Technical and Vocational Education

Liam Byrne Excerpts

Wednesday 9th July 2014 Commons Chamber

[Mr John Denham (Southampton, Itchen) (Lab)]

In a lecture to the RSA in January, I set out the case for employer co-sponsored degrees, so I am delighted by my right hon. Friend the leader of the Labour party’s announcement of his backing for new high-level technical degrees that, as he said, would be delivered in partnership with industry, co-funded and co-designed by employers. In the furore around the £9,000 tuition fees, not so much attention was given to an early decision of the coalition to close down Labour’s work force development programme. After just three years, it had created 20,000 co-sponsored degree programmes a year, with an average employer contribution of nearly £4,000. The scheme was different from other higher education funding, because instead of having central allocations, employers and universities had to bid for funds. That element of competition created the incentive to design courses that employers really wanted to help pay for, and employer contributions could be varied according to ability to pay and the course on offer. We need something like that, and more of it, today.

At the moment, we have a persistent degree-level skills shortage in parts of the economy, but we also have record numbers of students going to university. However, a third of graduates are not working in graduate jobs five years after they graduate. They are up to their neck in debt, but higher education has not delivered what they expected. The problem is not that we have too many graduates; it is the mismatch between supply and demand, which arises because employers have too little influence over the process. As the CBI said last July, we need more partnership-based provision, with greater business involvement in colleges and universities, as well as to boost apprenticeships. But the market in “learn while you earn” models, such as higher apprenticeships and more flexible degree programmes, is underdeveloped.

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

rose—

[Mr Denham]

I will give way to my right hon. Friend, but I do not have long.

[Mr Byrne]

My right hon. Friend is being characteristically modest in understating the influence he had on the announcement that was made yesterday. Is he as concerned as I am that the number of people who had the chance to study for foundation degrees, HNCs and HNDs in a full-time role has fallen by 40% since 2010?

[Mr Denham]

I shall come to that point.

There are other reasons why we need the change. The welcome expansion of higher education has had a less welcome aspect, in my view. Universities have increasingly concentrated on the most expensive model of higher education—the full-time honours degree studied away from home. More than ever before, higher education is a one-shop deal for 18 and 19-year olds. Our graduates are the youngest in the OECD. There are two consequences. With an uneven schools system, such as that described by my right hon. Friend the Member for Wolverhampton South East (Mr McFadden), there is no chance of young people competing equally at 18, so social mobility suffers. At the same time, there are fewer and fewer routes for the later developer, the student from the weak school and the young person whose family did not value education, and mature and part-time numbers are shrinking.

Technical degrees have been spoken of as an additional route for the 50% of young people who do not go to university. I will be frank and suggest that they would be a better route also for a minority of those currently entering higher education. In the proposals that I set out earlier this year, I showed how those could be delivered without student debt and with better value for money for the taxpayer. If we recognised that employed students do not need maintenance, and if we made the cash available not as debt cancellation, but as subsidy to the employer, we could create the finance for a good co-sponsored degree. I look forward to my own party’s development of the idea.

Businesses will contribute, as they have done in the past. If they can educate an employee whom they have chosen, on a course that they have helped design, which is delivered full-time, part-time, on site or by distance learning, according to their business needs, at times that suit their business, the cost of contributing to the education of the graduate will be much less than the typical recruitment costs of employing a new graduate, let alone the typical retention costs when the business or the graduate finds out that they have made the wrong choice.

I hope my party retains at least the flexibility and the competitive elements of the work force development programme. Not only did they help to ensure that both employers and universities worked in effective partnership, but they will avoid the need to create cumbersome structures to design and validate new degrees. The Wolf report was in part a comment on my time as a Minister. What Professor Wolf said, rightly, was that the genuine attempt to create employer-led bodies to design qualifications, which was shared by all sides, had not worked in delivering the qualifications that we needed. The innovative effort should go into ensuring that SMEs, not just the major employers, have sufficient voice and weight to negotiate with universities.

In the autumn statement, the Chancellor announced huge new funding to take the cap off university places. As things stand, that will all go to three-year degrees studied away from home by young people. Putting that money, or some of it, into the type of technical degrees now being discussed might be a much better use of the money.

--- Later in debate ---

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

This has been an excellent debate. My hon. Friend the Member for Dudley North (Ian Austin) made the first Back-Bench contribution to it and said that the debate was urgent and important. I could not agree more with my hon. Friend the Member for Darlington (Jenny Chapman), who said that we do not spend enough time in this House debating the subject of today’s motion. It has been an important debate because it has revealed that, on the future of vocational education and on the basic question of how our constituents are going to learn what they need to earn their way out of today’s cost of living crisis, there is no long-term plan. There is nothing long-term and nothing short-term; there does not appear to be much of a plan at all. The Chair of the Select Committee is not in his place, but we have heard some powerful calls today for a new cross-party consensus on the content of this debate, and I hope we can achieve that today. Therefore, I hope that the Minister for Skills and Enterprise, who is talking away from a sedentary position, will not divide the House today and that the motion will go through with full support, because that cross-party consensus, now and for the long term, is something this country desperately needs.

