Skills and Post-16 Education Bill [HL]

Lord Addington Excerpts

2nd reading
Tuesday 15th June 2021 Lords Chamber

[Lord Addington (LD)]

My Lords, this is one of those debate where I feel a degree of sympathy for the Minister, not only because she was nice about me when she started speaking, but because she may acquire a sore neck from having to turn around to answer people on her own Back Benches.

The noble Lord, Lord Willetts—he has clearly had enough now and is running away; I could not resist that, sorry—set a very high bar for us. He also made many of the points that I would have started with before my main point here, which is about special educational needs. The primary one is that we are going through part of a continuum, and that we are putting in place artificial barriers for further and higher education. That does not really work. Secondary school education cannot be seen as removed from this as well; it is part of a continuum. Where people start and how they go through is affected. The original block of their educational experience is going to affect the way they come through this. As my noble friend Lord Storey started by saying, if they do not get better career guidance, they will carry on with the same types of intervention, powers, hierarchies and activities they have always had, because that is the way you do it—that is the way you carry on. No doubt that is an important factor.

If we are to build up T-levels at levels 3, 4 and 5, replacing the status this sort of thing had a few years ago—or a few decades ago; I forget how old I am getting—we have to make sure that parents know they are career choices that will get people employed and make them a valid and interesting career, and we have to guide them through it. That will require real investment in those giving that advice. They have to be in the secondary schools, or in the initial phase that connection has to be made. It does not matter what is being given; if something becomes a secondary option, it is downplayed —end of.

To declare my interests, I am chairman of the company Microlink, which deals with assistive technology. I am president of the British Dyslexia Association. I am dyslexic and a user of assistive technology. I have not misspelled a word in years, but I have occasionally put the wrong one into many a message via voice technology and then not checking it. Many here will have suffered hearing that, I am afraid.

If we are to get the best out of all our students, we have to start dealing more coherently with special educational needs. At the moment we have a savage fight to get identification. Quite a while back, councils stopped putting £100 million a year into contesting people who wanted to get education, health and care plans. They lost 85% to 90% of those cases. We have a ridiculous system where the graduated approach we are supposed to be bringing in with the plans is not working. People are not getting identified because of the system.

What the Bill can do for the majority of those with special educational needs is make sure that those with moderate needs or those who are not identified are being picked up and offered the support that is easily available to them. Everybody’s phone, effectively, does voice recognition, so why do we not use voice recognition as a perfectly valid way of getting through an English test for those with dyslexia, dyspraxia or one of the other conditions? It is established in our lives. But no: someone who cannot do this has to take a spelling test.

I refer back to the hours I have inflicted on this House on the English test for apprenticeships. If you want to read all of it, then masochism is probably a part of your life, but this is something we should be adapting. There is a clause in the Bill on teacher training; we need to ensure that teachers can spot these conditions. Dyslexia is only one of the ones available: ADHD, dyspraxia, higher-functioning autism—they are all there, and that is just neurodiversity. How are we going to spot these conditions for people where it is not an absolute and who do not have the tiger parent to get it identified? Are we going to make sure that we can do this to get these people through the system?

We have a model to support this for level 4 and 5 qualifications requiring independent skill. It is called the disabled students’ allowance, and it has all the institutions that go with higher education, such as information capture—the sort of stuff we are doing now, which is being recorded by people using this for Hansard—which is now a given in higher education. Most of the colleges that run higher education courses will run through levels 4 and 5. Can we make sure they are all integrated—it is not that big an ask—so that somebody who cannot take notes from a lecture given as part of a course is presented with the information they need to study? If it is in an electronic format, they can get it into a verbal format. Voice to text and text to voice are very old hat now: how many people read books in the form of audiobooks?

We are not asking for the world here. These sorts of changes help, and they also help those who do not have these problems or are not on these spectrums. Can we make sure that this is integrated into our approach? If it is not, we will make life needlessly difficult. Please let us not get sucked into the idea that only higher needs need to be paid attention to, because that is a small group. It is those who are just failing and continue to fail that we should be giving some thought to.

Skills and Post-16 Education Bill [HL]

Lord Addington Excerpts

Committee stage
Tuesday 6th July 2021 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Garden of Frognal (LD)]

My Lords, I shall speak to Amendments 1 and 6, to which I have added my name, and to Amendment 20 in my name and that of my colleague and noble friend Lord Storey. I declare an interest for the whole Bill: I am a vice-president of City & Guilds, an organisation for which I worked for some 20 years.

On Amendments 1 and 6, I have been crossing out what I would have said as the noble Lord, Lord Lucas, has said it far more effectively than I could. I do not believe in repeating what others have said, even if I have not said it myself, so I shall just agree with what he said. It is essential that we take into account potential students—and not just the young people of Eastbourne, I suggest—who should surely be important players in any discussion. If there are no students, there is no point in employers wishing to train them. It is not just the views and interests of students but those of student unions, trade unions, relevant community groups, agencies and local government that need to be taken into account. There should also be constant dialogue with careers advisers.

Funding must be made available for social mobility. An aspiring blacksmith or chef should not be disadvantaged if local needs are engineering-based. Dyslexic students should not be disadvantaged if their skillset is different from local needs. Amendment 20 ensures that providers of distance learning are brought into play. As the Explanatory Notes set out, the role in the local skills ecosystem played by providers without a local bricks and mortar presence in a particular area is taken into account in local skills improvement plans. Of course, it may not be bricks and mortar. It could be any skills area, but distance learning is truly important, as the work of the Open University and other distance providers makes clear. The OU has been a life-changer for many who could not study residentially.

Often, people may wish to study for employment not directly available in their area but for which they can develop skills and earn qualifications which will serve them well in other parts of the country. We should not be depriving them of the wherewithal to do just that. Throughout the Bill we shall seek to ensure that distance learning is taken into account. This amendment will do that and provide opportunities for learning to those without local provision.

I add my support to Amendments 11 and 81, tabled by the noble Baroness, Lady Whitaker, a staunch supporter of the Gypsy, Traveller and Roma communities, but these proposals go much broader, to those who have problems with GCSE English and maths which, for so many skill areas, are not essential. To have an academic qualification in English and maths is not necessary for a whole range of perfectly useful employment opportunities. I also support the amendments tabled by my noble friend Lord Addington, who will be following me to speak for himself. They are important amendments too.

I hope that the Minister will be able to look favourably on the amendments in this group.

[Lord Addington (LD)]

My Lords, this is one of those debates when everybody has said and everybody is going to agree with everybody, so let try to do it in as precised a way as possible. Before, I do, I should remind the Committee of my declared interests and let the Committee know that I have become an adviser to Genius Within, which looks at neurodiversity with Birkbeck, University of London.

The basic thrust of this is: what will be put into the plans, how flexible will it be and how will it adjust to the needs of those people who are supposed to be covered by it? We have heard about many subjects. When someone mentions dyslexia in front of me in one of these debates, I give myself a little cheer because, hopefully, the word is getting out.

The most important thing about my Amendment 22, if you throw everything away, is identification. Most people in the neurodiverse sector or with any special educational need have moderate or lower-level needs that, if not addressed or supported, can lead to failure to get academic qualifications giving access to training. The noble Baroness, Lady Whitaker, and I might argue about GCSEs and certain points, but the essential thrust of what she said carries through to these groups. Someone who has trouble in that learning environment will always have trouble. If we suddenly get—as I did with the officials who the Minister was kind enough to give me access to, for which I am eternally thankful—“Oh but we have a high-needs strategy”, well, that is great, but what happens to the 18% of the population who are identified as having special educational needs but who are not in the high-needs group? They will become your workforce. They are the people who are underachieving and either do not get jobs or get jobs which they do not fulfil or can access other qualifications with.

Please, when we are doing this, can we build in a capacity to identify people who have already failed in the school system? As adults, they will be presenting differently, with established types of behaviour, which may mean that they are resistant to certain activities because who on earth wants to be told again: “You’ve failed, you can’t do something”? Let us take everybody who is scared of heights and stick them up that ladder and shake it. Let us make sure that it is uncomfortable and that something that you do not like to have gone through again. What will happen about identifying the people in these groups, people with ADHD, people who come from lower socioeconomic backgrounds, with parents with the same problems, who do not have the type of parents that I had behind me?

I appreciate that this is all that you can do here, but what steps will be taken to ensure that everybody gets through and is supported? The idea that you need only a functional grasp of English and maths is a step forward, but we must embrace the fact that there is now technology available that can do most of this for you, at least at a functional level. If you can talk, you can word-process now. Can we ensure that this is taken into account in the plans because the groups who are unskilled, which we are addressing, will be helped?

My Amendment 26 is about looking slightly wider than just at one area. It came from a conversation that I had with someone at the British Dyslexia Association, who said, if someone feels that they would be happier in something that uses hand skills and is slightly out of area, please can they be supported to get there? This is true of virtually all groups but is probably slightly more intense in this situation. If you are living in an area which is just on the boundary, the thing that you may want to train in is probably in the next area. All of us have done this for schools to work. Arguments about constituency boundaries go to an audience where many may have an interest. Can we please take that into account? When the Minister comes to answer, or at a later stage, can he give some idea of how these group plans or areas of concentration will work together? If they do not, we will be excluding large numbers of people from getting the support that they need where that is a local employment opportunity for them. We are still assuming that they will stay in their local areas for jobs for long periods. If we are doing that, then let us at least be realistic about it.

[Baroness Morris of Yardley (Lab)]

My Lords, I support these amendments and the thrust of the debate so far, particularly with what the noble Lord, Lord Lucas, said in moving the amendment, every word of which I agreed with, as I have with most of the other speakers so far, so I will try not to repeat myself.

There is something of a dilemma. It is very difficult to be against a local skills plan, and I am not. It is a really good thing. I believe in this notion of place, which I think we have lost recently in school and skills. It is very important, and I can see that these local skills partnerships adopt that notion of place and that one place is different from others. I am absolutely in favour of that. It is very difficult to argue against employers being involved, and I would not. I have moved, over the course of this debate, from being very much in favour of those two things to having difficulty visualising what it will be like when it is in a good form. The more you talk about it, the most difficulties you see emerging. I hope that this means no more than that there are a lot of details to sort out. I am not trying to be difficult on this, but I wonder whether a number of issues will be resolved by this structure.

I shall raise two concerns reflecting the debate so far, which are around whether an employer-led body is likely to deal with these issues. It is not that they cannot be dealt with, but employers are different organisations, representing different things and have different experiences. It might be that in some circumstances they are not the best to deal with certain issues. My first concern regards Amendment 1 and potential students. Are current employers with current businesses the best people to scope the future economy? I am not saying that they have nothing to offer, because they do, but they have got a lot to protect in the here and now. A successful employer will be successful only if he or she scopes the future, but it is an uneasy thing that we are having to do. I would welcome the Minister’s comments on that. How do we keep their eyes to the future if they are leading this plan?

The second is: is an employer-led skills plan going to be the most effective at looking after the groups of people who are often left out, whether it is the Travellers, the underachievers, the marginalised or those who have not got qualifications? The traditional role of employers is often as gatekeepers: they let the successful through to be their employees, but they do not have an ongoing responsibility for the ones they have rejected. They often fall to other organisations, which have or develop the experience to deal with them.

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[The Deputy Chairman of Committees (Lord Lexden) (Con)]

My Lords, the noble Lord, Lord Rooker, who is next on the list, has withdrawn from the debate. Sadly, I am not able to call the noble Baroness, Lady Blackstone, because she was not here for the speech moving the amendment. The noble Lords, Lord Liddle and Lord Adonis, and the noble Baroness, Lady Whitaker, have also withdrawn from the debate, so I call the noble Lord, Lord Addington.

[Lord Addington (LD)]

My Lords, this is a little sooner than I expected. I put my name down to speak on this because, as the Government have said, this is a framework Bill. Governments like framework Bills because they give them a chance to develop and change as they are going along, with a little bit of freedom and a hint of Henry VII and a half. It is there and they like that. The price they pay is the fact that we want to know exactly what they are aiming at initially.

