Adult and Further Education

Lia Nici Excerpts

Wednesday 5th July 2023 Commons Chamber

[John McDonnell]

I do not want to keep quoting the right hon. Member for Bexleyheath and Crayford, because it becomes embarrassing after a bit, but that was exactly his point, and I think my hon. Friend the Member for Stretford and Urmston said this, too. Without those staff, colleges will simply withdraw the course because they cannot get the qualified staff. That relates to investment, as well as to pay. One point that has been raised with me in my discussions with educators is that this also relates to the conditions of employment and to its precarious nature. If investment is not guaranteed for those courses, we get into a situation where some staff are on temporary contracts, and that cannot be right for the sector. We are dealing with people who have spent large parts of their lives gaining the qualifications that enable them to pass on that education to others.

[Lia Nici (Great Grimsby) (Con)]

Does the right hon. Member not agree that the reason that people may make other choices, including, perhaps to go back into industry, is that we have a shortage of skilled people to go into those jobs, and that employers are paying a lot more than they used to to secure these kinds of people?

[John McDonnell]

That is a really good point, and I think that is right: we have to pay the going rate. At the moment, the going rate is not being paid in colleges, because the colleges do not have the funding that they need to do that. We will be caught in that vicious circle unless we ensure that there is adequate, decent pay within the sector.

Apprenticeships have been mentioned. In real terms, the figures for 2021-22 show that the level of apprenticeship funding was 11% below the peak in 2009-2010.

I cannot be on my feet without mentioning university funding, I am afraid, because it is one of the things that I have been lobbied on extensively. To be frank, the state has all but withdrawn from funding university education. Government funding for university teaching is now 70% below what it was a decade ago, and if we compare our spending on tertiary education with other advanced countries, we see that we are now bottom of the league. It is shocking: we put in less public investment than every single one of the other 38 OECD countries. To cite some figures, Government spending on tertiary education in the UK is equivalent to just 0.5% of GDP. In France, that figure is 1.1%; in Germany, it is just over 1%; and in the US, it is 0.9%. The average across the G20 countries is 0.9%. We are falling behind in this key sector because of that lack of investment.

I want to make another point that has been made to me continuously: the one area of funding in UK higher education that does not seem to have dried up is the pay of university vice-chancellors. Every single vice-chancellor of a Russell Group university is paid more than the Prime Minister. In 2021-22, the vice-chancellor of Imperial College London received £714,000. That cannot be right, and it builds resentment when we have low pay and a casualised workforce elsewhere—to be frank, that differentiation is just abusive. At the moment, we are in a dispute in London regarding the low pay of security guards and other facility staff at universities, simply to get them paid a living wage. That cannot be right.

There are other issues I would raise, but I do not want to delay the House. We have had an excellent debate today about the future of our economy and the skills that we need, but to achieve those skills, we need investment in the education itself. We have heard about capital investment, and I am pleased by some of the additional investment, despite the huge backlog. However, if we are going to deliver on that aim, the key ingredient is the staff. Unless we get the investment to ensure that we recruit the appropriate staff with the right qualifications—and not just recruit them, but retain them—we will not achieve what we want to achieve in terms of developing a 21st-century economy, particularly with the challenges of artificial intelligence, new technology, and everything involved in the fourth industrial revolution.

I say to the Minister that whatever support he needs in those negotiations with the Treasury, he has got it on a cross-party basis. Let us make this one of the key issues for the autumn statement and next year’s Budget. If there is anything we can do to help him, either publicly or privately, please let us know.

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[Lia Nici (Great Grimsby) (Con)]

I have worked in the further education sector for 22 years—I hear the Minister’s inner voice saying, “No! Surely that means my hon. Friend started teaching in FE when she was still at primary school,” but unfortunately that is not the case—so I have a lot of experience of the absolutely glorious things that further education can do, but I have also seen it warts and all.