My hon. Friend the Member for Stoke-on-Trent Central (Tristram Hunt) started this debate with a candid admission that the problem we are talking about is decades old and decades deep. Indeed, Lord Percy reported to the Government shortly before the Education Act 1944. His Committee said that

“the position of Great Britain as a leading industrial nation is being endangered by a failure to secure the fullest possible application of science to industry… and…this failure is partly due to deficiencies in education.”

That was the position we found ourselves in again in the 1970s, as my hon. Friend the Member for Huddersfield (Mr Sheerman) pointed out, and we find ourselves there again today. So I am pleased that the Select Committee, chaired by the hon. Member for Beverley and Holderness (Mr Stuart), is going to look at this in detail. A new consensus is needed, and the business community is saying that to us loud and clear.

Labour left this Government strong foundations. I am sorry that the hon. Member for East Hampshire (Damian Hinds) felt that there were errors made between 2000 and 2010—no doubt there were—because some awfully strong foundations were left, too. I thought my hon. Friend the Member for Scunthorpe (Nic Dakin) put it well when he said we rescued the apprenticeship system from the state of complete collapse that we inherited in 1997, rebuilding schools and school standards, rebuilding further education colleges all over this country and rebuilding our university system. Labour Members are very proud of those achievements, and what we needed in this Parliament was a Government who were determined to build on those foundations and create a strong, new, wide path for vocational education from 14 through to 21 and above. I am sorry to say that instead we have the kind of chaos that means that at the age of 14 pupils can look forward to passing through systems regulated by Ofqual, Ofsted, the Quality Assurance Agency for Higher Education, the Education Funding Agency, the Skills Funding Agency and the Higher Education Funding Council. It is a dog’s breakfast; it is a complicated situation that is not delivering the skills we need.

That is what business is saying to us clearly. When I left business school in America, I was clear that the UK was the only country where I wanted to build my business. Thousands of firms want to bring work back to this country, but let me tell hon. Members what KPMG said a few weeks ago. It said that the ability of manufacturers to bring jobs back to Britain is being crippled by the lack of available skills. Mike Wright, the head of Jaguar Land Rover, said the following not too long ago:

“We are not educating nearly enough skilled apprentices or graduates to replace those retiring from manufacturing roles.”

Lord Adonis has said that skills are now the “single biggest impediment” to economic growth. The Migration Advisory Committee, which my right hon. Friend the Member for Wolverhampton South East (Mr McFadden) referred to, made an important contribution to this debate yesterday. The MAC has added more than 100 different roles to the shortage occupation list over the past three or four years. Firms have had to sponsor in 282,000 people from abroad because they could not get the skills they need here in this country. So my hon. Friend the Member for Dudley North is absolutely right when he says that a better deal for vocational and technical education is crucial if we are to regenerate significant parts of our country. My right hon. Friend the Member for Wolverhampton South East made a powerful speech and the point he drew our attention to is that we do not just owe it to the business community; we owe it to our constituents, too.

Training up to degree-level skills unlocks a life in which people can earn over £100,000 more over the course of their career than if they had only two A-levels. If we want to transform life chances for everyone in our constituencies, we need to build a better system. I hope our motion today is the basis of that new consensus. [Interruption.] The Minister for Skills and Enterprise is chuntering away. Let me tell him where I think he is getting a few things wrong.

A new, stronger system must start in schools. I am sure that, like me, he is slightly worried that there has been a 16% rise in unqualified teachers in my children’s classrooms. I am sure that he is concerned, like me, that when we say that people should be able to study English and maths up to the age of 18, that is not the policy of the Education Secretary. The Minister gave us a new piece of information this afternoon about 1 million bits of careers advice being distributed to our children. I was not quite sure what that meant, but I do know that the CBI has said that the careers service is “on life support”. That is not a system fit for the future.

Those lucky enough to graduate to a further education college confront colleges that have seen a £700 million fall in their funding. That has weighed heavily on those aged 18 studying in FE colleges. For those going on to study in further education beyond the age of 19, funding has fallen by 22%. The Minister for Skills and Enterprise made great play of apprenticeship numbers. He wanted to make the point that apprenticeship numbers have risen since 2010, and of course they have. But, like me, he will be worried that over the past year apprenticeship numbers for the under-25s have fallen by 11,400. He will be concerned about the fall in apprenticeship starts in his constituency, and so will the Under-Secretary of State for Education, the hon. Member for South West Norfolk (Elizabeth Truss).