When this amendment was tabled and it was said which groups were going to be talked to, I saw that we already had employers down there. There is the danger of a dominant employer in here—a dominant employer who may not be the most foreseeing employer. Surely they should be talking to other people as well. Those with local power—that is, the mayoral authorities and local government—are surely dead certs to be involved in that conversation. These are people with budgets which will affect the local marketplace. We have already had a discussion about the green agenda, how that is implemented and the certain skills that are required there. These will be people who will be talking to you as you go through.

The amendments also mention students’ unions and trade unions. Why not? But I do not think that is the really important bit; that is the idea of what the influence will be, and which group will be having the conversation about what you should be doing and what your plan for training is. If we can get an answer to that from the Minister, at least on what the thinking is, we will all be slightly better informed and able to hone our arguments for the next stage of the Bill.

If we do not, we will be going round in a circle here. We will have to impose something on the Government to get them to come back and give us an answer. If the Government can give us an idea of what they actually require on this occasion, life becomes that little bit more straightforward. I hope that when the Minister comes to answer this, she will be able to provide at least the basis of the Government’s thinking about what goes on, because employers are great, but they occasionally get it wrong. I would just point out that many firms that were there 20 years ago are not here today. Surely that means that their boards—however well intentioned—got something wrong.

[Lord Bradley (Lab)]

My Lords, I am pleased to speak to this group of amendments, particularly Amendments 13 and 14. I commend the contribution of my noble friend Lady Morris of Yardley. I declare my interests in the register, especially my role as chair of council at the University of Salford.

While I fully support the principle of employers playing a more active role in driving certain aspects of the skills system, as well as the more specialist role for further education colleges in delivering high-level technical skills, this should be taking place within the context of a holistic and objective overview of the whole education, skills and employment support system, to guard against introducing further complexity and fragmentation. One of the best ways to achieve this is to have a formal role for the mayoral combined authorities, where they exist, in the development of local skills improvement plans, reflecting MCAs’ unique position in this area of policy.

As drafted, there is no provision or requirement in the Bill for the Secretary of State or the designated established employer representative bodies to engage with mayoral combined authorities, local authorities or other key stakeholders such as universities in relation to—among other things—the designation or removal of designation of an appropriate ERB to lead activities, the geographical footprint of the local skills improvement plan, and the context and strategic priorities of the area. This omission overlooks the vital roles that MCAs and local authorities play in skills and economic regeneration, as well as MCAs’ devolved functions across adult education and, in the case of Greater Manchester, significant elements of employment support.

Further, the DfE has indicated that while an MCA’s agreement to the proposed local skills improvement plan would assist the Secretary of State’s approval, it is not a prerequisite, so proposals that fail to secure the support of mayoral combined authorities might still receive government approval. Therefore—I agree with the Greater Manchester Combined Authority and am grateful for its extensive briefing on this matter—the Bill should make provision for consultation by the Secretary of State and the consent of MCAs in the designation of employer representative bodies and the approval of local skills improvement plans. Without such a provision, there could be a number of potential issues and risks to their success—and success is what we all want.

First, the Bill focuses primarily on higher-level skills and technical specialisms, which I agree have been neglected in policy and funding terms for far too long. However, there is a vital talent pipeline, starting with community-based engagement and entry-level essential skills, that is barely recognised in the Bill. It is unclear to me how this vital progressive pathway will be protected in the face of employer-led plans that will have a legal status not afforded to strategies for other aspects of the system. This could undermine existing partnerships and collaborative approaches to the local labour market.

Secondly, it is unclear how ERBs will be accountable in relation to strategic oversight, long-term vision and resource and capacity issues to ensure co-ordinated and impactful delivery in partnership with all relevant stakeholders. In particular, checks and balances will be required where designated ERBs are membership organisations and/or where they hold contracts as providers in order to ensure that local skills improvement plans are truly reflective of employers’ needs and interests across a locality, rather than solely for those ERB members.

Thirdly, the Government have not specified what constitutes a local area in terms of the geographical footprint of the new local skills improvement plans. Instead, employer representative bodies are being invited to define their own localities for the purpose of skills planning. So, for example, despite Greater Manchester being a well-recognised functional economic area with a long history of collaboration, there is no guarantee that the new local skills improvement plan proposals will follow existing geopolitical and functional economic footprints. This could undermine the alignment of skills and employment support in places such as Greater Manchester, which has used complementary devolved functions, pilots and other resources to support the creation of jobs and the skills to match them.

To address these issues and others, I believe the role of the mayoral combined authority and the local authorities should be properly recognised in the Bill to ensure the successful development of the local skills improvement plan and that all stakeholders feel they are part of the success going forward. I am pleased to support these amendments.

Skills and Post-16 Education Bill [HL]

Lord Addington Excerpts

Committee stage
Thursday 15th July 2021 Lords Chamber

Moved by

[Lord Addington]

39: After Clause 4, insert the following new Clause—
“Review of apprenticeship levy
The Secretary of State may request a review of the apprenticeship levy in respect of eligible costs definitions, in order to ensure that the funding required for the delivery of local skills improvement plans is optimised and reflects employers’ needs.”Member’s explanatory statement
The purpose of this amendment is to create flexibility in the eligible use of employers’ apprenticeship levy funds.

[Lord Addington (LD)]

My Lords, in speaking on this bit of the Bill and this amendment, I feel like the reserve coming in to fill in for somebody else as my noble friend Lord Storey initially had his name down. When I see that the other co-signatories are here, I am reasonably sure that the team will do the job.

The apprenticeship levy sounds right. It is the idea that if you have a turnover of, I believe, more than £3 million, you will pay into a training levy—apprenticeships through a training levy might have been better in the first place—then you will get something out of it. However, it has never really taken off. We do not really know what it is for or what it is getting in. Of late, we have had a decline in the number of apprenticeships, yet you are still having to pay in. There have been lots of other issues here, such as— although the loophole has been filled—the fact that MBAs have been studied on the money from the apprenticeship levy. Can we have a look at what this is really for? Does it need redefining? Does it need a new level of focus? That is what is behind this amendment. How can we make sure that it is functional and does what we think it was supposed to do? If we actually know that, we will get more encouragement for it and will keep it going forward.

Before I go any further, I want to point out that the Treasury gets money that is not spent at the time. If it is training money, we should make sure that it goes somewhere that trains. Hopefully we will examine questions here, such as would level 1 and 2 activity be taken on here? Should it be for the under-25s if it is supposed to be about youth training? Can we get these things out? Can the Minister, in her reply, let us know exactly what the Government think the future of this institution is? At the moment, it is danger of becoming something faintly ridiculous that is not quite achieving what we think it should. The people are having to look for a way to get the best out of it and get a focus. We could actually use this money to support colleges and institutions in delivering the right type of structure, especially locally, under the course of this Bill.

--- Later in debate ---

[The Deputy Chairman of Committees (Lord Lexden) (Con)]

I have received no requests to speak after the Minister so I call the noble Lord, Lord Addington, to conclude the debate on this amendment.

[Lord Addington (LD)]

I believe that the noble Baroness, Lady Neville-Rolfe, wanted to come in.

[The Deputy Chairman of Committees (Lord Lexden) (Con)]

Forgive me.

[Baroness Penn (Con)]

My Lords, I believe the Government are aiming for quality and quantity when it comes to apprenticeships. On the noble Baroness’s specific question about lower-level apprenticeships, I will ensure that I write to her with that specific information before Report.

[Lord Addington (LD)]

My Lords, this has been one of those slightly odd debates. One thing that we have established is that it is complicated—“We are not quite sure what it should do; we think it is quite a good thing, so please do not get rid of it now.” That certainly seemed to be the attitude of the Labour Party. They may be right about that, but at the moment there is a great deal of scepticism about whether this actually delivers. The intentions are good, but that is the thing that paves the way to hell. Can we please just make sure that we get a little more clarity on this? Whether it is worth returning to on Report, I will have to have a word with my noble friend Lord Storey after he has read this debate.

I felt, listening to the first part of the speech of the noble Lord, Lord Aberdare, that with a bit of tweaking you would get to a classic sketch about bureaucracy in some lofty TV show of my youth when people were being clever. Because it is complicated, but there is an intention behind it. The noble Baroness replied, “Yes, but we are trying to do things.” There was a lack of clarity here and focus at the heart of this. We should keep an eye on this, because if it continues to bring itself into disrepute, it may well be doing more harm than good. I beg leave to withdraw the amendment.

Amendment 39 withdrawn.

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Moved by

[Lord Addington]

41: Clause 5, page 5, line 33, leave out “from time to time” and insert “regularly”
Member’s explanatory statement
This amendment is to make sure that the needs of students and potential students are regularly considered and reviewed in decision-making.

[Lord Addington (LD)]

My Lords, I almost feel that the noble Lord, Lord Lingfield—indeed, as we discovered in a debate in this House, my noble kinsman Lord Lingfield—should be the one opening this debate, because he has the more substantive amendment. Having said that, I think that I know better than to try to put words in his mouth.

My Amendment 41 concerns a part of the Bill that says, and I think it is best if I quote it, although I am beginning to wish I had put my glasses on:

“The governing body of an institution in England within the further education sector must … from time to time review how well the education or training provided by the institution meets local needs”.


I tabled the amendment because I do not know what “from time to time” means. I have absolutely no idea what “from time to time” means. Does it mean once a decade? Every six months? I have absolutely no idea.

--- Later in debate ---

[Lord Addington (LD)]

My Lords, this has been an interesting debate. My probing amendment got the reply, “Yes, we actually know what it means: it’s in the guidance”. If it had been put on the face of the Bill, I would not have asked. So, there we are.

As I have said, the more substantive amendment was from the noble Lord, Lord Lingfield. We should have a look at this. As we started speaking, we both went to different groups in that very big group that has special educational needs. As the Minister will accept, that means you have two different sets of needs, or different groups that have a variety of needs that interlock and overlap. It is a very difficult thing you are expecting an institution to do to meet all of those needs. It is not easy. If it was, we would not be banging on about it. It is difficult. The Minister said that they have to have a plan. I shudder every time I hear that, because most disabled youngsters do not have a plan. Most do not have parents who can fight to get one for them, or they have very severe needs, which are dealt with.

People who have a moderate difficulty and who may well, with a little bit of help, find a place in training, are the group we are worrying about here. Certainly, I am, and I think my noble kinsman is talking about the same thing as well. We need to have more clarity on this. It is a way in to giving a better description of what is supposed to be done, so that everybody knows. The Minister should listen to her noble friend; some colleges are not as good as the best. Aspiring to get there is what they should be doing. I agree that we should look at this again on Report, but for the moment I beg leave to withdraw my amendment.

Amendment 41 withdrawn.

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[The Deputy Chairman of Committees (Lord Russell of Liverpool) (CB)]

The noble Lord, Lord Liddle, has withdrawn, so I call the noble Lord, Lord Addington.

[Lord Addington (LD)]

My Lords, this is one of those occasions where I thought I knew what I was going to say before the debate started, but I have changed my mind—or, at least, my words—considerably having listened. When the Minister replies to this, I feel that the audience behind her might be the most worrying. I suggest that when the noble Lords, Lord Willetts and Lord Baker, are saying “beware of this”, any sensible Minister would listen. I know the noble Baroness falls into that category.

The Minister has to pay attention to what has been said. Everybody here said, “We are not sure what you are doing yet”. T-levels may sound neat, but we do not quite know what they are. Are they doing something else? Are they a replacement? I think it was the noble Lord, Lord Willetts, who asked if they are replacing BTECs, which are an established way forward and allow flexibility, university entrance and other qualifications. That is the sort of thing we want, especially as we are giving more power to level 4 and 5 qualifications, which is overly due. Can we have some assurance that there is no government thinking that T-levels will be used to replace all this? They will simply not lead to these places; they cannot.