People seem to forget that the further education sector, alongside schools, interacts with more members of the public than any other sector. Adult education, community education, 16 to 19, apprenticeships and higher education are all provided for within the further education sector. Even when I was learning to be a lecturer and doing teacher training all those years ago, the sector was called the Cinderella sector. It has always been acknowledged that it has done a lot of the heavy lifting from an educational perspective, but it has rarely been given the same funding as schools and, in particular, universities. The university sector does a wonderful job, but a university lecturer will generally deliver about half as many hours of actual contact time in a year as a further education lecturer.

The teams do a fantastic and very varied job, but I have heard a lot about how we need more funding, and of course every sector will always ask for more funding. I am pleased the Department for Education is increasing funding into all the sectors mentioned, but we do have a particular issue, as many Members of the House have said, about how much salary we are able to pay people coming into teaching, or taking part in teaching, and to technicians, assistants or whatever it might be in the further education sector. We might want to attract engineering lecturers, for instance, but someone would have to be crazy, or have a private income that meant they could just work as a hobby, to even look at doing an engineering teaching job if it did not start at £55,000 a year at least. That is because they could go and work anywhere else and start at that salary or a lot more.

That is a perennial problem in the industry, and I would like the Government to look at it. I understand that the issue really is challenging in the current climate, but if we do not start to look at it, we will end up with an ever-increasing problem. We already have skills shortages, ergo, in five, 10, 15 or 20 years’ time, not only will even fewer people want to go into further education but even fewer will have the skills and industry experience to do so. As a country, we really have to take this issue seriously in order to see where we are going.

[Mr Robin Walker]

My hon. Friend is making an excellent speech, as I knew she would given her experience in the sector. We see this particular challenge in engineering, maths and physics. Does she agree that the Prime Minister’s aspiration of getting everyone doing maths until 18 is exciting in that context, but that it requires supporting the workforce in our FE colleges to deliver it? We need that breadth of teaching of mathematics, alongside other key skills.

[Lia Nici]

I thank my hon. Friend for his expertise, and he is absolutely right. However, many students when I was teaching struggled with their maths GCSE. They struggled with their basic skills and functional skills in numeracy. There was still a fairy tale, seemingly, that if someone had studied mathematics for 11 years in school and failed their GCSE, magically the further education sector—everybody seems to think it can do everything magically and often it does—in less than one year can produce a grade C or above, or a grade 4 or 5 and above, as the grades are now. There was this idea that someone who had failed at maths, hated maths and was scared about it could study for nine months part-time—maybe for one hour a week—in their college and would suddenly and magically have a maths GCSE. That is not the reality.

When I was head of department, all the mathematics we used to teach was applied, and further education has still not been able to do that across the board. That is often because we cannot find people who can teach maths confidently. Certainly we find it difficult to find people who can teach functional skills, numeracy or maths that is applied to the industry for which the students are coming to study. We have some real problems. For instance, I taught a group of level 2 media students once. I said to them, “I am giving you a tape measure, and I want you to go into the studio. We are going to calculate the square meterage of the studio so that we can do a lighting plan.” The students went off and within a minute they came back. They said, “Lia, we are having a problem here.” I said, “Why?” They said, “Because the tape measure is not long enough.” Think about that for a moment. Those students did not think that perhaps they had to measure it multiple times with one tape measure. Those are the basic skills we are talking about. I had to go into the studio and talk about it. That is the level we are at.

Schools are struggling to recruit maths teachers. I love the aspiration that everyone can be better at maths through to 18, but I always have the analogy of saying, “If you do not feel you are good at maths, equate that to something that you really don’t like”, because a lot of people have a fear of maths, or have been told over years, “You are not good enough at it”, so it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. I say to people, “Do you like horses?” They say, “No, I’m scared of horses.” I say, “Okay, so you’re scared of horses and horse-riding. You’ve never wanted to do it, or when you’ve tried it, you’ve hated it, or you’ve fallen off or you’ve never dared to get on. Tomorrow, I will make you go to a horse and get on it. You are going to have to ride it for an hour every week for nine months, but boy, you will be an Olympic showjumper by the end of it.” We need to think about how we will do these things, because we know as a country that we are a potential powerhouse in so many areas, but we have to think with common sense about how we will overcome some of the difficulties that we have.

