King’s Speech

Lord Aberdare Excerpts

Friday 19th July 2024 Lords Chamber

[Lord Aberdare (CB)]

My Lords, the theme of today’s debate is about creating opportunities. Nothing could be more important for that than education and skills policies. As the noble Lord, Lord Baker, made clear, none of the aims set out in the King’s Speech and in the Labour manifesto can be achieved without the right skills, and education has an essential role in developing those skills.

I welcome what we know so far about the Government’s plans, and what we heard from the noble Baroness, Lady Smith of Malvern, in her fine maiden speech. I also take the opportunity to echo the appreciation expressed to the noble Baroness, Lady Barran, for her work and commitment over the years, including giving me occasional help with my mathematics.

Many of the plans we know about are encouraging, if as yet somewhat incomplete—as might be expected, given the difficulty of adjusting the course of the tanker that is education policy, especially during these cash-strapped times.

The need to recruit, train and retain good teachers is rightly recognised with the commitment to recruit 6,500 new teachers, funded by ending the current VAT exemption for private school fees. While I recognise the difficulty of finding new sources of funds, I share the concerns expressed by the noble Lord, Lord Lexden, and others, including the noble Baroness, Lady Monckton of Dallington Forest, in her excellent maiden speech, that this may produce unintended and undesirable consequences, and may generate less net income than the Government expect or hope for.

There is anyway, as the noble Lord, Lord Storey pointed out, the much wider challenge of reinvigorating and remotivating teachers, many of whom feel not just underpaid and underappreciated but unduly constrained by an overprescriptive, over-rigid and overdemanding curriculum and assessment system. In passing, I wonder whether this Government might consider restoring the funding recently withdrawn from Now Teach, which does such excellent work bringing successful and committed late-career people into teaching.

The current system is failing to deliver consistently the broad and balanced curriculum to which it aspires. There is an imbalance between knowledge-based learning and the acquisition of practical life skills, such as listening, speaking, problem-solving, creativity and teamwork. The needs of many young people who do not aspire to university but whose goals are more work-centred, leading to careers as technicians or tradespeople or entrepreneurs, are not adequately met. I am delighted and encouraged that the promised review of curriculum and assessment was launched yesterday under the leadership of Professor Becky Francis, and I hope that it will come up with a plan to improve the balance of the curriculum and enhance the motivation of both students and teachers.

The manifesto recognises the importance of access to arts, music and sport, and specifically promises a new national music education network. How do the Government see this as helping to narrow the shocking gap between state and private schools in the quality of music, arts and cultural education that they offer?

The manifesto makes no mention of building on recent improvements in careers education so that all young people receive high-quality personal guidance. The engagement of employers, including smaller and more local employers, is another key to opening young people’s eyes to world of work in all its range and variety. I hope the Government will seek to encourage more employers to be involved in this way.

A central proposal for skills policy is to establish Skills England, with a remit to create a long-overdue skills strategy, aligned with the proposed industrial strategy, which will hopefully bring together skills policy activities across the UK to produce a coherent understanding of current and future skills needs and shortages, and ways of addressing them locally, regionally, nationally and sectorally. I look forward to hearing more about how Skills England will work, and I hope that its membership will include proper representation of independent training providers, which deliver two-thirds of all apprenticeships.

On that subject, the idea of turning the apprenticeship levy into a more flexible growth and skills levy will be welcomed by the many employers who complain about the inflexibility of the current system. I will be interested to hear what form this will take, how it will work and how it will be funded.

I am conscious that transforming education and skills policies, as the manifesto aims, is a long-term incremental process, so it would be wrong to express any impatience at this stage that the many promising measures proposed in the Speech and the manifesto may seem smaller than the high ambition of the goals that the Government have set themselves. I hope that as the initiatives get under way we will be able to discern a clearer vision of where policy is heading—a vision ambitious enough to motivate and inspire teachers, students, parents, training providers, employers and all of us whose future depends on an education and skills system that truly creates opportunities for all.