The Minister for Skills and Enterprise should take great care in the changes that he proposes and he should listen hard to small and medium-sized enterprises up and down the country that say that putting apprenticeship funding wholesale into their hands through the PAYE system could be a disaster that sees apprenticeship numbers fall off a cliff. He needs to listen carefully to that.

Earlier this week the Leader of the Opposition, my right hon. Friend the Member for Doncaster North (Edward Miliband), announced the final stage of our proposals. It was not the Minister for Skills and Enterprise who introduced the chance for apprentices to go on and study at the highest level of skill. That was a change that was made many years ago, and it is not acceptable that just 2% of apprentices go on to study degree-level skills. There has been a 40% fall in the number of people studying for HNCs, HNDs or foundation degrees. That is not the way to empower apprentices and enable them to go on and study to degree-level skills, and it must change.

We know that there is a big appetite among young people for a vocational path to the highest level of skill. That is why it is now harder to get an apprenticeship in this country than it is to get into university. It is now harder to get into BAE Systems’ apprenticeship programme than to get into Oxford. It is harder to get into Rolls-Royce than to get into Cambridge. These are brilliant programmes and if we are to create more chances like that, we must introduce the kind of proposals for a technical baccalaureate that have been discussed. We must give people the chance to study English and maths through to the age of 18. We must raise the quality of further education across the board by introducing institutes of technical education.

We must radically increase the number of apprenticeship opportunities, crucially using the power of public procurement to increase the number of opportunities. Finally, we must put more resources into the hands of employers so that, with universities and colleges, they are able to use that buying power to expand the opportunity to study technical degrees to the highest level of skill. This is a proposal that was pioneered by my right hon. Friend the Member for Southampton, Itchen (Mr Denham) when he was in office. It was a tragedy that the work force development programme was shut down. It was popular with employers, with students and with universities and colleges, too.

I finish on the point underlined by my right hon. Friend the Member for Wolverhampton South East. We need to offer our young people a chance, not an excuse and not a target. The hon. Members for Milton Keynes South (Iain Stewart) and for Beverley and Holderness were among those who called for a new cross-party consensus. If we on the Labour Benches sound partisan, it is because we are passionate about transforming the life chances of the people whom we represent. We have a simple belief that the world around us is changing in a way that it has never changed before. There is a new competitive threat to this country from rising economies in the east. If we want to live better than others, we will have to be better than others, and that means giving us a skills system that gets everybody, not just some, to the very highest level of their potential. Only in that way can we offer a future that is optimistic and ambitious. Only in that way can we be a country that is full of hope and not a country that is facing fear.

[The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Education (Elizabeth Truss)]

There is nothing more vital to the future of our country than the education and skills of our young people. I find myself in violent agreement with the hon. Member for Dudley North (Ian Austin) and the right hon. Member for Wolverhampton South East (Mr McFadden). They are absolutely right that it is the No. 1 priority for our future competitiveness, social mobility and outcomes as a nation.

As the hon. Member for Huddersfield (Mr Sheerman) and my hon. Friend the Member for East Hampshire (Damian Hinds) pointed out, education and skills are becoming more and more important over time as our world is transformed by technology and globalisation. We will not be dividing the House on this motion, because we realise that the Opposition acknowledge their failings over previous years, and that they back our direction. Indeed, they back many of our policies, such as the technical baccalaureate and the availability of more degrees from apprenticeships, and also our reforms in English and maths.

We need to ensure that every qualification, whether it is academic or vocational, is demanding, rigorous and a route to employment. Many Members today commented on the vital importance of English and maths. As the Secretary of State said, those are the most important vocational subjects, which is why we care passionately about ensuring that all children achieve. We are setting up maths hubs, so that all children can master maths. There will be 32 hubs across the country, which will learn from those high performing countries in east Asia that so many hon. Members have talked about this afternoon. In those countries, all children, regardless of their background or whether they are boys or girls, perform very highly.

We are putting in new grammar, spelling and punctuation tests at age 11, and double-weighting English and maths in the performance tables to make sure that every child is literate and numerate by the time they leave school. Students who do not secure good passes in GCSE maths and English will continue to study those subjects until 18 so they can earn those vital passports into future careers.

In addition, we are introducing a new mid-level maths qualification, which students on both the academic and vocational route can study. The core maths qualification comes into being next year, but we have some early adopters—179 colleges and schools. All seven of our tech bac trail blazers will be trialling core maths from this September.

Until now, 40% of students who got a C at GCSE and who wanted to continue with maths did not have an option to do so. Those students will now be able to maintain their confidence and competence in maths. They will be able to apply maths in real-life situations and use statistics, which are so vital in so many jobs today. The core maths qualification is part of our technical baccalaureate, which is our way of ensuring that technical and vocational qualifications are world beating.