Other institutions with qualifications which are understood and known, such as City & Guilds—if I do not mention City & Guilds, I fear that my noble friend might well have a few words with me afterwards—will be saying, “Everybody knows what these are.” If you are going to bring in T-levels, do it slowly and make sure that you are adapting them to take over these functions. A one-off exam at this age cannot do what these do because they do wonderful and flexible things. A few employers cannot find their way around them, but others can. You could simplify them a little and not sweep them away to do something else.

I will not follow the noble Lord, Lord Lucas, into his very intellectual comments about the destruction of post-modernism because we have quite enough on our plates without thinking about the centre of Glasgow and its planning issues. But I hope that when the Minister answers she will say that we are not getting rid of all of these good and established things straightaway, just because we have a lovely new toy that sounded good when we first put it forward. T-levels, I am afraid, will have to earn their stripes. They may become something that replaces or works into the rest of it, but further education deals with a diverse range of subjects and paths. It will never be that straightforward. I look forward to the Minister’s response and do not envy her task.

[Baroness Berridge (Con)]

My Lords, these amendments relate to the measures that support the implementation of the Government’s reforms to align the majority of technical qualifications to employer-led standards by 2030. To respond to the noble Lord, Lord Lucas, we are aiming here for all qualifications for learners to be of high quality and connected to those employer-led standards.

I was disappointed that the noble Baroness, Lady Garden, was not down to speak in this debate, because we had a very interesting discussion today where, as the noble Lord, Lord Flight, outlined, the key to what we are trying to do is to clarify the roles of a number of the institutions involved—IfATE, the OfS, which is relevant to the next amendment, Ofqual, the department and Ofsted.

We believe that the technical qualifications should cover the knowledge, skills and behaviours that are essential to an occupation. But the heart of the matter here, and one cause of the problems, is that although Ofqual accredits general qualifications such as A-levels and GCSEs, which are developed by awarding organisations, usually of the exam boards, in line with content set by government, the content of the majority of publicly funded technical qualifications is not specified or scrutinised centrally before the qualifications can be taught. That really is the nub of the problem here: Ofqual is not performing that function.

For parity of esteem, these reforms will bring the treatment of technical qualifications more in line with general qualifications. We have already done that process with T-levels, which were developed along with 250 employers to ensure that they met that standard. The content and employer-led standard then delivered, which could be by an FE college, is inspected and overseen by Ofsted. This process will raise the quality bar and deal with the issue of why we have, at level 3 and below, more than 12,000 qualifications, of which only about 800 are GCSE and A-level. As the Sainsbury review identified, we have had a proliferation of qualifications at that level, and many of them are currently created by the awarding organisations.

On the question of no one overseeing the content and it not being connected to an employer standard, we would not tolerate that in relation to GCSEs and A-levels, and someone needs to do that function. I have outlined the process for academic qualifications; the question then is who does that function. The institute currently manages the system of employer-led standards, and we believe it has the expertise to ensure that qualifications genuinely meet the skills of the economy, and the needs of learners and employers, and that it is right for the institute to lead this reform.

I explained some of these issues to noble Lords in the letter on 1 July. It is quite helpful that at the moment the position of chief regulator is being sorted out. Dr Jo Saxton, the Government’s preferred candidate, appeared last week in front of the Education Select Committee for the approval hearing, and was approved for the role. She was specifically asked about Ofqual and IfATE. She outlined that Ofqual will continue to play a key role with regulatory oversight of the standards of technical qualifications in live delivery, as it does currently. Ofqual and the institute are both needed as they contribute different and complementary sets of function and expertise. The two bodies will work together to assure, on Ofqual’s side, the consistency and reliability of assessment and awarding, as it does over the exam boards, and on the institute’s side the relevance to employers of the content of technical qualifications. When asked by the chair, she said:

“At its simplest, the curriculum side of it sits with IfATE. Once the curriculum has been agreed and approved to go forward, Ofqual’s job will be to make sure that any endpoint assessments and examinations continue to assess the curriculum that has been determined by IfATE and the employers and that receivers of the endpoint assessments and qualifications know that the awards they end up with accurately reflect what they know and can do. The relationship should work well. At its heart, it is essentially a separation between curriculum and regulation”.


I find that really helpful. That was the core purpose—she outlines why Ofqual was set up to be the regulator while the content of the curriculum was set out by the department.

--- Later in debate ---

Moved by

[Lord Addington]

62: Clause 16, page 19, line 9, at end insert—
“(2A) Regulations under subsection (1) must include provision to require ITT(FE) courses to include special educational needs awareness training relevant to the students of ITT(FE) courses within an institution.”

[Lord Addington (LD)]

My Lords, the intention of this amendment is straightforward. It is to probe and clarify. When you are training teachers in this field, can they be sure of the 20% to 25% of their students who have been identified as having special educational needs? When you get to further education, the proportion of those with special educational needs often rises. Those who have passed all their exams are not doing level 1 and level 2 qualifications, so in that situation you have a higher density.

Anybody who ever doubts this just needs to look at the number of people who we know have a neurological condition that is passed on. The figures make it clear. You are going to have a higher number of people. If we look at the number of people who have been identified as having these needs in the school system, many more will be unidentified. The maths just tells you that from the genetic stock and the numbers we have got.

What I am trying to get out of this is whether people will be trained to identify and train those people in front of them correctly. People will have different learning pathways. If someone cannot take notes from a blackboard very easily, can we do something else? Does the teacher know how to spot these people? Remember these are not the people who have been identified and have the plan; it is those who are on the edges.

--- Later in debate ---

[Baroness Penn (Con)]

My Lords, I am grateful to the noble Lord, Lord Addington, for this amendment. It highlights the importance of equipping teachers to identify and support learners with special educational needs. Further education teachers must be trained to identify and support the needs of all learners, enabling them to overcome barriers to their learning and allowing them to meet their full potential.

I concur with the noble Lord’s intention and I understand that he intends it as a probing amendment. He may be unsurprised to hear that I do not believe it is necessary to specify such a requirement in the Bill. Other mechanisms for achieving the same aim are more appropriate, and steps are already being taken.

Our reforms to teacher training are founded on a new occupational standard for FE teaching, which will specify the knowledge, skills and behaviours expected of FE teachers. This standard is being developed by a group of employers—colleges and other providers, so organisations which employ teachers—from across the sector, who bring a wealth of experience and expertise and are well placed to determine the right content for teacher training that will meet the needs of all their learners. We fully expect that the new standard will be explicit in its requirement for further education teachers to meet the needs of all learners, including those with a wide variety of special needs as well as learners from diverse backgrounds. We anticipate that the standard will be in place in time for the next academic year. It will form the basis of a new FE teaching apprenticeship, and we will support the reform of FE teaching qualifications so that they are also based on the standard. If, in future, the content of FE teacher training was considered of insufficient quality to meet the needs of all learners, this clause would give the Secretary of State the power to take appropriate steps.

To address the point I think I have understood from the noble Lord, Lord Watson: the reason we do not believe this amendment to be necessary is that we do not intend to use the powers in this Bill to take greater control or gain more centralisation of FE teacher training. We believe that the sector is doing the work needed to set out that standard and that steps will be taken within it to make the right provision for the training with regards to special educational needs. To allay his fears in relation to initial teacher training reforms for schools, I undertake to write to the noble Lord to further clarify that point.

I hope that with those brief remarks the noble Lord, Lord Addington, is assured that we are already taking steps to ensure that teaching in the FE sector meets the needs of all learners, including those with a wide range of special educational needs. On that basis, I hope he will be content to withdraw his amendment.

[Lord Addington (LD)]

My Lords, this is an odd one. Actually, I do not think that response really hit it, because there is supposed to be a report. The noble Lord, Lord Watson, pointed out that it is supposed to be out now. I cannot quite match the withering sarcasm he put into it: “Oh, autumn then, maybe.”

The entire education system is squaring up to the fact that special educational needs is not working in our schools at the moment. There is a series of cock-ups made by other bits of legislation, for which I have some of the blame for not spotting them coming down the line. Unless you are going to be specific about having somebody in there who can spot, transfer and change the way they are dealing with at least some of the most commonly occurring conditions, you are guaranteeing a degree of failure and underachievement. We might have a conversation about how this works, and there might be something behind this that I need to hear, but what I have heard today convinces me that this needs some more time.

I would have intervened on the noble Baroness if the process was going through, but I suspect we are going to have a more robust Report stage than normal because of this. It is not the noble Baroness’s fault, unless she wrote the brief herself. I think we have opened up something here. Teacher training is the best way of dealing with this so that you can deal with those who have moderate difficulties and certain patterns of behaviour. Small changes and a bit of reassurance—telling them they are not thick—are the best way to get a reaction out of many of the groups that I deal with. Saying “Hey, I think you’re dyslexic or dyspraxic or have ADHD; here are a few quiet, basic strategies; by the way, you’re not an idiot” dramatically improves the outcomes of that group, which is about 20% of the whole group we are dealing with. Dealing with that type of action enables them to start that process to take them on to somebody else, and that is so important.

The transition I am looking at is away from: “I have somebody in my classroom who is a pain, can’t concentrate and won’t spell. Oh, God, can we get rid of him?” And it is towards: “Oh, I think he needs a bit of help and support.” It is not about the dramatic ones who are easy to spot, who are going to get the plan. It is that level of expertise that we need.

Can we please engage so that we actually know what is coming? At the moment, there is a review going on. There should be more there. I hope that the next time we raise this, the noble Baroness, if she is still with us—I should not have opened that one up —or whoever answers this, provides better answers. Good intentions have always been there. The problem remains.

[Baroness Penn (Con)]

I will briefly respond to the noble Lord, because I do not think I will get the opportunity to take this conversation forward with him ahead of Report, although I am sure that others will be happy to continue that conversation.

The point of differentiation here is specifically about the approach to regulating teacher training in FE colleges versus the regulation of teacher training in schools. The latter is subject to a regulatory regime that allows the Secretary of State to set conditions for its content and delivery, but we do not have that equivalent provision for FE teacher training as the content is determined by the sector itself, working with organisations. Although this clause as drafted would enable the Secretary of State to prescribe course content if desired, with a view to improving the quality of FE initial teacher training courses, the initial intention is for the sector to do that work itself. The points that the noble Lord makes about how important it is that SEND is properly accounted for in this and the widest understanding—and not just those with education, health and care plans but the broadest spectrum, and those who may not have been identified before—are an integral part of that. With regard to specifying that as part of the reforms to the initial teacher training, we would hope not to use the powers of the Secretary of State to intervene in this area at the moment and would rather do it through collaboration with the sector.

I thought it might be useful to say just one or two words. That is not the end of the conversation, but someone else will take it forward with the noble Lord.

[Lord Addington (LD)]

I thank the Minister for bending the rules quite positively there. There will be a continuation of this discussion but I thank her for that and beg leave to withdraw the amendment.

Amendment 62 withdrawn.

--- Later in debate ---

So all that I am asking is that, as well as the measures of absolute performance that Ministers want, they also expect information that shows how universities are doing relative to the characteristics of their students. It is how, for example, the TEF—the teaching excellence framework—is already done. We should leave it to individuals to compare the information collected in those two different ways. They are both of value—I think of equal value—and it is a pity that the current framework of legislation in the Bill goes out of its way to prioritise one sort of data over another sort of data that is equally important for all of us who wish to hold universities to account for their performances.

[Lord Addington (LD)]

My Lords, this is an interesting group of amendments, because I think everybody would agree that universities as institutions have a duty of care to their students. They are adults, but most of them are only just adults. I must declare an interest here; I have an 18 year-old daughter who is expecting to go to university—and not only go to university, but a university in another country: Wales in this case, but there we are.

[Baroness Wilcox of Newport (Lab)]

It is another country.

[Lord Addington (LD)]

At least I have got that confirmed; I thank the noble Baroness for that aside.

The point here is about “Students like us, how do they do and what do they go through?” I have heard it from many people, and indeed from members of my own family. Two of my nephews are of mixed race and are wondering “Where do we go where people like us are?” We have to get this information out, because it is a perfectly normal thing. You are leaving the support structure of home and your parents, but there is some way of intervening.

