Adult Learning

Kelvin Hopkins Excerpts

Wednesday 3rd September 2014 Westminster Hall

[Kelvin Hopkins (Luton North) (Lab)]

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Robertson, as it was to hear the excellent speech of my hon. Friend the Member for Hackney South and Shoreditch (Meg Hillier), and all the speeches that have been made. All the hon. Members who have spoken made positive and useful comments and I hope that the Minister will pay attention to them.

The focus so far has been on employment-related learning, but the title of the debate is adult learning, which I think goes beyond that. I had experience of teaching in further education in the 1970s and I know the sheer joy of adults coming back to study—particularly at evening classes—subjects that perhaps they did not have a chance to do at school. They might not have had any academic qualifications, but their eyes would be opened and they would see life with more possibilities because of what they studied at evening class.

In those days, certainly in Luton, we had better provision than now. The colleges and schools in Luton are excellent, but in those days we had a technical college with a language laboratory where people could learn a variety of languages, including even Swedish. We had a further education college with all sorts of engineering courses that people could do for fun, as well as those related to work. There was a range of subjects.

I saw friends transformed by the experience of going to an evening class for a modest fee. They would sign up, having had no real academic experience, and would come out with an A-level. A friend of mine did A-level government and politics and got a grade B, and her life was transformed. She was a single parent and could not afford expensive education, but she did an evening class. Subsequently—it was not directly related—she became, and eventually retired as, a lecturer in further education. That resulted from the leap forward she made by doing an A-level.

[Mr Gregory Campbell (East Londonderry) (DUP)]

As to the transformational effect that adult learning can have, does the hon. Gentleman agree that for many people, particularly in deprived communities on large working-class estates, such opportunities open doors? If they do not get that opportunity, the door is closed for a generation, because in many cases the fathers and grandparents of those people were also unemployed.

[Kelvin Hopkins]

That is a valid point. During my time teaching in further education in the 1970s I not only took evening classes but taught day-release students for what was called liberal studies. That is nothing to do with Liberalism with a capital L, of course. I saw young people whose view of the world might be very narrow suddenly opening up to the possibilities. They started to understand politics, believe it or not, and a range of other subjects that I used to talk about in those classes. The experience was enhancing and enriching for them. It made their lives different. They went away thinking, “I have had my eyes opened to new possibilities in life that I never thought I would have.”

Initially, sometimes, there was a bit of hostility, because of resentment at “these clever people coming and talking about subjects I know nothing about”; it took time. I had one experience of a class that insisted at the end of term on dragging me to the pub to buy me a pint, because they enjoyed their time with me so much. I think that was the biggest compliment I was paid. Working-class young men, who were particularly alienated from education, were changed by having a bit of a good experience, and I am glad I made a contribution.

I was for 10 years co-chair of the all-party group on further education, skills and lifelong learning. I emphasise the term “lifelong learning”, which is not just about getting on a course to get a job; it is about one’s whole life. One can go on studying all one’s life—most of us do, in one way or another—but some people need the opportunity to have people who know things talking to them in a friendly way at an evening or day-release class, to open their eyes to the possibilities of the world.

I had those experiences, but something really disappoints me now. Luton has a wonderful sixth-form college, of which I have been a governor for 21 years. I am now the vice-chair of governors, and the college has a brand-new building and superb teachers, but it is unable to put on evening classes because funding for adult education in sixth-form colleges has been cut and it receives statutory funding for 18-year-olds and below only.

The teachers want to teach adults, and adults want to be taught by them. The fabulous building is unused and empty in the evenings, but it should and could be used for education in this conurbation of perhaps a third of a million people. If someone wants to study a European language, for example, they cannot do that in-class in Luton anymore. The possibilities exist, but such areas need specific funding. We cannot just say to sixth-form colleges, “Get on with it. Put on an evening class if you want, but you’ll get no more money.” It would not happen, because teachers need to be paid and perhaps more teachers would be required.

From my experience, teachers enjoy the variety of teaching adults as well as youngsters. Adults often have a positive effect on classes, because—I am trying to be polite about young people—they are more likely to behave themselves and to be positive about education. They can also actually have a maturing effect on younger students, so mixed classes can be a good thing. We are preventing potentially millions of people from studying things that they would like to learn simply because we will not fund non-statutory adult learning.

