Post-18 Education and Funding Review

Lord Aberdare Excerpts

Tuesday 2nd July 2019 Lords Chamber

[Lord Aberdare (CB)]

My Lords, I was disappointed that so much of the reaction to this excellent Augar report focused on the issues relating to universities and their funding, but the debate so far has gone a long way to restoring the balance. I too will focus on issues including skills in general, further education and apprenticeships. It is a pleasure to follow the noble Lord, Lord Layard, in that context.

The report clearly shows how shockingly further education has been neglected in recent years. It has undergone average budget cuts of 30%, yet it has responsibility for educating about half of all young people—those who do not go to university—and is crucial to the Government’s laudable goals of achieving parity of esteem for technical and professional education with higher education, and to delivering T-levels. The total number of people involved in post-18 education has actually declined, and that decline is mostly in FE. The Augar review is right to recommend increased funding for the sector, including £1 billion of capital investment, together with a restructuring and grouping of colleges to increase the quality of provision and access. Its recommendations for a three-year adult education budget, for increased capacity for technical provision in specific FE colleges, and, above all, for greater investment in the FE workforce are also welcome. Why can there not be a programme such as Teach First or Now Teach to encourage new teachers into FE?

I am also delighted that the report asks for the careers strategy launched in 2017 to be rolled out nationally. This strategy is fundamental to addressing our skills needs and is already making an impact, particularly in areas which have received funding for careers hubs. I find it very encouraging that the latest evidence from the Careers & Enterprise Company indicates that careers support is now strongest in areas of disadvantage. I hope the Government will take to heart the recommendations that hubs should be rolled out nationally and that more young people should have access to careers activities, including encounters with employers—and, of course, that schools should be held to account for their statutory responsibility under the Baker clause to give employers access to their students.

The report includes a chapter on apprenticeships, starting with a very helpful contextual overview outlining the recent history and current status of apprenticeship policy. I echo the congratulations of the noble Lord, Lord Patten, on the quality of the report itself. This chapter includes the suggestion that apprenticeships should reflect the priorities of the industrial strategy, which I will come back to. I am not convinced that Ofsted is the right body to have the lead responsibility for inspecting the quality of apprenticeships at all levels. Given the range of sectors covered by apprenticeship standards, I am not sure whether Ofsted, as an education regulator, would have the right experience or skills to reflect the needs of the employers for whom and by whom the standards are designed.

However, I agree that the standard-setting process should be more transparent, and I strongly support the suggestion of undertaking work to address the barriers faced by SMEs in offering apprenticeships. Over half of current apprenticeships are in SMEs and that proportion will need to be maintained in future, but relatively few SMEs have the knowledge, capacity or willingness to offer them. My own experience, mainly with SMEs employing apprentices in the construction sector, has shown that specific mechanisms are needed to support them in providing apprenticeships, such as the apprenticeship training agencies—ATAs—of which the Minister has occasionally made mention. Can he tell us what actual support the Government might consider for ATAs or for other mechanisms to enable more SMEs to offer apprenticeships?

There are some gaps in the report’s recommendations. The utilities sector is a vital part of UK infrastructure and a particularly effective employer of apprentices. Its 1,000th apprentice completed the endpoint assessment process under the new standards just last month; it was only about six months ago that I hosted an event here to celebrate the 500th apprentice who achieved that goal. The report notes the sector also faces severe skills shortages, with 33% of skills shortage vacancies, but is not clear how this strong unmet demand for craft-level skills might be addressed.

There is little mention of the potential impact of new technology in delivering post-18 education. What happened to all those MOOCs—the massive open online courses—that we used to hear so much about? I would have expected more coverage of new, digitally based ways of delivering post-18 education, whether in or outside colleges. The report mentions but does not actually recommend the sensible idea of creating a single central portal or clearing-house for information about, and applications to, technical education courses along the lines of what UCAS does for higher education.

How will the review’s recommendations promote overall workforce development and labour market resilience? Its terms of reference extend only to England but, although education and skills are devolved, most other aspects of the labour market are UK-wide: the movement of people, industrial strategy, productivity, work and pensions arrangements, and so on. How can we have a meaningful UK-wide skills and workforce strategy without ensuring some degree of consistency, optimisation and shared goals between the four UK nations, not to mention the wider regional situation? There is already an anomaly with apprenticeships: employers in the devolved nations pay the apprenticeship levy to the UK Government but do not have the opportunity available to employers in England of drawing on their levy payments to fund their own apprenticeships.

A strength of the review is that it seeks to tackle post-18 education in the round, within the limits of its terms of reference. Skills strategy as a whole might benefit from a similar approach to create a comprehensive blueprint for tackling UK skills needs and provide a framework for deciding how the Government’s various initiatives fit together, what each should deliver and how their success should be measured. The review says that 70% of apprentices are aged 19 or over: is that good or bad? Should the allocation of apprenticeships by sector or geography be mainly market-driven, as now, or more responsive to the industrial strategy’s priorities? How can a UK-wide labour market be reconciled with devolved education and skills policies? Without an overarching strategy, such questions cannot be easily answered. The result is a plethora of separate initiatives, often worthy in themselves but not necessarily consistent or mutually reinforcing.

I do not expect the Minister to be able to commit to the development of such an approach in today’s debate. But I urge him and his colleagues, as they look at the spending review and beyond, to explore the possibility of some sort of grand plan for skills to which all interested parties could sign up: politicians, national and regional; educators at all levels; employers; and, above all, young people, especially the 50% for whom university does not fit the bill and who we will look to for the technical skills that we need. Such a plan would of course incorporate many of the welcome recommendations in the Augar review, and in a way that inspired confidence that they would make a measurable difference in raising productivity and delivering the industrial strategy. I believe there is a real opportunity here, and look forward to hearing from the Minister how the Government might seek to grasp it, using the Augar report as a template.