The noble Lord, Lord Willetts, referred to special educational needs. We have a universal package there called the disabled students’ allowance. We have a structure within universities that means you actually have to give things. Members of the Front Bench have sparred with me on this—I think “sparred” is quite accurate—in the past. There is a structure of support and a standard, and you can take action if that standard is not fulfilled. That is difficult, but it is there. You have a support structure going through.

So having more information about what happens here and what goes on will not hurt. It is not that big an ask. People are posting about entrance requirements and groups are coming across—it is happening at the moment. I suggest that having more information gives a better guide to what can come out of the experience and what other people are experiencing on their way through. I think this information is being gathered in many places anyway, usually for internal commercial reasons by the institutions. It would not hurt to have it in there.

I do not know whether the Government are in the mood for accepting amendments at the moment. I always remember when it happened to me many years ago; it stunned me into silence for the rest of the evening. It may be a bit late in this day for doing that, but I just throw that out. It would be something that would be quite good to have. I would hope that the Government at least give us some idea that they are encouraging, if not requiring, people to do it.

[Baroness Morris of Yardley (Lab)]

My Lords, this is a particularly important group of amendments and the debate on it has been very good. I support all the amendments in this group. They have been very well spoken to by the people who put them down. I really want to add support and try not to go over the same points again.

They fall, basically, into two groups: the first on mental health and well-being and the second on how we measure outcomes. I will briefly comment on both. I very much support the amendments put forward by the noble Lord, Lord Lucas, and the way in which he put them forward. I was going to say that I was not sure the amendment was the right way to solve the problem, but he said it beforehand, so I see the amendment as very much drawing the issue to the attention of the Government and wanting a response.

My experience really came from when I was chair of council at one of the London colleges. I had the honour of giving out degree awards at the ceremonies twice a year. There is nothing as heartbreaking as giving out a degree posthumously to the parents of a student who has passed away through suicide. It is absolutely heartbreaking, and it happened more than once. That was just my experience at a relatively small college, and it will be replicated throughout universities.

We think of those children as adults, and they are: they are legally adults and they do adult things. But to begin with they are only a year out of school. By the time they graduate, they are only three years out of school, and children—young people, adults—develop at different rates. Somehow, we put a whole chasm between the pastoral support they get by the end of school, and the lack of pastoral support they get at the start of university. Somehow, we have to build a bridge between the two, particularly with academic high-flyers. There is often an emotional inability to cope with failure. One university lecturer said to me once that they had had an overseas student who committed suicide. They had to greet her parents from China and go through what had happened. They did not know, but their view was that it was the first time the child—the young woman—had ever found it difficult to come top of the class. She has come top of the class right the way through everything; she gets to a Russell group university and she does not come top of the class. She did not have the resilience to know how to deal with that.

We could spend a week discussing this, but the noble Lord, Lord Lucas, got this absolutely right. Universities hitherto have been slow to see this as an issue that they have a role to play in addressing. I should give credit to the Government, because I think I am right that they did something recently that means universities can tell parents if they feel their child is at risk. Certainly, in my day, when I was chair of council, legally a university could not phone up the parents without the young person’s permission, to say they were at risk.

The only way in which I would disagree with the noble Lord, Lord Lucas, is that I am not sure they need to be “watched”—I think that was the phrase he used. Universities need to be worked with to make them realise that this is a core part of their job. Once they can see that, they will extend their considerable prowess and commitment and care for their students into pastoral health, mental health and well-being, as much as they offer academic support. But they are at the beginning of that journey and anything the Minister can offer in this Bill, to give them the powers or the freedom, or just the direction, to do this, I certainly think would be a step worth taking.

I also want to say a little bit about the other amendments to which the noble Lord, Lord Willetts, spoke. This is also exceptionally important, because I absolutely agree with the premise that universities ought to be measured by student outcomes. It would be silly not to take into account student outcomes. We take them into account in schools. Why we would stop doing it when we get to universities, I am not quite sure.

I do not think we have a great record so far in deciding what outcomes universities should be measured by. I will not go into it, but I am a bit critical of some of the teaching excellence framework, the TEF criteria for success. One measure is whether their students are in employment 12 months after they finish their degree. For some subjects, they are not likely to be in employment in a degree-level subject. People in the creative arts very often make do for a year while they are finding their feet. They very often work in a pub or a restaurant while they are doing the creative work. Measure them in five years’ time and they will be flying, and that is a credit to their university, but it will not get the credit if they are not in a degree-level job after 12 months.

One measurement that is not used by the teaching excellence framework but is regularly used by the newspapers that publish the tables is the A-level mark needed to get into a university. If universities want to take risks and bring on young people who got Ds and Es at A-level and say, “We believe in them and want to give them a chance; they come from an area of disadvantage”, they get marked down in the league table. Why on earth would they do that? I thought that was what we wanted to do.

I do not think there is a very good record of getting the outcome measurement right. Universities are partly at fault because they did not want this and did not engage in the discussion. I think they left others to decide what the measurement outcome should be and are paying the price.

I have a couple of specific points. I agree with the noble Lord, Lord Willetts—why would we not want this extra information? Why would we not want to know what universities have achieved, in terms of outcomes, with specific groups of students? It adds to what we know about universities and it means that when we are developing policy, we can do so with more knowledge about how existing policy affects different groups of students and different institutions than we would have without this information. I cannot see one good reason for not requiring that information at this level should be collected. I look forward to the Minister’s response.

Clause 17(7) says:

“The OfS is not required”


to collect this information. I think it should be required, but will the Minister confirm that neither is it banned and that it could collect it if it wanted to? The noble Baroness is nodding, so I take it that it is allowed to collect it. That leads us to the question of whether it should be up to the Office for Students to decide whether this information is collected. It should not be up to the OfS, because it is useful to other people as well. I want to know it, as somebody who is involved in education and interested in policy-making. The Government should want to know it; the universities should want to know it; employers should want to know it. Why should the Office for Students not collect it so that others can have that information? Whether the OfS or the Government do anything with it is a different discussion, but not to collect it means that no one else can do anything with it.

My last point is that the world of schools is far more advanced in collecting data about pupil progress: it is 20 or 30 years more advanced. It has been through a lot of pain and made a lot of mistakes, but it is in a better state now than the universities. I just hope that the Office for Students learns lessons from those decades of trying to get the collection of data improved in schools.

One thing that ties into the amendments of the noble Lord, Lord Willetts, is that, to begin with and for many years, Ofsted and the examiners did not discuss with schools what the outcome measurements would be. All it created was a very poor relationship that has not done well for children, teachers or schools. We are still trying to get over it, so I very much support the amendments proposing that the Office for Students, in developing these measures, should discuss them with universities and all higher education providers. We are setting the framework now for the next stage of using measurements of outcome for university; it is really important that we get it right and I very much hope that the Government’s response to these amendments will give us greater clarity and perhaps highlight areas where further attention is needed.

Skills and Post-16 Education Bill [HL]

Lord Addington Excerpts

Committee stage
Monday 19th July 2021 Lords Chamber

[Lord Adonis (Lab)]

My Lords, in the previous group on Amendment 76A, the noble Baroness did not reply to my point about the international baccalaureate at all. I fully accept that she may not have the data I was after, but I would be grateful if she could put on record a commitment to write to me about it.

[Lord Addington (LD)]

My Lords, having had a look at this amendment, I really put my name down to speak to ensure we can thank the Government when they correct things on the go. It is a precedent that should be encouraged as we go through this, so I thank them for doing it. The description of the amendment the noble Baroness gave made sense to me, so more power to their elbow. I hope they will correct things as they go, with great rapidity.

[Baroness Sherlock (Lab) [V]]

My Lords, I thank the Minister for her explanation of these amendments. From what she said, this appears to be a minor change to Schedule 2 to HERA. I gather it will apply only to providers that have a TEF award but not an access and participation plan, which therefore can charge only the basic fee plus a TEF supplement. The legislation currently says that they have to have held the TEF award on 1 January in the year before the course starts, but I presume it should have said on 1 January before the course starts. That is a good lesson to all of us on the importance of careful drafting. Although it went through in 2017, I am glad they have now been able to correct it.

I take this opportunity to ask the Minister a couple of quick questions. First, will any current providers be affected by this? I imagine that none will be, as the last TEF assessment exercise was in 2018-19. All TEF awards had been due to expire this summer, but were extended to 2023 to give the Government time to create a new TEF scheme and make assessments under it. I imagine that means that the only people who will be affected by this amendment, any time soon, are new providers applying for provisional TEF awards. Could she confirm that? Since that provisional award process has only just opened and the awards will not be confirmed until September, I imagine it will only affect courses starting in 2022, but it seems a sensible move.

We are now in the strange position of most providers having a TEF award but being told by the Office for Students not to advertise it, because the assessments that led to them are now out of date. This is a rather sad state of affairs for a system launched with such fanfare, so could the Minister take this opportunity to give the Committee a brief update on what is happening with TEF and when we can expect to see proposals for a new TEF system?

--- Later in debate ---

[Lord Lucas (Con) [V]]

My Lords, these essay mills are getting ever more sophisticated and are employing in some cases quite high levels of artificial intelligence to disguise what they are creating based on existing sources so that the cheating software cannot find it. I suspect that there is no reasonable solution if we are to continue with a system where essays produced in unsupervised conditions count towards a qualification. However, there is some hope, and I encourage the Government to look down this avenue in the work that has been done, for instance, by FutureLearn on analysing the pattern of keystrokes made by a particular individual typing an essay and working on that essay while they are in the course of preparing it. That sort of analysis is very difficult to duplicate and defeat. If we use technology to defeat technology, we can again be confident about the quality of essays.

[Lord Addington (LD)]

My Lords, my noble friend—despite the fact that he has been defeated by the wonders of technology—here addresses one of the other problems we have. Something went from students who knew certain essays would come up in certain courses at certain times, and vaguely plagiarising them—that went on just about everywhere—to an industry that means students can gain a qualification. Continuous assessment is reckoned to be quite a good way of learning or of assessing somebody’s ability, or has been in many cases. That is particularly vulnerable to some of these services. The sums of money involved are considerable, because people are paying for it. Furthermore, a student who does this is then open to blackmail for the rest of their professional career. Their qualification, which is the way they make their living for the rest of their life, could be invalidated or they could have a black mark against them. They might not have to pay just a few hundred pounds but could end up paying tens of thousands over the course of their lifetime.

I hope that the Minister will give us a positive answer. My noble friend is quite assiduous on this—he has a Private Member’s Bill going through. If I may appeal to those who are planning government business, it might be a quicker and easier way to accept this amendment or one like it than to have to have an entire Bill go through Parliament. There is not much hope of that but let us try.

Can we find out what the Government are planning to do about this? Technical checking of every essay might be possible—I do not know the state of play of the technology—but everything will have to be entered to be assessed by it, and I am not sure how long that takes. We will have to look at this and at things such as dissertations, or studying by oneself, which are a traditional part of long-term studies in further and higher education. These cannot really be done in any other way than a person working independently, unless there is a lot more monitoring or a lot more time spent on it by staff.

We will have to deal with this problem, or at least learn to live with it and minimise its impact. I hope that the Minister can tell us that there is a coherent plan to at least display the dangers of blackmail and coercion that people are exposed to throughout the rest of an academic career. This is a real problem, and if we can solve it or at least make it slightly better now, surely we should.

[The Deputy Chairman of Committees (Lord Faulkner of Worcester) (Lab)]

The noble Lord, Lord Adonis, has withdrawn from this group so I call the noble Baroness, Lady Sherlock.

