Skills and Post-16 Education Bill [HL]

Lord Aberdare Excerpts

2nd reading
Tuesday 15th June 2021 Lords Chamber

[Lord Aberdare (CB)]

My Lords, I, too, strongly welcome this important Bill. Skills are fundamental to our future well-being both as a nation and as individuals. In order to succeed in an increasingly complex, competitive, technologically driven, net zero-targeting world, we need the right skills in the right places for the right people at the right time. The Bill includes many proposals to enable that. Most of what I wanted to say has been more eloquently expressed by other noble Lords, so I will confine myself to questions in three areas that I believe may need some further thought, relating to small businesses, independent training providers and careers education.

The Bill rightly focuses on ensuring that skills are relevant to local needs, mainly through local skills improvement plans, created and managed by local partnerships and led by employer representative bodies. The Government play a central role through designating the employer representative body for each local area and then through approving the actual plans. This sounds to me more like a top-down, centrally driven approach than a truly local one.

So how will LSIPs engage smaller businesses, particularly in areas with few major employers, where most employers are small? How will the Government ensure that LSIPs are not dominated by the views of larger, better-resourced employers in determining local skills needs and allocating available funding? How will LSIPs build on and work with existing local partnerships, such as LEPs, careers hubs, skills advisory panels and local digital skills partnerships?

On independent training providers, I have a rather different perspective from my noble friend Lady Wolf, who I am rather relieved to see is no longer in her place. ITPs provide a substantial proportion of skills training, including in the great majority of apprenticeships and traineeships. They are an essential and valuable part of the system. Many are small, but they bring much-needed responsiveness, innovation and competition to the skills training marketplace. Yet the Bill seems focused on constraining them through requirements to meet potentially onerous conditions for inclusion in the list of relevant providers.

Before joining noble Lords, I ran a small independent business providing employability training for young Londoners. Our work was commissioned by bodies such as the former London Development Agency, Barnardo’s, Nacro, schools, colleges and local authorities. These provided stringent supervision and oversight. But, as a small business focused on service delivery, we would have struggled to meet the sorts of conditions suggested in the Bill—for example, for insurance cover against possible cessation of training. Such a sledge- hammer approach risks penalising all ITPs for the failings of a few.

So how will independent training providers be more positively engaged in the development and delivery of local skills improvement plans? Will the Minister commit to ensuring full consultation before details of the register of training providers and of the conditions ITPs have to meet are finalised?

Many noble Lords have emphasised the importance of impartial, independent, expert and personal information, advice and guidance, including the noble Lord, Lord Lucas, just now. Careers education and guidance have improved significantly in recent years, helped by the careers strategy launched in 2017, which ended last year. But there is still some way to go to ensure that everyone has access to high-quality careers advice, that its provision covers all ages and circumstances and that it is provided by well-trained, highly qualified professionals with an understanding of the skills scene, both locally and nationally, including pathways for acquiring skills in areas such as creativity—as we heard from the noble Lord, Lord Puttnam—and entrepreneurship, which we have heard rather less about. Yet the Bill makes no reference at all to careers information and guidance.

Will the Government consider including a right to professional careers guidance as part of the lifetime skills guarantee? Will the provision of good careers education be made a formal requirement for colleges to achieve high Ofsted ratings? Finally, will the Minister commit to producing an updated careers strategy to support the aims of the Bill, including the extension of career hubs to cover the entire country?

I support many other suggestions made by noble Lords, including the desire to see the Baker clause given statutory force and a more flexible apprenticeship levy. I fervently hope that the Bill, when it leaves this House, will be even better crafted to create the skills system we so badly need. I like the description of the Bill by the noble Lord, Lord Johnson, as a “down- payment”. Will the Government complement it with a comprehensive, overarching, cross-departmental, long-term education and skills strategy, so that the Bill will prove to be much more than just another of the regular reorganisations of our education and training furniture that have so signally failed to deliver in the past?

As my new noble friend Lady Black of Strome suggested in her splendid maiden speech, we need to create an education ecosystem that brings together the talents and energy of all participants in delivering the skills we need, including SMEs, ITPs and careers professionals.