[Mrs Drummond]

My hon. Friend is making an excellent point, because Britain is an outlier in not doing maths to 18. Other countries must be able to do it, so we should look around the world to see how they are achieving it. We need to go from primary school straight up to the age of 18 and work out a proper syllabus that everyone can access.

[Lia Nici]

My hon. Friend is absolutely right. As we have been able to do with phonics and literacy-based subjects, where we have moved ahead quickly, we need that thinking from primary school age and all the way up. As wonderful as further education is—I know that it is—it cannot repair all the structural issues to do with maths within that year or two years of study. We all want that to happen, but we have got to think sensibly about how it will happen, because people who are Prime Minister and have been Chancellor find maths very easy, but perhaps the rest of us do not.

From a further education perspective, Grimsby Institute, where I worked for many years, is a fantastic college that works really hard with industry. It was a grade 1 “outstanding” college for many years and is currently grade 2. I know how hard the staff work and thank Ann Hardy, the chief executive officer, and her team for looking at new ways of doing things and innovating.

I also thank Peter Kennedy and his team at Franklin College, which is our sixth-form college. The week before last, I went to see “The Bridge”, a new facility that it has opened to recreate corporate ways of working so that its 16 to 19-year-olds and adult learners—and its staff—can work in a corporate, modern environment, preparing them for work. Franklin College has done all its renovations and new build without grant help; it has done that with really good financial management. That is really worth celebrating and shows how outstanding leadership and management can do great things in the community.

I say to the Minister that we know how fantastic further education is, and he knows that, but it cannot do everything, so we need to start thinking about how we can do things more creatively and more flexibly. As my hon. Friend the Member for Sedgefield (Paul Howell) mentioned, we know that many colleges go out and deliver in the community. Many years ago, Grimsby Institute worked on blended learning, making sure that there was online provision and that it was going out in the community. We need to think differently in the environment we find ourselves in, with more vacancies than people available for the work, skills mismatches and a lack of skills in areas that we need to move forward.

Absolutely, apprenticeships can be the answer, but, with respect, they may be a little too complicated at the moment, and standards can often restrain our ambition. We know that we need standards, but my concern is that while large companies can become involved with apprenticeships, what about our sole traders and small and medium-sized enterprises? They really are the lifeblood of our businesses and industries, but it is a real challenge for them to take on apprentices with that right support. We do need to look at that.

I have concerns about some areas of T-levels. The aspiration for high quality is good, but while T-levels came out of the Sainsbury review of 2016, which was looking at parity between vocational and academic routes, I do not believe that they have parity with A-levels. That is not because people might think, “Academic is better.” No, actually T-levels are perhaps more demanding than A-levels in many ways. When an “academic student” goes to study A-levels, they can choose two, three or four subjects, plus work experience, a work placement or employment, so when they have finished their A-levels, they can go to university, get an apprenticeship or go and work—they have all those options at hand.

However, for T-levels, similar to national diplomas, students have to decide, for example, that they want to work in the health and social care industry, and have to study that with an employer. But what happens at the end if they discover that it is not what they want to do, or they feel that they are better at something else? If T-levels or something similar were smaller and modular, with a similar amount of guided learning hours to A-levels, a vocational student could do health and social care, travel and tourism, and digital media, and they could go and do some work experience as well. They could still build a T-level, but it would be multifaceted and very enjoyable. It would give vocational students much more choice about where they go from there, rather than just studying their health and social care level 3 T-level and that is it. They would then have to spend money later in life to do something else to go into another industry. I would like the Minister and his team to think about something like that.

The further education sector has always been the Cinderella of education but, along with schools, it is the kingpin to ensuring that this country can continue to be a powerhouse in future. I thank everyone in the further education sector, no matter what job they do—whether the cleaner or all the way through to the chief executive, and everyone in between. I thank them and appreciate their work, and I look forward to seeing colleagues again in the future.