--- Later in debate ---

Moved by

[Lord Addington]

78: After Clause 25, insert the following new Clause—
“Further education colleges: careers advice
(1) In carrying out inspections of further education colleges, Ofsted has a duty to take into account the careers advice provided to students by colleges, including for the delivery of LSIPs.(2) Ofsted may only give a good or outstanding rating to a college if it considers that the careers advice provided by the college is of a good or outstanding standard.”Member’s explanatory statement
This amendment aims to ensure that young people are supported in their career choices with good careers guidance by making poor careers provision a limiting factor for grading in inspections.

[Lord Addington (LD)]

My Lords, this group of amendment refers to careers guidance. They are very appropriate to go into the Bill, and many different options run through them. The one tabled by my noble friend is more compact, but with more information than we find in some of the others. Any one of these approaches is valid, because we need to get something in the Bill that gives some guidance through our system of education.

At the moment, our teachers have gone through a series of exams—GCSEs, A-levels and university—and know what they are doing there. The system knows what it is doing. If we can provide a better service that takes people through the various aspects of what is on offer to various people—particularly in further education—they will get a better idea of what their options are as a student or person going through training, and can go back to refer to it.

The principle has had almost universal agreement; it is just about how we implement it. How will we make sure that somebody knows this quite complicated series of routes? It is further complicated by the fact that, at the moment, further education is the thing you do if you are not academic. The Bill suggests that there are ways forward for which a degree of academic rigour will be required but which are actually training—they are level 4 and 5 qualifications.

As has already been stated today, I have heard that we have been short of people qualified at technician level for 30 years—and I think the shortage goes back further than that. We have always had this problem. There has always been this approach of “Well, you can if you want to”, or “If your A-levels aren’t quite good enough to get to university, you can take on this.” There are myriad qualifications lower down—justifiably, because you have myriad training paths to go down. We will need somebody who studies the options to explain to students and parents how to proceed. I hope that we will get an idea in the debate about the Government’s thinking on this and how they will change the process because, at the moment, it does not matter what you do in the other sector if you do not let anybody know about it in a coherent and planned pattern.

If I remember correctly, my noble friend’s amendment would introduce interventions in certain years before students make decisions, which may well be a valid approach; certainly, it is as good as any I have heard so far. We must make sure that people understand, know, make decisions and plan their lives and the various steps so that they are taking these options on board—or at least are not ruling them out.

Most people generally know where they are headed in education by the age of about 14, so some form of intervention from about then onwards would be sensible, but it will be a difficult job and will require specialist, trained people with a great deal of knowledge to do it properly. It is something we should have done a long time ago, and I hope that, when she replies, the Minister will give us at least a coherent steer as to where the Government’s thinking is. At the moment, we are dealing with something that simply does not work and should have been dealt with a long time ago. I beg to move.

[Lord Baker of Dorking (Con)]

My Lords, first, I owe an apology. Normally when I speak in this House I ad lib from a handful of notes and do not read out a written speech. The last time I read out a written speech that I had written myself was 29 years ago, when I was a Minister. So I am breaking my record, and I am reading it out only because this matter involves the law. Not being a lawyer, I remember some advice my father gave me a very long time ago. He said, “When you grow up, be careful what you say to a priest, a doctor or a lawyer”. So I ask noble Lords’ forgiveness.

I declare my interest as chairman of the Baker Dearing Educational Trust. In 2017, the Government accepted my amendment to the Technical and Further Education Act to allow providers of alternative education, such as FE colleges, apprenticeship providers, private learning and training course providers, and university technical colleges, to go into secondary schools and explain to students the various alternative education pathways for their education and training. At the time this was looked on as a breakthrough in careers guidance.

When my old department was devising the legislation, I asked it to make it a statutory duty for schools to provide such meetings, but I was told that the Department for Education would depend on giving ministerial guidance to all secondary schools, and the secondary schools would follow. The advice was largely disregarded by schools and, when complaints were made to Ministers about schools refusing access to specific providers, such as university technical colleges, the department did not act on these complaints to insist that the meetings should take place. There has been no help from the department for the last three years.

This amendment would make it a statutory duty for all secondary schools to provide meetings with their students between 1 September and 28 February in each academic year. These dates are essential because school recruitment lists end on 31 March. By then, students will have selected which school/education pathway they wish to attend. The amendment specifically provides for years 8 and 9, year 11, and year 13, which means that 13 and 14 year-olds, 15 and 16 year-olds, and 18 year-olds will be advised of the various alternatives available for their education and training.

The amendment has secured cross-party support from the noble Baroness, Lady Morris, and the noble Lord, Lord Adonis, from the Labour Party, the noble Lord, Lord Storey, from the Lib Dems, and the noble Lord, Lord Field, from the Cross Benches. I have taken separate legal advice and I am assured that this amendment would work satisfactorily.

I acknowledge that improvements to implement the Baker clause have been taken by Ofsted and the Government. Ofsted has said:

“If a school is not meeting the requirements of the Baker Clause, inspectors will state this in the inspection report. They will consider what impact this has on … CIEAG and the subsequent judgement for personal development.”


That is most welcome, although it does not directly say whether this would influence the inspectors’ judgment of the overall position of the school.

Robert Halfon, the chair of the Education Select Committee in the Commons, has said that, if a school has not implemented the Baker clause, it should not be rated either good or outstanding. I understand that he has support from members of his committee on that position. This is putting Ofsted’s judgment very close to the judgment on safeguarding, which merits inevitably an “inadequate”. It should also be remembered that only a relatively small number of schools get inspected each year, and some heads may be encouraged to delay a meeting so that it does not take place and risk whether that will be noticed. One should never underestimate the determination of heads of secondary schools to prevent their students knowing about alternative pathways and so keep them in their school’s sixth form, even knowing that several of them would do much better in alternative education.

The Government have also significantly improved the guidance, which was issued only on Friday in a document of 43 pages. I might be the only Member of the House who has read it from beginning to end. I do not recommend it for light reading. Page 7 confirms that the Baker clause has not been implemented; page 14 makes it clear that any complaint against a refusal of access should be heard locally and made to the governing body of the school, which will make a decision on it. This could be a lengthy and expensive process.

The case can then be referred to the Department for Education, but the department recognises that it cannot change an academy’s decision about a complaint—it does not have that power. The role of the department is solely to ensure that the complaint has been handled properly. This means that it is clear that the Baker clause does not impose a statutory duty to provide a meeting, because if it did the department could tell the school that it must arrange a meeting forthwith. No such direction has been given by the department over the last three years. So the present law is defective, and the Government recognise in this document that it has to be changed.

Page 35 makes it very clear that the department wants to see the Baker clause implemented. It says it will “consult on policy proposals” and announce these in September, and it plans to change the law for January 2022. I, of course, welcome that.

My amendment would provide a solution to this problem. I invite the department and the Minister to study it very carefully, as it would clearly create a statutory duty for a school to provide a meeting for all students of the appropriate ages between 1 September and 28 February. Those dates are very important as school admission lists close on 31 March. Therefore, a meeting in the summer term would be futile. Moreover, in the summer term schools are preoccupied with revision, and in June and July, as a result of exams, they are half empty.

I am also glad that the Government make it clear that heads cannot select to attend these meetings those students they want to off-roll and send to other schools. That is an improvement on what they have said in the past.

The guidance, which is good, goes on to say that all students must be able to attend to hear post-16 and post-18 options. This seems to exclude university technical colleges, studio schools and FE colleges that wish to recruit at 14. Year 8 students at the age of 13 must also hear these options. This is recognised in the guidance document on page 41, which says that events for UTCs should take place in the autumn term for year 8 students—a quite specific statement. That should also apply to studio schools and FE colleges—I hope that the Minister or the officials are noting that—because they also recruit at 14. I very much welcome that clarity. I am satisfied that it does make quite clear that UTCs can apply to have meetings in the autumn term, but I suggest that this could be extended to the spring term as well. It is a matter of logistics for the local school as to whether it is more convenient.

This is a very clear statement of the policy that the Government want to pursue, but it must be backed up with a statutory duty that schools must comply with the guidance. I suggest to the Government and to the Minister that, during Recess, I could meet with her—I have not had the chance to meet with her personally, which I am sure I would enjoy—and her officials, as they have made it clear that they would welcome views. When we return in September for Report, we will know what the legal position is. If it is satisfactory and the duty of the school is clearly defined, it will not be necessary to submit this amendment for debate. But if it is not clear and there is not a very clear duty for the schools to arrange these meetings, this amendment will be retabled and put to a decision of the House.

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[Baroness Penn (Con)]

I am aware that that was one option being looked at to improve the way that young people can navigate their next steps, post school. I do not have the specific outcome of that investigation to hand, so I will happily write to the Committee on that matter.

[Lord Addington (LD)]

My Lords, this has been an interesting debate and one which brought, I am afraid, horrible reminders for me about the situation on special educational needs. Something should happen, and we have done something that should correct it, but it has not. The noble Lord took us through the appeals process. I felt that most pupils would have left school by the time it had finished, which does not give a parent or the person driving it that much incentive to follow it through, to be perfectly honest.

Will the Minister take on board the intentions behind this, because at the moment it is not working? We do not have that breadth of knowledge going in to inform pupils and parents about the options. We just do not have it and, although it might be slightly better under this direction of travel—the Minister said “In a little while”—there will still be lots of holes, judging by the past record. We are going into a culture that does not want to change because it is quite comfy with where it is, thanks very much. It quite likes getting people X grades and on to X institutions, then forgetting about it.

If we are talking in the Bill about giving a broader aspect to what people can get out of this—I come back to levels 4 and 5, the underplayed bit of the education system—we are going to have to educate pupils and teachers, and everybody else, that they have something that can give them a career pathway that may well be more rewarding than, for instance, higher education. It has to go a lot wider than apprenticeships; apprenticeships have been the silver bullet that has successfully missed the mark. We have even run out of ammunition because we are not getting people there. We have got to do better.

If I had to choose a favourite from this little pack of amendments, I would probably run with the amendment from the noble Lord, Lord Baker. With his level of experience on this, I do not suppose that is any surprise to anybody. I would suggest that we will have to look at this in further detail on Report. There is no disagreement here about the fact that more work needs to be done. There is disagreement only about what progress and what weight has to be put behind the process of change. Bearing that in mind, I beg leave to withdraw Amendment 78.

Amendment 78 withdrawn.

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Moved by

[Lord Addington]

87: After Clause 25, insert the following new Clause—
“Review of Kickstart scheme
(1) The Secretary of State must review the operation of the Kickstart scheme.(2) The review under subsection (1) must consider—(a) extending the lifetime of the current scheme; and(b) extending the criteria of those eligible to benefit from the scheme beyond those receiving universal credit.”

[Lord Addington (LD)]

My Lords, once again I find myself stepping into the shoes of my noble friend Lord Storey. Regardless of how comfortable those shoes are, I will do my best. This is something where we are saying that the Government have done something pretty well and asking if they will carry on doing it—that is the essence of what is in front of me. The Kickstart scheme seems to have started well and at the right time because, when any job market goes into a state of convulsion, the people who are shed are the young and less qualified. You take a chance on people coming into the job market, but you might not want to take quite that degree of chance.

Kickstart seems to have done well. It is not perfect, but it would surprise nobody who has been looking at this for any length of time that, when a new government scheme comes in, smaller firms have trouble accessing it. We would expect that, to be honest. Things like this are smoothed out by planning them, looking at them and making sure they go on. If the Government are not prepared to do that, we need an explanation of why because, with the job market in flux, as I said before, we will need things like this to get people involved. If the Government do not like what they are seeing in this scheme, they should tell us why. It was supposed to end in December, but I think we have 150 jobs promised, from the information I have. The CBI has come out and said that it is a good scheme which it likes, and others have said that before. So why are the Government not taking that on board and improving it? We could use it for a little longer.

The amendment itself basically just calls for the Secretary of State to review and consider the Kickstart scheme:

“The review under subsection (1) must consider … extending the lifetime of the current scheme; and … extending the criteria of those eligible to benefit from the scheme beyond those receiving universal credit.”


The Government had a good idea and did some good work. It seems to be working, so can they now build upon it, not stop it? That is essentially what this is about. I beg to move.

