

I pay tribute to the hon. Gentleman, whose expertise and interest in this issue is of long standing and dates from long before he came to this House. He is, of course, right in what he says, but in too many cases, institutions were putting young people on courses that they may or may not have known were of limited value, but that were in fact of little or no long-term value, because it suited the interest of the institution, rather than the interest of the young people. That is why it was right to look carefully at that problem.

When Professor Wolf published her review, she warned:

“The staple offer for between a quarter and a third of the post-16 cohort is a diet of low-level vocational qualifications, most of which have little to no labour market value…Among 16 to 19 year olds, the Review estimates that at least 350,000 get little or no benefit from the post-16 education system.”

That was a pretty terrible inheritance, with more than a third of a million people being educated at great public expense, with no benefit to themselves or the country as a whole. Both literally and metaphorically, Britain cannot afford to continue to fail young people in that way, and it is to the Minister’s credit that a considerable amount of work has been done, including the commissioning of the Wolf report.

Almost 100 university technical colleges and studio schools have been established. I hope there will be a Humber UTC in the not-too-distant future, and I know that the hon. Member for Scunthorpe (Nic Dakin) is working hard, championing it. I hope there will be involvement from companies such as Able UK, Total, Centrica Storage, Tata Steel and Clugston.

The Government have published a new 16-to-19 accountability framework, the headline measures of which focus on pupil progress, attainment, retention and destinations. Elsewhere, as others have commented, the apprenticeships programme has had rocket boosters put under it. It has been lengthened, and there have been improvements to quality.

Returning to the question about the number of apprenticeships raised by the shadow Secretary of State, if there are fewer 16-to-18 apprenticeships, more of them are a year long or longer; a year is now the minimum length. Overall, I do not know—I hope our inquiry will find out—whether the package for 16 to 18-year-olds is better than it was, in respect of quality and long-term impact. Whatever happens, we need to keep wrestling with the question—that is why my Select Committee will look further into it—of how to get more people in the young age group on to high-quality apprenticeships, particularly in view of concerns raised about the way in which some employers were training people who were already in their employ. Morrisons was criticised for some pretty short-term apprenticeships in supermarket skills that were unlikely to have been income-transformative—a point I raised earlier.

I am mindful of the time, so I shall try to conclude. I hope that we will keep focusing on vocational qualifications. It is the route that most people in this country follow. It is therefore the route that this House should focus on. Notwithstanding the excellent personal experience of the hon. Member for Huddersfield (Mr Sheerman), the truth is that Members of all parties have little personal experience of the further education sector and associated sectors. That is all the more reason why we need to focus on them, read about them, conduct inquiries into them and make them better. Our problem as a nation has not been the way in which we have educated the academic elite; it has been the fact that we have failed to make decent provision for a decent education, whether academic or vocational, that gives people an entitlement to the riches of our civilisation and access to the jobs market. Whoever is in power after next May, I hope this House will remain focused and determined to serve the part of the population that has most often been let down historically.

[Several hon. Members]

rose—

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[Simon Wright (Norwich South) (LD)]

Everyone deserves the opportunity to get on in life and reach their full potential. A strong system of vocational education equips young people with the skills they need to succeed and is a crucial aspect of building a stronger economy and a fairer society. The renewed focus on apprenticeships over recent years is warmly welcomed by almost everyone. They provide real opportunities for young people to get a job in a vocation of their choice, providing the skills they need for a fulfilling career.

Employers value apprenticeships enormously, as they provide the skills needed for growth and increased workplace productivity. With the greatest expansion of apprenticeships since the 1950s during this Parliament, I am pleased that the Government are continuing to aim high by setting a target of 2 million by 2015. Importantly, employers have a growing voice, which means that the apprenticeships on offer are increasingly of world-class quality, providing young people with the skills that employers are looking for and providing the country with the work force we need to build our economic future.

Of course, not all young learners are apprentices. Many young people take part in vocational education exclusively through college provision. There has been extensive debate about the need to promote excellent teaching in our schools, and we also need to ensure that learners in vocational education are supported by great teachers. Achieving that is challenging, because vocational teachers must not only have strong pedagogical skills, but be fully up to date with practices in their vocational area.

Last year’s report by the commission on adult vocational teaching and learning highlighted the value of industry experts getting involved in vocational teaching and curriculum development. Since then, the Education and Training Foundation has commissioned the development of a Teach Too initiative, which will bring industry experts and those involved in vocational teaching and training closer together. It will help to gain a better understanding of current practice and build on it to lead towards a national framework for Teach Too. I encourage Ministers to see what can be learned from the initiative as it progresses. I also encourage Ministers to consider what more can be done to encourage industry secondments to FE colleges, which offer a low-risk means for colleges and employers to engage industry professionals in teaching and learning. The Education and Training Foundation might be well placed to conduct work in that area too.

One area of Government policy that has seen industry and education partnerships blossom is the university technical college programme. I am delighted that this September Norfolk UTC will be opening in my constituency. It will specialise in the skills needed for the energy and high-value manufacturing sectors, both of which are important drivers of growth in the East Anglian economy. Employers are involved in shaping the curriculum so that courses meet the needs of local industries and provide routes for young people to go on to employment, training or university. Places at Norfolk UTC are in high demand, and I hope that in due course the UTC programme can be further expanded at a sustainable pace.

I would like to point to a further challenge: how we can best ensure that young people are fully aware of their options from school. It is meaningless to create education and career paths if young people do not know about them and do not have the support they need to access them. Ofsted has highlighted that too many young people are left to wade through the frequently confusing array of options available to them with no real idea of what skills they need or the path most suitable for them.

[Mr Stuart]

Does the hon. Gentleman agree that we need many more employers to go into schools and help embed careers in the curriculum, perhaps by helping with science practicals in sixth form? There are all sorts of ways that employers can embed careers in the curriculum by getting involved in teaching.

[Simon Wright]

I agree 100%. At the moment, too few schools value vocational qualifications or the needs of the 60% who do not go to university, and we do not start learning about careers in school at a young enough age. At the same time, there is a perception gap among industry, education providers and learners about employment markets.

I welcome the strengthened statutory careers guidance for schools announced earlier this year and the proposal for a UCAS-style system to provide a single route for 16-year-olds. We need to consider how we can further strengthen the role of Ofsted and how school destination measures will fully support vocational and technical education routes being treated with equal esteem as academic education.

Finally, I want to emphasise the contribution of city deals and local growth deals, supported by local enterprise partnerships and local employers, who know better than Whitehall what skills their area needs. In Norfolk and Suffolk, a LEP-wide skills programme will maximise employer involvement and investment and increase apprenticeships and graduate internships, as specified in the region’s city deal, which was confirmed last year. This week the New Anglia local growth deal confirmed that colleges in the region, including Easton college, which is just outside my constituency, will benefit from additional investment, enabling the building of a new construction training centre and new agri-tech laboratory areas to accommodate employers’ needs.

A transformation in vocational education is under way, and we need to be undeterred in our determination to continue the progress that has been made. The quality and status of vocational qualifications has improved; the number and standard of apprenticeships has increased considerably; and employers, professional bodies and providers are working to ensure that training reflects our future skill needs. Most importantly, the foundations for a stronger economy are being laid while giving every young person the opportunity to gain the skills they need to get on in life.