The Chairman of the Select Committee talked about Alison Wolf’s report. He used some of the quotes that I was going to use in my speech. Essentially, her report showed that too many young people were fobbed off with qualifications of little market value. What we are doing is ensuring that all the qualifications that students study are of high value.

My hon. Friend the Member for Reading East (Mr Wilson) talked about how we have transformed vocational education. We have introduced technical awards, which are genuinely equivalent to GCSEs, and tech levels, which are backed by employers and will help students get jobs in occupations such as engineering, computing, hospitality and accountancy. We are ensuring that the tech bac is taught across some of the 50 new university technical colleges, which many hon. Members have praised.

As my hon. Friend the Member for Mid Derbyshire (Pauline Latham) pointed out, we are hugely expanding apprenticeships. There will be 2 million apprenticeship starts over the course of this Parliament, which is a record for our country.

[Mr Byrne]

The Minister gives way with characteristic generosity. I know she will be concerned by the fall in apprenticeship starts in her constituency—apprenticeship starts were down by 150 between 2011-12 and 2012-13. Is she as worried as I am that small and medium-sized enterprises, no doubt in her constituency, are concerned about some of her colleague’s proposed changes?

[Elizabeth Truss]

Apprenticeship starts are actually up in my constituency since 2010, and we are seeing record levels across this Parliament. One of the most important things, as many hon. Members have talked about, is the quality, as well as the quantity, of apprenticeships, and it is important that employers are engaged.

My hon. Friends the Members for Milton Keynes South (Iain Stewart) and for Gosport (Caroline Dinenage) talked about the importance of ensuring that young people are doing the right courses and taking on the right apprenticeships in areas of huge demand, such as STEM. Our Your Life campaign, which has been launched by industry and will go forward to students and young people this autumn, is all about encouraging more young people, particularly girls, to consider future careers in technology, engineering and business. I met some fantastic young women at the Big Bang fair who have taken on apprenticeships at Jaguar Land Rover. They are passionate about what they are doing, and we want to see more of that, because too many young people are not necessarily taking the choices that will help them to get great jobs in the future. The hon. Member for Darlington (Jenny Chapman) pointed that out and made some very good points.

As early as 2004, before the great recession, youth unemployment was on the rise—it was up 40% in the first decade of this century. The reality is that the basic skills that many Opposition Members bemoan were not being taught properly in our schools, and the reality is that many young people were let down by not having basic literacy and numeracy skills. The sad truth is that those young people were let down by low expectations and devalued qualifications.

Our reforms are working. There are 135,000 more young people in work, education or training than this time 12 months ago. Long-term youth unemployment is down by 25,000 on last year, and the number of young people claiming out-of-work benefits has fallen every month for the past 23 months. It is time for Labour Members to acknowledge the changes, reforms and progress that we have made. All young people will now be able to work towards GCSEs in maths and English until they are 18, and all young people now have an opportunity to take the apprenticeship route or the university route. We are expanding the opportunity for students and apprentices to study degrees. We are working more closely with employers, and more and more employers are coming into schools to talk to young people about the fantastic opportunities that are available.

I am afraid that both the Leader of the Opposition and the shadow Secretary of State for Education, in their announcement yesterday, failed to talk about the fantastic progress that has already been made by employers, colleges and schools in bringing together business and qualifications. We have fantastic things going on, and it is a shame that Labour Members seek to be miserablist, rather than positive. [Interruption.] Miserable is the word. Why do Labour Front Benchers not learn lessons from the excellent contributions of their Back-Bench Members, who have talked about optimism, hope and a new future, rather than complaining about the reforms that we are already undertaking?

Although the shadow Education Secretary talks about technical degrees, baccalaureates and employer-led apprenticeships, the Opposition do not seem to realise that we are already doing that and young people are benefiting. Under this Government our young people are getting the opportunities they deserve, and they are gaining the skills to get on in life.

Question put and agreed to.

Resolved,

That this House notes that the previous Government rescued the idea of apprenticeships and quadrupled apprenticeship starts; furthermore believes that a transformation in vocational education has eluded governments for decades; therefore believes that the UK needs a new settlement for those young people who do not wish to pursue the traditional route into university and the world of work; and further believes that in order to achieve a high status vocational education system that delivers a high-skill, high-value economy the UK needs a new Technical Baccalaureate qualification as a gold standard vocational pathway achieved at 18, a new National Baccalaureate framework of skills and qualifications throughout the 14 to 19 phase, the study of mathematics and English for all to age 18, for all large public contracts to have apprenticeship places, new employer-led apprenticeships at level 3 and new technical degrees.