[Baroness Fox of Buckley (Non-Afl)]

My Lords, I broadly support Amendment 87, although I will probe rather more on what we could get out of Kickstart moving forward and what some of the issues are. I started off as quite an enthusiast for KickStart, but for me it has failed to live up to its promise. However, there is a chance that by reviewing it, it could be made more positive and make a positive contribution to this Bill. That is why I am keen on the amendment. If the last time I spoke regarding the Bill I worried out loud about the dangers of too short-term an approach to skills and training and too much power being given to employers to define what skills are needed, conversely I now note that sometimes, short-term and immediate issues, from the threat of mass youth unemployment to skills shortages in the here and now, require a degree of urgency and a more central role for employers. Sadly, Kickstart has slightly missed out on this and does neither.

To remind ourselves, the challenges facing young people in the labour market in the here and now have been exacerbated by Covid-19. Policy decisions have effectively closed down whole sectors in which young workers are overrepresented. The highest job losses have been in accommodation and food, wholesale and retail, and arts and entertainment—the three industries with the highest percentage of young people in the workforce. We must recognise that the non-Covid collateral damage of lockdown is indeed young people’s job prospects. In that sense, Kickstart should have been a godsend, but it is rather misnamed. It sounds urgent and dynamic, but the take-up has been sluggish. Despite the promise of a quarter of a million new jobs for the young and claims of 195,000 jobs approved, fewer than 20,000 people have started jobs created by the scheme, and even with scrapping the ludicrous requirement for employers to create 30-plus opportunities, forcing the SMEs into a bureaucratic labyrinth of those gateways, it has not really speeded things up enough.

I would like a review of this because there is still too much red tape. To quote a couple of employers, they are keen to avail themselves of this scheme, but it has been “like pulling teeth” and “extremely frustrating”. They say that the application process is lengthy with a lot of paperwork and an extremely saturated line of communication. I have not given up on Kickstart and I am glad to see, as the noble Lord just mentioned, that the CBI seems to be united with the TUC and a lot of business federations in still seeing Kickstart as useful, but it needs some time. As the amendment argues, I am mystified as to why this scheme would end in December 2021, since it is only just kicking in.

The DWP says that the hiring process will be ramped up as lockdown unwinds, unlocking key sectors, but as unlocking has been constantly delayed, only starting today and even then hesitantly, if the Government close Kickstart in December, they are giving it less than half a year to have any real effect. That is important. The amendment also tries to free up Kickstart and not confine it to those in receipt of universal credit. This is an important point, for a number of reasons. The young, most in need of work and training related to employment progress, are often working, but they might be on zero-hours contracts or picking up part-time work stacking shelves. Therefore, the initiative should not exclude them from Kickstart. We also know from the latest furlough data that the young are more likely to be furloughed. Realistically, when furlough ends, many could be jobless. Why insist on them having a six-month gap on universal credit before letting them access Kickstart for their job prospects?

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[Baroness Penn (Con)]

My Lords, the Kickstart scheme was created and deployed rapidly to provide urgent jobs for young people to support their long-term work prospects. Kickstart will help to reduce the long-term effects of unemployment caused by the pandemic.

To be effective, the scheme must be targeted. It is for that reason that Kickstart funds the creation of jobs for people aged 16 to 24 on universal credit and at risk of long-term unemployment. Through Kickstart, these young people have the chance to build confidence and skills in the workplace and gain experience that will improve their chances of progressing to find long-term, sustainable work.

Turning to the amendment in the name of the noble Lord, Lord Storey, I should point out that, as with other grant funding schemes, the Kickstart scheme is not cited in legislation but exists pursuant to the powers of the Secretary of State for Work and Pensions under Section 2 of the Employment and Training Act 1973. The amendment would not therefore be appropriate as it seeks to make legislative amendments to something not named or referenced in legislation. However, I understand that the point of the amendment is perhaps rather more probing and, in fact, encouraging from some noble Lords; I will seek to address their points about the Kickstart scheme in my response.

I assure the noble Lord, Lord Addington, the noble Baroness, Lady Fox, and others that the Department for Work and Pensions already keeps the Kickstart scheme under review. It continues to deliver Kickstart jobs to the young people who need them most. However, I am afraid that I must disappoint noble Lords because, at present, there are no plans either to expand Kickstart outside the current eligibility criteria or to expand the length of the scheme.

As I said, Kickstart was designed as a response to the impact of the pandemic and the economic restrictions put in place at the time. As we are phasing out those restrictions, we will transition to a new phase in our response. However, let me say to noble Lords that the Kickstart scheme will run until December; that is the last date for placements on the scheme, which run for a further six months into 2022. After the winding down of the Kickstart scheme at that point, a range of support will continue to be on offer for all young people, including those claiming jobseeker’s allowance or universal credit. This support offer involves placements on the sector-based work academy programme.

The noble Lord, Lord Watson, referred to apprenticeships. Although we do not plan to link Kickstart and apprenticeships formally, he will be aware of the incentive payments that we have put in place during the pandemic to encourage employers to take on young people through the routes of traineeships, work experience, mentoring circles, basic skills training and skills boot camps, in addition to locally available support.

Young people aged between 18 and 24 in the intensive work search regime of universal credit are able to access the DWP youth offer, which offers them wraparound support through the 13-week youth employment programme and is complemented by joined-up local delivery through our youth hubs and specialist youth employability coaches. As some noble Lords will know, we have recruited an additional 13,500 DWP work coaches and established more than 140 youth hubs across England, Scotland and Wales.

The noble Baroness, Lady Fox, spoke about some young people most in need of employment progression perhaps not being in receipt of universal credit and not qualifying for this programme. She is right: Kickstart is focused not on those who might need progression but on those who are unemployed and at risk of long-term unemployment. We will not seek to amend its criteria in that way.

To the noble Lord, Lord Adonis, the Department for Work and Pensions will monitor and evaluate the Kickstart scheme throughout and after its implementation, and will continue to evaluate the longer-term outcomes for Kickstart participants after they have completed their six-month placements. The Department for Work and Pensions will publish the findings of that evaluation once it is complete.

The noble Lord, Lord Lucas, asked for more support for employers to take on Kickstarters. The £1,700 is in addition to paying the salary of the Kickstarter for the duration of their placement. As the noble Lord, Lord Watson, referred to, we have had great employer engagement in providing these opportunities. My understanding is that 145,000 jobs are currently available. To update the statistic that the noble Lord, Lord Watson, had for the number of young people who have started on Kickstart, as of 30 June that has reached 40,000—so that is a significant ramp-up in delivery. On average we currently have 500 starts to Kickstart jobs per working day. Noble Lords were right to point out that we had to make some improvements to how the scheme ran, but it is now running at a faster and better pace and delivering that support to young people.

Although I am afraid I cannot say that we will extend the duration of the Kickstart scheme or change its eligibility, as I said, we keep it under review at the Department for Work and Pensions. A longer-term evaluation of that scheme will also be undertaken. I therefore hope that the noble Lord, Lord Addington, is able to withdraw the amendment on behalf of his noble friend.

[Lord Addington (LD)]

My Lords, I am trying to sum up what has been said. Apart from anything else, “Storey-cum-Addington” from the noble Lord, Lord Aberdare, sounds like a small village in a not very distinguished novel. We will let that one go.

It is a very odd thing. The Government put huge effort into a scheme and there seem to be some signs of hope. I am not sure whether I am much less enthusiastic about the Government, what progress they have made and the promise of jobs than the noble Lord, Lord Watson, so I am being much more optimistic. We can possibly discuss that later.

The Government have said they are keeping things under review. I cannot remember the number of things the Government keep under review. Just about everything is kept under review for a period, officially, so saying they are doing that does not really answer the general thrust of the amendment. Are they going to take it, look at it, study it and develop it, or are they going to say, “We’ll have a look at it sometime, maybe never, and remember that it’s in the archive”? That is the real difference here.

I appreciate that the amendment may well be defective because apparently this is done by regulation, which is in the gift of the Secretary of State—fair enough.

As for the idea from the noble Lord, Lord Adonis, suggesting that my noble friend include it in his review, that would not really address the point, would it? Apart from anything else, a committee of the House would quite rightly have my head if I told it what it was supposed to be doing. It having a look at this and making some small assessment for a report that will come out in a period of time would go right beside the Government’s long-term review of something.

If the Government are seriously going to learn about this, take it on board and take some action, I will be surprised but glad. Under those caveats, I beg leave to withdraw the amendment.

Amendment 87 withdrawn.

Skills and Post-16 Education Bill [HL]

Lord Addington Excerpts

Committee stage
Wednesday 21st July 2021 Lords Chamber

[Lord Addington (LD)]

My Lords, I can be fairly brief, given that my noble friend has just done some of the heavy lifting on the amendment standing in her name and that of my noble friend Lord Storey.

Universal credit is there to help people, and it replaced a lot of other benefits. However, there are problems relating to the fact that generally one is supposed to be looking for work, but the system seems to exclude people from taking on training. That is purely an absurdity. If one wants to try to improve the skills levels of the nation, surely every time that people are available, often when they are not in work, it would be a good chance for them to take up that reskilling.

We need to get people better skilled. I hope that the Government when they answer will be able to tell us exactly how they are going to get those groups of people who are available to take up the training and skill opportunities to take part, because presumably some of them are not doing anything else. If one takes away the foundation on which they are able to live, one is stopping them taking part.

That is not a new problem, but at the moment the benefits system is acting in many cases as a disincentive to upskilling. We should do everything we can to change that. This is as good a time as any.

[Baroness Greengross (CB) [V]]

My Lords, I support the intentions of these three amendments. In essence, they would allow people on universal credit to engage in study without being financially disadvantaged.

The current situation creates a perverse disincentive, whereby those wishing to upskill and gain qualifications that may make them more employable find themselves financially worse off as they no longer receive universal credit payments. Allowing people to study and gain new skills improves their chances of getting off benefits and into employment. Whatever short-term savings the Government make by not paying benefits to people who enrol in training courses, they are lost if the system incentivises people to stay on universal credit rather than participating in education.

One understands completely the desire to limit benefit numbers and, further, to encourage those who can work while studying to do so. However, this needs to be carefully balanced with the need to encourage upskilling at a time when our workforce is changing rapidly—and will continue to do so, in my view.

This is an area that the Department for Work and Pensions and the Department for Education need to work together to solve. Can the Government outline what work has been done to date by both departments on this important policy area? What steps will they take to ensure that universal credit policy is not inadvertently discouraging people from participating in crucial skills training?

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[Lord Addington (LD)]

My Lords, when the Government are asked to have a long-term look at something, the usual answer is, “We are”. That is what generally comes out with all these different things, but the advantage of the right reverend Prelate’s amendment, which I have signed, is that it puts it in one nice solid place and gives us three good bases to start from.

I was initially attracted by the support for special educational needs, and I remind the Committee yet again of my interests in that particular part of the playground. But looking at things regularly, over a long period of time, is essential if a policy is to develop. To go back to special educational needs, there was a long development of saying, “Of course you can, but a requirement on the way in”—I have an interest in dyslexia—“is that, by the way, you have to pass a written test in English, despite your having God knows how many other qualifications.” I remind the Committee of how many hours I have burned on that subject over the years. If you have a way in, how do you maintain that person? Does that maintenance pattern keep up with both the understanding and the technology out there at the moment? That is a pattern of development that comes one after the other and will change over time.