I hope that when the Labour party forms a Government in a few months’ time, they will hear this message and start to rebuild the kind of evening classes that we used to have when I taught in the 1970s. I hope that millions more people will be able to study not only for work, but also to enrich their lives and to enjoy the simple pleasure of knowing things.

[John Robertson (in the Chair)]

Before I call the Front-Bench spokesmen, I want to thank all speakers for sticking to the time limit.

[Mr Liam Byrne (Birmingham, Hodge Hill) (Lab)]

It is a privilege to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Robertson. I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Hackney South and Shoreditch (Meg Hillier) on securing the debate. She has always been a fighter for her constituency and for Hackney college, and she reminded us this afternoon of why we need to spend more time debating this subject, for which we are grateful.

I want to draw out a couple of remarks from today’s debate and to sharpen the points of some of the questions that my colleagues have asked the Minister, but I will start by discussing the skills crisis that so many businesses up and down the country are now confronting. Report after report has been put before us over the past two or three years, all basically saying the same thing: there is a skills crisis in Britain that is holding back growth, destroying productivity and keeping people trapped in the cost of living crisis that has bedevilled this Parliament. KPMG reports that a third of manufacturers would like to reshore work back to this country, but cannot do so due to a lack of skills. The Migration Advisory Committee, which was set up when my hon. Friend and I were at the Home Office, has now added 100 different roles to the shortage occupation list. As a result, under this Government, we have imported 282,000 workers because their skills could not be found at home. In a recent report, Mike Wright, the chief executive of Jaguar Land Rover, said:

“We must double the number of engineering apprentices qualifying at advanced level…by 2020.”

Lord Adonis has said that skills are

“the single biggest impediment to economic growth.”

Report after report says the same thing: we have a skills crisis in Britain that is holding the country back.

The impact on productivity in this country has been devastating. We used to have a phrase for that in public debate—the British disease. A crisis of productivity means that we do not produce as much in this country as the rest of the world produces. Today, the productivity gap is 21% against the G7, meaning that what the rest of the G7 finishes producing on a Thursday night takes us until the end of Friday to complete. There will be no escape from an economy of low wages unless we increase productivity. As the Royal Society puts it:

“Unless we get smarter, we will get poorer.”

As we have heard this afternoon, the problem is not just one of productivity, but one of poverty. Before the summer, we published a big report in Birmingham about child poverty, which has led to a 40% spike in the number of children presenting in A and E units having tried to take their own lives. The majority of children in poverty in Birmingham are in families where people are working. How do we raise family living standards in a great city such as Birmingham? There is only one way: raising productivity and therefore raising skill levels. We have heard this afternoon about a £958 million cut in the adult skills budget. Overall, taking into account other cuts in capital, but also the injection of money in from 24-plus loans, nearly £900 million has been taken out of adult skills over this Parliament. The impact is that fewer adults are enrolling in skills courses.

[Kelvin Hopkins]

My right hon. Friend is making an excellent speech about the importance and lack of skills and opportunities. The reality is that we are still importing some 15,000 graduate engineers every year to work in an industry that even now is too small. Manufacturing in this country is half the size as a proportion of GDP than that of Germany, and yet we still cannot find enough engineers from among our own people. Something is wrong and I hope he addresses it.

[Mr Byrne]

I certainly will.

Money is tight, and I noticed that the former Member for Clacton—I am not sure whether he is still the Minister’s hon. Friend—wrote on his blog earlier this week that public sector net debt has increased and is now £400 billion higher than the debt that the Labour Government left. He said that this Government have now put on more debt in five years than the Labour Government did in 13 years.

We all know that money is tight, but there are three things which the Government could turn their mind to quickly. The first thing must be integration with the Department for Work and Pensions, which means bringing together ESOL budgets in a completely new way. As my hon. Friend the Member for Birmingham, Perry Barr (Mr Mahmood) made clear, the Skills Funding Agency has taken away well over £1 million in ESOL provision that the DWP has had to put back in. It is heartbreaking for us to meet mums who are desperate to go back to work but do not have a strong enough grasp of English. They want to do well by their families, but they cannot. Proposals from Lord Heseltine and Lord Adonis radically to devolve skills funding are on the table and would allow us to put together the Work programme and skills budgets in a new way, so that we can skill people up to do the jobs that are available. I represent a constituency a mile away from the expanding Jaguar Land Rover plant in Castle Bromwich, but it has the highest youth unemployment in the country, which is prima facie evidence that the skills system is not working. We should listen to Lord Heseltine and Lord Adonis and think radically about how to devolve skills funding so that the DWP and skills budgets can be joined up in a new way.

