Adult Learning and Vocational Skills: Metropolitan Borough of Dudley

Lord Austin of Dudley Excerpts

Tuesday 1st October 2019 Westminster Hall

[Ian Austin (Dudley North) (Ind)]

It is a pleasure to speak in this debate under your chairmanship, Mrs Moon. Before I begin, may I pay a big tribute to my hon. Friend the Member for Stourbridge (Margot James) and thank her for securing this important debate? She is a brilliant local MP and an asset to our borough and to her party. She has worked tirelessly to improve education for school pupils, young people and adults in Stourbridge, encouraging young people to aspire to study at top-level universities and supporting Stourbridge College, Old Swinford Hospital, King Edward VI College, and all the other local schools. It is therefore a great shame that, despite all her hard work and support for education in Stourbridge, the college has found itself in this position, but I know that she is working hard to try to address the situation and ensure that educational provision continues on the Hagley Road site.

My hon. Friend was right that the number of 16 to 19-year-olds in Dudley and the Black Country is increasing and that low levels of skills both among people who are out of work and among the working-age population is a long-term issue—the legacy of a traditional industrial economy. However, it is important to note that Dudley is the biggest place in the country with no higher education provision, so further education plays an important role in filling that gap and ensuring that people can get degree-level qualifications through further education—apprenticeships in particular—so that those working in local businesses can get the skills they need.

I will talk mainly about what is happening in the north of the borough and in Dudley itself. When I was first elected in 2005, Dudley College was failing and struggling to attract staff and students, with unsatisfactory results and a decrepit set of old buildings spread around the town that it had inherited from various schools or the University of Wolverhampton. Thanks to the brilliant leadership of Lowell Williams, who is now the college’s chief executive but who used to be the principal, and the new principal Neil Thomas, we now have officially the best college in the country—the first to be awarded outstanding status under the new Ofsted inspection regime. It has achieved record results, has more students than ever before, provides among the highest number of apprenticeships in the country, and has a brilliant, brand-new town centre campus. Right at the outset, therefore, I pay tribute to Lowell Williams and his team. They have done more than anybody else to transform opportunities for young people in Dudley, and to transform and regenerate the town centre. They have made a huge difference in Dudley. I was absolutely delighted when his work at the college and his contribution to further education in the wider west midlands were recognised last year by his being awarded The Times Educational Supplement further education leader of the year.

It is important to understand the context in which we are discussing education in the Black Country. Fifty years ago, Black Country manufacturing made the west midlands the UK’s richest region. Output in the west midlands outstripped even that in London and the south-east. Then came the huge loss of manufacturing in the 1970s and ’80s, and we faced a 40-year struggle to replace jobs lost in recessions or due to technological change or to competition from lower-wage economies abroad. As a result, output in the west midlands lagged behind that in the rest of the country for 35 years, during which we fell further behind. In the 1970s, manufacturing provided half the region’s jobs; the figure today is nowhere near that number. Instead, a high proportion of jobs are in low-productivity and slow-growth industries. We have had a higher proportion of public sector jobs and a smaller proportion in business, financial services and high-tech industries.

There are lots of brilliant industries and there has been major investment at companies such as Jaguar Land Rover, but I think everybody would accept that we have struggled to attract new investment and new industries to replace the jobs we have lost. As a result, unemployment has been a stubborn problem. Long-term youth unemployment is still twice the national average.

It is the need to respond to those big economic changes that has driven the transformation of education in Dudley. Over the next 20 years, there will be huge growth and millions of well-paid jobs in high-tech industries such as advanced manufacturing and engineering, technical testing, low-carbon industries and construction, digital media, biotech, healthcare technologies and the rest. This is literally a new industrial revolution. At the same time, there will be far fewer jobs for people with limited skills or no qualifications at all, and many of what we think are regular jobs for life will disappear.

We believe that young people in Dudley are as good as anyone, that they deserve the same chances as young people elsewhere in the country, and that with the right support and the best facilities they can do just as well as anyone else. We also believe that we have to make education and skills our No. 1 priority, to attract new industries and well-paid jobs to replace those we have lost in traditional industries, to help local business grow, to give youngsters a first-class start, and to help adults get new jobs as well.

Driven by that vision and those beliefs, Dudley College has increased the number of 16 to 19-year-olds in education by almost 2,000 learners—from 3,000 in 2008, to 4,900 by 2019. It has become one of the largest providers of apprenticeships nationally, increasing the number of apprentices from 600 in 2008, to an amazing 3,853 by 2015. These are high-quality apprenticeships, with 51% of all apprentices in programmes related to science, technology, engineering and maths, and 44% of all full-time learners in STEM-related subjects. Despite cuts to the adult education budget, the college maintained its adult provision, supporting more than 3,000 learners a year to retrain.