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Moved by

[Lord Addington]

91: Before Clause 14, insert the following new Clause—
“Personal Education and Skills Account
(1) A Personal Education and Skills Account (“PESA”) is an account—(a) held by an eligible adult (an “account holder”); and(b) which satisfies the requirements of this section.(2) An eligible adult is a person who—(a) is aged 18 or over; and(b) is ordinarily resident in England.(3) A PESA may be held only with a person (an “account provider”) who has been approved by the Secretary of State in accordance with regulations.(4) The Secretary of State may by regulations establish a body to administer the operation of the PESA scheme. (5) In the case of each person who is eligible under subsection (2), the body established under subsection (4) must open a PESA for that person.(6) If a person does not wish to hold a PESA, they must inform the body under subsection (4) in writing in accordance with regulations.(7) The Secretary of State must pay into each PESA a deposit of £4,000 during the year in which each account holder attains the age of 25 and a deposit of £3,000 during the year in which each account holder attains—(a) the age of 40; and(b) the age of 55.(8) Further contributions may be made to a PESA by—(a) an account holder;(b) employers; or(c) any other person as may be prescribed by regulations by the Secretary of State.(9) At any time after an account holder has attained the age of 25, they may transfer funding from their PESA to an approved institution for their chosen education or training course.(10) For the purposes of subsection (9) an “approved institution” is—(a) a “relevant provider” under section 18;(b) such other education or training providers as may be approved by the Office for Students.(11) Prior to an account holder making an initial funding transfer, the National Careers Service must offer a careers guidance consultation to that account holder.”Member’s explanatory statement
This amendment provides for individual “skills wallets” which may be used by a person to pay for education and training courses throughout their lifetime. The Government will make a payment of £4,000 when an individual turns 25 and then two further payments of £3,000 when an individual turns 40 and 55.

[Lord Addington (LD)]

My Lords, I am sorry that I am out from the subs’ bench here. This amendment is quite straightforward and an act of unprecedented generosity from the Liberal Democrats because it was a clear commitment in our 2019 election manifesto. It is a practical way of dealing with some of the problems that we are looking at here. We would create a personal education and skills account, or a skills wallet. We can go through the amendment in fine detail, but I think my noble friend Lady Janke will be in a much better position to do that than I will. The principle behind this is that you have a degree of money that you are in control of to help you update or change your skills.

Anybody of my age who looks at the various changes in the work environment will know that you not only had to upgrade your skills, you had to change them. The world is a very different place. Let us face it—everything we hear at the moment suggests that the world of work and the skills required for it are liable to change rapidly over the next few years. There is the technical revolution and the digital revolution. Will they continue? Will they evolve? There is also the green revolution going on in the world of work.

The level of possible change required within those ideas is massive. Having the ability to say, “Yes, I have at certain times the ability to change my skill set,” must have some attraction to all those listening. When the Minister responds, I would like her to let us know the Government’s thinking on that idea.

We have given the Government a series of options here; whether they will decide to pay us the ultimate compliment by taking our ideas, I do not know. The ones that we have down here are that you can upgrade, you can change and you are in charge. Maybe you could argue about the times at which you might intervene, but not by much. They are reasonably well paced throughout somebody’s working life. There is an initial stage, then a few years in, then a few years more and then towards the end, as—we are told—we will all be working longer. Surely, that is about right.

I think the fact that you have good careers guidance going in with this is very important. These are components that have to be involved to keep somebody working productively for longer. They come in together and the person has a greater degree of control. There is less bureaucracy as you can choose where you go. You can go to regular employers and trainers, who are identified as being of a certain standard. That is the idea behind this.

I hope that the Government will be quite open to these ideas—and possibly this amendment. Who knows? I am not putting a great deal of money on that but, hey, we live in hope. If we could find out the Government’s thinking on this, we would all be slightly better informed for the next stage of Bill. I beg to move.

[Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle (GP) [V]]

My Lords it is a pleasure to follow—if unexpectedly—the noble Lord, Lord Addington, and to express support for the intention of this amendment. In a way, it is an acknowledgement that individuals gaining skills is to the benefit of all us. We should acknowledge that we are not talking here about narrow, financial cost-benefit calculations, but rather acknowledging that skills have a wide range of advantages for us all, embedded as they are in individuals.

I will be brief and I shall resist, with some difficulty, the urge for a cheap political shot about student fees. I have to note, however, that this amendment provides one way to ensure that people can access courses for free. There is an obvious, much simpler way to do that, which would be to abolish student fees and ensure that we are not, as the Bill is currently doing, expanding the burden of debt weighing on individuals in our society.

I look forward to the Minister’s response anyway. The question I am really asking is: do the Government acknowledge that skills are not something just acquired by individuals—I go back to the reference to social solidarity from the noble Lord, Lord Watson—but something that we all benefit from and should all help to pay for?

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[Baroness Berridge (Con)]

My Lords, I am grateful for this opportunity to further discuss our vision for lifelong learning. As part of the lifetime skills guarantee, and as I hope noble Lords are now aware, the lifelong loan entitlement will be introduced from 2025. It will provide individuals with a loan entitlement to the equivalent of four years of post-18 education, to use over their lifetime. It will be available for modules and full courses of study at higher technical and degree levels, at levels 4 to 6, regardless of whether they are provided in colleges or universities. I hope that the noble Baroness, Lady Janke, is reassured that this plan will provide flexibility. I say to the noble Lord, Lord Addington, that it will enable people to update and change their skill base across their lifetime.

While the sentiment of the amendment to develop lifelong learning is admirable and one the Government share, unfortunately the personal skills account policy would create significant fiscal and logistical challenges—so at this point I would advise the noble Lord, Lord Addington, not to place any bets on its acceptance. The amendment could disrupt our established loan support system to accommodate an additional system of grants. This would substantially increase the costs to the taxpayer, both in the cost of such grants themselves and in their administration.

The amendment suggests that a new body would be created to administer these learning accounts for every adult resident in England. This process would have to happen seven years before an individual could first make use of any funds at 25, and integration of these new accounts with the Student Loans Company’s existing operations would have significant costs and operational impacts. Moreover, there is an opportunity cost to the Government in depositing thousands of pounds into these accounts, only for them potentially to be left idle and waiting for an unknown point of use. This poses a strong contrast to our current loan support, which is available at the point of study.

To answer one of the questions raised by the noble Baroness, Lady Bennett, we are all contributing to further and higher education, as what is called the RAB rate is currently 53p in the pound. That is what the Government end up paying for under the current student loan system that is not repaid by the student.

Finally, these significant changes to the basis of our student finance offer would risk delaying the rollout of the lifelong loan entitlement beyond 2025. I know that many noble Lords have sought to bring that date even earlier. As noble Lords will be aware, the introduction of the lifelong loan entitlement was a key recommendation from the Independent Panel Report to the Review of Post-18 Education and Funding, led by Sir Philip Augar. It was also endorsed by the Economic Affairs Committee of your Lordships' House. We want to ensure that the lifelong loan entitlement provides value for money to students, the education sector and the taxpayer. I am afraid this amendment is at odds with these aims. As such, I hope that the noble Lord, Lord Storey—sorry, I meant the noble Lord, Lord Addington—will feel able to withdraw this amendment.

[Lord Addington (LD)]

My Lords, I should now mention my noble friend Lady Garden, so that all three of us who have covered the Front Bench can be in on this one.

I am not surprised that the Government are not going down there. If I had any money on the Government accepting this, it would have been only on very long odds. However, we are getting a little clearer on what lifelong learning will mean under the Bill and under the current Government. We might want to dig further into the difference in approach here at a later stage of the Bill, but it is certainly something that we must look at all the options for. If the noble Baroness, Lady Wilcox, looks in our manifesto, she will see that the costings are there. I am sure that is a bit of light reading that she will embrace massively over the holiday.

Having been given that bit of assurance and saying that we will probably come back to this, I beg leave to withdraw the amendment.

Amendment 91 withdrawn.

--- Later in debate ---

So I wonder if the Minister would agree that we need not only a proper economic impact analysis of the ELQ restriction but a serious and holistic evaluation of the economic costs and benefits of creative arts education before we wave through the LLE. If the Treasury really wants to save big money, the Government should abandon any plans that they might have to restrict student choice in this way and instead focus on fixing some of the needlessly costly features of the student loan that my noble friend Lord Willetts mentioned earlier—for example, reducing the student loan repayment threshold could save billions and significantly reduce the proportion of the student loan book that ends up being subsidised by the taxpayer. This would be a far better way of putting the student finance system on a sustainable footing than constraining student choice, stifling education for the creative industries and choking off the supply of talent to socially valuable but lower-earning professions.

[Lord Addington (LD)]

My Lords, of the two speeches that we have had so far, the noble Baroness’s introduction of the amendments seemed reasonable and necessary. Then we heard the speech of the noble Lord, Lord Johnson. When someone who has been involved in the system as recently as the noble Lord says that you have got something wrong, I would listen hard and long—so I hope that, when the noble Baroness responds to that, she will give the impression that that is happening, because the creative arts and the creative sector pay for themselves. Many of my noble friends have spent a great deal of time on this, not usually with the noble Baroness but with others—the noble Baroness, Lady Barran, can probably show you the scars of dealing with that. This must be looked at because the creative sector is a growing part of our economy, and the ways in are not usually through formal qualification.

The amendments in this group with my name—Amendments 99 and 99B—go back to the familiar territory of special educational needs. Amendment 99 basically tries to say that higher education has a series of support structures involved for those with special educational needs who are going through it. The noble Baroness, Lady Penn, referred to one of my slight irritants on this subject—that we are dealing with higher needs, but most people with special educational needs do not have higher needs but just have slight difficulties in certain sectors.

In the higher education sector, one of the most useful things is information capture, for instance—namely, taping or recording lectures and tutorials and playing them back in certain formats, meaning that the person can digest it in other ways, such as in a written format that you do not have to take notes on, which is the great killer for dyslexics. Several pages of hieroglyphics are of no use to man nor beast, and, trust me, when you wrote them you did not really listen to what was going on anyway. That sort of device going through would be very helpful. I am trying to make sure that all these types of provision for lower needs will be accessible by anyone who is going through this lifelong learning process.

I was thinking in particular about levels 4 and 5, because here a person will be working independently for some of the time or, if they are taking lectures, et cetera, will need some support. The support is available in higher education, and higher education goes on within colleges of further education, does it not? It does if you look at their syllabuses. Will we make sure that this facility is there, is used and supports these candidates? If it does, we are doing a good thing with something that is already in place; we do not have to reinvent the wheel. We can go back and make sure we are getting the best out of what is in an existing system and transfer it across.

The same is true, as the right reverend Prelate who is speaking after me will confirm—I may be putting words in his mouth but I will take a chance on it—when we come to further education, where we have a different regime again. To the age of 25, support is more tied in with the education, health and care plan—but they are different regimes working across each other. Are we going to take the best of both and bring them together in one place to make sure people are supported, or are we going to let them compete with one another and decide where we come in? This is something of an absurdity that makes sense only if we assume that further education and higher education do not cross. I would have thought some of the subtext behind much of what we have heard here challenges that. Also, good practice in one area of learning will be good practice in another.

I just hope the Minister will be able, when she replies, to tell me that the Bill will bring a bit more coherence to these plans and support. Look for good practice and make it appropriate to the student, not to whether it is an F or an E—or an F or an H, or whatever the thing is. Is that a dyslexic mistake? Probably. Anyway, as we go through this, whether it is further or higher education we are dealing with should not really matter; it is merely what helps that candidate get through. I think I will get told off for using that expression. If the Minister can give me that assurance, I will be a little happier at the end of this. Making sure there is a coherent strategy that refers to good practice would make many people a little more comfortable about the direction of travel here.

We do not want to keep going back to this. If we can take what works in one sector and apply it to another, it would seem logical and sensible. This may be a challenge that is beyond any one Minister or Government—but strike a blow and we will all remember you fondly, no matter what happens.

[Lord Flight (Con)]

My Lords, this debate has, I believe, produced extremely valuable advice for government in sorting out our higher education and apprenticeship problems, and I give great praise to what I have heard today.

My amendment requires the Secretary of State to amend the Education (Student Support) Regulations 2011 to ensure that those claiming the lifelong learning entitlement qualify as eligible students for support under those regulations. There is a similar amendment tabled by the noble Lord, Lord Watson, on student maintenance, which I understand may have cross-party support. My proposals would create a maintenance support system that enables everyone to live reasonably while studying or training at colleges of both FE and HE. One might ask why student maintenance is needed when the Government’s ambition is to make education and training available to people throughout their life. It is welcome and needed as jobs change and are displaced and are likely to change even faster. The lifelong loan entitlement announced in September 2020 could open up tuition fee loans for people taking level 4 to 5 qualifications, which are especially important for unlocking higher technical skills for the sector.

