Vocational Education and Training

Lord Aberdare Excerpts

Monday 28th October 2019 Lords Chamber

[Lord Aberdare (CB)]

My Lords, I too congratulate the noble Viscount on obtaining this debate, which I trust will not unduly harm our performance of “The Dream of Gerontius” with the Parliament Choir next month. It is also a great pleasure to follow the noble Lord, Lord Baker, with his unparalleled wisdom and experience on this topic, and whose comments I very much endorse.

One of the UK’s greatest current challenges is shortage of key skills, contributing to our alarmingly low productivity. Some 93% of leaders of fast-growing businesses said in 2017 that their number one worry was the skills of students leaving school. For many young people, not least those from disadvantaged backgrounds, high-quality vocational education may provide the best route to gaining skills that enable them to fulfil their potential. Governments have been trying for years to improve vocational education so that it earns parity of esteem with the academic route, via university. There is still a long way to go and I will briefly talk about three areas in which improvement is needed: careers education and guidance, work experience provision, and awareness raising.

Significant progress has been made in careers education since the Government launched their careers strategy in 2017. There is now a clear definition of what good careers guidance in schools looks like, in the form of the eight Gatsby benchmarks. More than 3,800 schools and colleges are measuring themselves against those benchmarks. The Careers & Enterprise Company, responsible for co-ordinating delivery of the strategy, has created a network of more than 2,500 enterprise advisers to support schools in setting up links with employers. Every school must have a published careers programme and a named careers leader. The Government are funding training for 1,300 careers leaders and more than 40 careers hubs have been or are being set up around the country, covering about one-quarter of all secondary schools and colleges. There is clear evidence of progress against all eight benchmarks by schools across the country, with disadvantaged areas, encouragingly, among the best performers.

I hope the Minister will respond to some suggestions about where further effort is needed to ensure that all students benefit from these moves. First, as we have heard, the Augar review of post-18 education recommended that careers hubs should be rolled out nationwide so that every school would be part of a hub. Will the Government implement this, and how soon? Secondly, I hear some concerns about inconsistent quality across the network of enterprise advisers. How do the Government plan to monitor and assess the effectiveness of the network to ensure consistent delivery? Thirdly, the eighth Gatsby benchmark, concerning personal guidance, requires students to receive one face-to-face interview with a careers professional by age 16 and another by age 18. How are the Government addressing the current shortage of qualified careers advisers to meet this need?

One essential element of careers education is work experience. The fifth Gatsby benchmark calls for encounters with employers and employees; schools need to give students at least one such encounter a year from ages 11 to 17, seven in all. A major challenge is finding enough employers willing and able to offer high-quality work experience, especially among SMEs.

Recently I took part in a launch by the British Youth Council’s work experience action group— six young people aged between 16 and 25—of a toolkit for SMEs interested in offering work experience placements. This includes an excellent analysis of what constitutes good-quality work experience, as well as guidelines on how to achieve it and a useful resource bank of sample forms, checklists and templates. Resources such as this should be made more widely available to, and easily accessible by, the SMEs which could benefit from them.

There are numerous other excellent initiatives providing tools and assistance both for schools and students looking for placements and for employers willing to offer them. The Workfinder platform developed by Founders4Schools is particularly ambitious in its scope and impressive in its use of online technology, enabling students to identify and set up their own placements, often with fast-growing, high-potential enterprises for which work experience is a crucial part of addressing the severe skills shortages they face.

Services such as these will become ever more important as demand grows, including, as we have heard, from T-levels. How does the Minister plan to address this need? Should there be an online directory to signpost the services and resources available? Would he consider offering incentives, financial or other, to encourage SMEs to offer placements? What about the often-touted idea of a UCAS-like portal for young people looking for suitable technical and vocational pathways?

The Education Secretary promised at the Conservative Party conference to,

“give my all to make technical and vocational education the first choice for anybody with the aptitude, desire and interest to pursue it.”

As the noble Lord, Lord Baker, said, that is a very encouraging statement for a Minister to make, but for it to happen there needs to be much greater awareness of its opportunities and benefits among students, teachers, schools, parents and employers. Many if not most teachers lack the necessary background and experience of business fully to appreciate what skills and attributes employers seek. What plans does the Minister have to provide them with training and support, perhaps through specialised work placements specifically designed for teachers? I have also recently heard of plans for a coalition for careers education to create online courses for teachers on the FutureLearn platform to enhance their digital skills and familiarity as well as their awareness of employer needs. What are the Government doing to encourage such initiatives?

Often the best champions of vocational education are young people themselves. There are no better ambassadors for apprenticeships, for example, than young apprentices such as those we often meet at events in Parliament. Might the Minister consider extending the Baker clause to encourage schools or even require them to allow recent former students to return to share their experiences of following vocational routes, which I know many have found it hard to do?

This Government have been prodigal in making bold promises about what they seek to achieve. I hope the Minister will be able to be much more specific about how they intend to deliver on those promises relating to vocational education in secondary schools.