The college has invested—this is amazing—£60 million in a new campus, which has transformed the town centre. We now have a new academic sixth-form centre, a new building for creative arts and service industries, centres for advanced manufacturing, engineering and advanced building technologies, new specialist facilities for students with special needs, and a construction apprenticeship training centre. Almost all of those have been developed without any Government support, by selling off old land and buildings and, while maintaining a strong financial position, by borrowing resources from the banks.

I would like the Minister to come to Dudley to have a look at all that, because I think she will be amazed when she sees it. Everybody thinks, “Oh, I’m just going to go to another FE college,” but that is not the case in Dudley. Lots of FE colleges say that they do manufacturing and construction, but they do not do it like we do it. It is absolutely amazing. The phenomenal advanced manufacturing and engineering centre is working with hundreds of local employers.

Although the Black Country has a higher proportion of SMEs and manufacturing than anywhere else in western Europe, those small businesses cannot afford research centres. If a business is worried about how it will meet the payroll a week on Friday, it will not be able to develop links with universities, or think about big apprenticeship programmes, or new products and processes. That is the gap that Dudley College of Technology is filling. It is an amazing centre of advanced manufacturing. The state-of-the-art, high-tech construction centre is doing ground-breaking work on digital construction, using artificial intelligence, drone technology, and working on how to design and manufacture buildings in factories instead of on site—extraordinary work. It is the only college of its kind in the country to be doing that sort of work, and that facility was developed in partnership with leading construction companies in the country.

We are now moving to the development of new university-level technical skills and an apprenticeship centre, which will provide even higher level qualifications in Dudley. As I have said, Dudley is the biggest place in the country with no university campus, although we did successfully secure funding to open one of the country’s 12 institutes of technology. Last month, the Government announced that we will get £25 million from the stronger towns fund, which will be spent on the next phase of that campus, University Centre Dudley. That will transform an old rail terminal just outside the town centre. It has been an old rail terminal and a derelict site for as long as I have been alive, but it will finally be transformed. It will be developed by Dudley colleges, Dudley College of Technology, universities and local businesses, and they will train young people for jobs in new, growing and high-tech industries such as advanced manufacturing, digital technologies, low-carbon industries, autonomous electric vehicles, and health care.

The money from the Institute of Technology and the stronger towns fund is the best news that Dudley could have had. I have been saying for 14 years that we must make education and skills Dudley’s No.1 priority, and at the election I promised to campaign for that new high-tech skills centre. I am delighted that our campaign has paid off, and it is exactly what we need to give Dudley a bright future and make it a stronger town again.

The college has also established the Dudley Academies Trust, which is sponsoring four schools in Dudley. It has only been going for a year, but it is already possible to see improvements in aspiration, discipline, standards and results. The Minister will not be surprised to hear that all secondary schools in Dudley are finding that funding for special educational needs is inadequate to meet people’s needs, and all schools are under pressure in Dudley, as they are across the country—it is important to note that point in a debate such as this.

Ladder for the Black Country is an extraordinary local project, and over the past five years, thousands of people across the region have landed jobs or improved skills thanks to that scheme. It brings businesses and training providers together to take on young people and invest in their future. Young people gain the hands-on work experience that they need to start their careers, and businesses get a highly trained, well-motivated workforce, helping to breach the skills gap that many firms say holds them back. In recent years, thousands of people have landed jobs thanks to that scheme. It was launched in 2014, and was so successful in the Black Country that it was expanded to Staffordshire and Shropshire, and copied by communities across the country. It is backed by local authorities, businesses and training providers, and I pay particular tribute to the driving force behind it, Kevin Davis, chief executive of the Vine Trust Group, and to the Express & Star, whose support has been critical to the scheme’s success.

What Kevin Davis, together with Martin Wright, editor of the Express & Star, and his predecessors and colleagues have achieved is remarkable, and their work will make a huge difference to the lives and prospects of thousands of local people. We should imagine how much better off Britain would be if every local paper and the voluntary sector worked together to do that sort of important work in every community. It is a great example of how, over the past 15 years, we have brought together schools, colleges, local universities, local authorities, employers, training providers, the region’s media and the community as a whole to make educational skills our No. 1 priority so that we can attract new investment, new industries and well-paid jobs to replace the ones that we have lost in the Black Country, help local businesses to grow, give youngsters a first-class start and help adults to get new jobs, too.