The second point, as made eloquently in a forensic speech by my hon. Friend the Member for North West Durham (Pat Glass), and underlined by my hon. Friend the Member for Birmingham, Perry Barr, is that we must raise our game on skills and radically increase the number of higher apprenticeships. If we want to tilt our economy decisively towards those high-value engineering and science-based industries that are the key to the bigger-knowledge economy, we must increase the number of higher apprenticeships. Just 2% of apprentices go on to study higher level skills, which is appalling and needs to increase. Across the country, however, there is a profound lack of clarity about how the Government’s new proposed money will actually be distributed. That lack of clarity is unacceptable and the Minister will want to work that out quickly.

There is wide support to increase employer ownership of skills as one way of increasing the number of apprenticeships and higher level apprenticeships, but in an economy in which small and medium-sized enterprises are creating jobs three or four times faster than big business, the new funding system must work for SMEs. All over Britain, SMEs are saying that putting in all the money through the tax system will not work. That decision is in the Minister’s red box and I hope he will be able to tell us whether he is planning to go wholesale and introduce the plan in the autumn, as originally proposed, or whether to listen to the voices of 4 million or 5 million small businesses across the country that are asking him to think again.

The third thing that the Minister was left with by his predecessors, as underlined by my hon. Friends the Members for Scunthorpe (Nic Dakin) and for Stretford and Urmston (Kate Green), is the strategic problem with adult skills. Big cuts to further education, a very marketised higher education system and a huge explosion in the private sector college system have unleashed a series of competitive pressures in the further and higher education system. As a result, system collaboration is incredibly difficult. That problem is compounded by a broken bridge between funding for 18-year-olds and funding for those over the age of 24.

My hon. Friend the Member for Scunthorpe underlined the appalling impact of big cuts in further education funding for those at 18, but between the ages of 18 and 24 there is only 50% funding towards tuition costs and 0% access to the Student Loans Company. That means a broken bridge between the funding system that works up to the age of 18 and the one that then kicks in at the age of 24. There is no clear escalator through the skills system. Some funding for level 4 and above is offered by the Skills Funding Agency, but only for a higher apprenticeship. The problem is that, out of 200 apprenticeship frameworks, only 14 go up to level 4. Furthermore, people need a degree to understand the system. Why is that a problem? It is a problem because, as the OECD cited in its seminal report on skills in England back in 2013:

“the weak articulation between level 4 and 6 programmes and university bachelor programmes is a serious problem”.

There is a broken bridge, and a radical rethink is needed.

On behalf of the Labour party, the shadow Secretary of State for Education, my hon. Friend the Member for Stoke-on-Trent Central (Tristram Hunt), and I have set out a different approach—a “gold standard” route for vocational education, so that we begin to reform the school system, the further education system and the university system. We believe that everyone should be doing some vocational education from the age of 14. We believe that there should be a new gold-standard technical baccalaureate with compulsory English and maths up to the age of 18. We believe that the priority for expanding the higher education system should be the creation of technical degrees, so that people can study while they are still working. We floated the idea over the summer that a new institutional partnership between further education colleges and universities is needed, along the lines of the American community college programme.

Those new technical universities should have partnerships with universities with world-class engineering and science facilities, perhaps as part of new university enterprise zones up and down the country. That could be one of the ways in which we make the decisive shift that was explained by my hon. Friend the Member for North West Durham. We have got to rebalance our economy, and rebalancing our skills system has got to be part of it.

We have had an impassioned debate. Particularly welcome was the emphasis of my hon. Friends the Members for Luton North (Kelvin Hopkins) and for Sheffield Central (Paul Blomfield) not only on the sheer economic importance of further and higher education and of adult learning, but on the life-changing power of such investment. This country faces a productivity crisis and a poverty crisis, so we must leave the Chamber hearing the note sounded by my hon. Friend the Member for Hackney South and Shoreditch sounded—she said that there is poverty, but no poverty of ambition—as well as leaving with a determination to do something about it.

The Minister is a thinking member of his party and has a track record of thinking through complicated issues. He is someone with a conscience and he cares profoundly about increasing social mobility in this country. He is blessed by simply having been appointed, with that great mind of his, to one of the most fantastic jobs in the Government. We look forward to his brief and his work with a heightened sense of anticipation. We also look forward to what he has to say to us this afternoon.