Clauses 14 and 15 create powers to put this into effect, but they cover only tuition fees and higher-level courses—level 4 and above. This is packaged with an all-age level 3 entitlement in the lifetime skills guarantee. Many adults will be unable to take up those opportunities because there is no support for living costs when they are taking courses at this or higher levels. These people would be prevented from transforming their life chances and becoming part of the skilled workforce that employers and the economy need so much.

Skills and Post-16 Education Bill [HL]

Lord Addington Excerpts

Report stage
Tuesday 12th October 2021 Lords Chamber

[Lord Aberdare (CB)]

My Lords, I, too, have added my name to Amendment 11, tabled by the noble Lord, Lord Watson, and to the amendment to it, Amendment 12. I shall speak also to my Amendments 14, 18 and 21, which are mainly concerned with the overall coherence and effectiveness of the skills systems of which this Bill will be such a major part. Many aspects of that system lie outside the Bill as drafted, but are essential for it to achieve its aims, so Amendment 11 and my amendments seek to fill some of the more important gaps that need to be addressed in the Bill. Others will no doubt be covered in the forthcoming guidance for employer representative bodies, which I have been no more successful than the noble Lord, Lord Watson, in absorbing since I received it this morning.

The amendment tabled by the noble Lord, Lord Watson, lists a range of bodies whose views rightly need to be taken into account in LSIPs. My Amendment 12 adds two more categories to the list: bodies providing careers information, advice and guidance and independent training providers. I have previously expressed my view that the importance of high-quality careers guidance should be more explicitly covered in the Bill. Every LSIP should surely take account of the status of careers guidance provision in its area through drawing on the views of those responsible for it, including careers hubs and careers leaders in local education institutions. Seeking to ensure that all schools and colleges in its area are meeting the eight Gatsby careers benchmarks and complying fully with the requirements of the Baker clause as, I hope, amended by the Bill.

Given the importance of informing young people about their career choices and options early on, will the Minister tell us how the Government are ensuring that chambers of commerce currently delivering trailblazer LSIPs are engaging with local careers hubs to ensure that careers provision in schools is aligned with local labour market skills needs?

Could she also say whether there are any plans for a new careers strategy, to revive the terrific impetus provided by the previous one in improving the careers situation, and what the Government are doing to ensure that careers hubs will be an established part of the future careers landscape right across England, with sufficient funding to support careers activities in schools and colleges and enough qualified careers professionals to deliver them? Finding those professionals seems an increasing problem for some schools.

My Amendment 12 would also add independent training providers. I will spare noble Lords a repeat of my spiel on independent training providers, but I do believe that no LSIP can afford not to take account of their role in meeting the skills needs of its area.

My Amendments 14 and 18 seek to ensure that LSIPs take account of UK-wide standards developed by national employer groups, picking up on what the noble Lord, Lord Storey, said. Either of the two might meet the need, although the first relates to the actual content of an LSIP, and the second to the characteristics of the employer representative body which develops it. I apologise to your Lordships if this seems like trying to get two amendments for the price of one.

There will be many areas of technology where there is a pressing need for LSIPs to upskill and reskill the existing workforce in their area but there are no associated apprenticeship standards; for example, because they would not support a full year of study. Examples include some of the key green technologies, such as installation of ground source heat pumps or electric car charging points. In the absence of formal standards, LSIPs will need to assure themselves that training provision and assessment is of the right quality and meets agreed industry standards. This assurance could be provided by recognised national not-for-profit employer bodies representing specific sectors, such as the Energy & Utility Skills Partnership, again mentioned by the noble Lord, Lord Storey, for whose briefing I am grateful. I would welcome the Minister’s views on how this need might be met and whether she might consider establishing a reasonably short list of recognised sectoral employer bodies capable of supporting LSIPs in this respect.

Amendment 21 addresses a related issue. The Bill says remarkably little about accountability and reporting requirements of employer representative bodies, apart from developing their LSIPs in a form that the Secretary of State is prepared to approve and publish. Perhaps the Minister could say something about how the subsequent progress and implementation of the plans will be reported and monitored; how information from LSIPs across the country will be aggregated to assess their impact on national skills needs and objectives; and how the Secretary of State will determine whether the new arrangements in specific LSIP areas are working as intended, bearing in mind the point that noble Lord, Lord Adonis, and others have made, that chambers of commerce in England vary considerably in size, scope and capacity, and may not always be the right body to lead ERBs.

Amendment 21 addresses only one specific aspect of this broader issue of reporting accountability and two-way flows of information between local plan areas and the centre. The amendment would ensure that the Institute for Apprenticeships and Technical Education has access, via reports from ERBs, to information on the activities and outcomes of the upskilling and reskilling programmes being pursued through their LSIPs, to inform its own work in identifying and approving needed apprenticeship standards and other technical qualifications for the future.

I do not anticipate pressing any of my amendments to a vote, but if the noble Lord, Lord Watson, decides to seek the opinion of the House on his Amendment 11, I shall gladly support him.

[Lord Addington (LD)]

My Lords, if I may say a few words now, let me first say that I will speak to Amendment 26 in my name. It was originally in the name of the noble Lord, Lord Lingfield, who has just sent me a note saying that he wishes me well but he has an appointment he must go to in the City. All right for some, but it was his idea in the first place.

Anyway, I have a few comments about the clerical Bench’s series of amendments here. What I like about these is that when we deal with special educational needs, often it is as special educational needs going forward into the outside world. The fact is that talking about the employment gap for people with disabilities is something we should spend more time on and is sometimes a better way of looking at it to get clarification.

Skills and Post-16 Education Bill [HL]

Lord Addington Excerpts

Report stage
Thursday 21st October 2021 Lords Chamber

Moved by

[Lord Addington]

44: After Clause 15, insert the following new Clause—
“Lifelong learning: special educational needs
When exercising functions under this Act, the Secretary of State must ensure that—(a) providers of further education are required to include special educational needs awareness training to all teaching staff to ensure that all staff are able to—(i) identify, and(ii) support,those students who have special educational needs; (b) providers of further education provide support for students with special educational needs or disabilities that is of an equivalent standard to those with similar needs in higher education.”Member’s explanatory statement
This amendment places a duty on the Secretary of State to ensure that there is sufficient SEN training for teachers of students in further education and that there is support for students with special educational needs or disabilities that is of an equivalent standard to those with similar needs in higher education.

[Lord Addington (LD)]

My Lords, I have two amendments in this group, and I welcome the support of the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Durham for them. They are both about special educational needs in the further education sector. Special educational needs in further education are a bit like they are in everything else: an afterthought. They are an afterthought with a couple of special bits of legislation attached, including education, health and care plans, which allow some support until the age of 25 but do not apply to higher education. For those who get to higher education with special educational needs, there is a nice, structured support centre based on the disabled students’ allowance—some of the old jobs of which are taken on by the institution.

Why did I need to preamble like that? My amendments are trying to take best practice from the other two areas of education and apply them to further education. If you happen to attend a higher education institution and you have an identified special educational need, the institution must do certain things—for instance, it must make sure that you have information capture available to you. A few noble Lords might ask what that is. It is where students can digitally record a lecture, seminar or whatever and transfer it into a format which they can take the information from. It could be putting it on to a screen or into verbal means. Basically, there are lots of clever things you can do with technology nowadays that you could not do 10 or 20 years ago which mean that just about anybody can access it in any way they want to. This is a duty in higher education.

Some might ask why I have tabled these amendments, as these two areas are different. I think it was the right reverend Prelate’s office which provided me with the fact that over 100,000 students taking higher education degrees are doing it at colleges—100,000 students are able to get this support, but they cannot get it if they are on a level 4 or level 3 course. I think level 5 is covered by it; if I have that wrong, I put my hands up, but the principle is still there. Why are we not taking the best practice from one area of education and applying it to another? Let us face it: making sure that further education is a viable option is central to this debate. Everything in the Bill implies that, and we have an overlap of provider, so why are the Government not doing this?

There is also the question of how to train people to deal with this, and that is also a part of Amendment 44. Virtually everybody with a special educational need or disability that applies in this sector—depending on which end you take it from—will usually have a slightly different learning process. Can they write or read well? Will they absorb the information in the same way? Can they tolerate the same amount of time concentrating within a lecture or tutorial? All these people are slightly different, and understanding that is the way that they can succeed. I once again refer to the disabled students’ allowance, which guarantees support in higher education. So, level 6 and level 4 apparently have two totally different systems which contradict each other, and there is a different structure again within schools. How are we going to make sure that the best is taken from one system and applied to another, especially where there is a very high level of overlap? You will have the expertise and you will have people involved in it. Even if it is not in your institution at the moment, the one down the road will know—pick up the phone and find out. It is not that difficult.

When it comes to Amendment 46 and teacher training in further education, we have an awareness programme for schools and those trained in them. It does not include that much, and I think it should be much wider. It is based upon the most commonly occurring problems that a teacher will have to account for. I should have identified my interests: I say once again in this Chamber that I am dyslexic, the president of the British Dyslexia Association and the chairman of a company that organises packages of support for people in work and education. In the school system, there is an awareness package which means that teachers have some basic knowledge of those most commonly occurring conditions. Dyslexia comes at the top of that list, but it is only the top. To highlight how difficult it is for the person providing the training, co-occurring difficulties are almost the norm. For example, it is very common for a dyspraxic student to also be dyslexic. There is a conglomeration of little oddities and changes in patterns of learning which are difficult to meet for both the student and the teacher giving the support. Teachers must have some knowledge, because more of the same is a guarantee of failure in many cases.

To give a little example in the case of dyslexia, if you say, “Oh, if we give him lots of spelling tests, he will learn to spell”, no, he will not. He will just forget more words. Give him the same spelling test a lot, and he will learn a few. That is the tip of the iceberg. Teachers need to work differently and need the knowledge to understand why somebody will not respond in certain ways. They at least need to know that they should find out more. If that degree of knowledge is not provided, there is almost a guarantee of failure or delay. This is fair neither to the person doing the teaching nor to the person receiving it.

Both these amendments call upon the Government to institute actions which have been done in other areas of the education system. They should make sure that they take examples from there. I would like to go further and institute better back-up and support. When the Minister replies, she will undoubtedly have a list of lots of regulations and all the things that should happen, but they do not, because there is no way of going forward and co-ordinating them. I also hope that the Minister from the second-half team for this Bill will carry on from the first-half team in recognising that we are not just talking about high levels of need. We need to make sure that somebody who is in danger of doing less well and possibly failing receives the same attention as somebody who is a dramatic failure. At the moment, requiring that stamp of approval from the plan or the official diagnosis—saying that you are of a sufficient level of severity to need X level of help—means that we are worrying about those on the edge, who might just get through on a good day but probably will not. With small adjustments to their behaviour or the way information is presented to them, those people can actually get through.

I look forward to hearing what the Minister has to say. I hope I do not have to press either of these amendments, but that is now in the Minister’s hands. I beg to move.

[The Lord Bishop of Durham]

My Lords, this is my first opportunity to welcome the Minister to her new role, and, indeed, the noble Baroness, Lady Chisholm, to hers. In my own role as chair of the National Society—which I declare as an interest—I look forward to working with them both on many matters relating to education and the Church of England’s place as a major provider.

Turning to Amendments 44 and 46, which I was pleased to add my name to, I thank both noble Baronesses for the time they gave us recently to discuss them. The need for specific provision to be made to better meet the needs of students with specific learning needs and disabilities at all levels has been made—not for the first time—with great expertise by the noble Lord, Lord Addington, and I wholeheartedly support these amendments. Given the range and varied nature of the learning needs among FE students, their lecturers, tutors, assessors and other staff must have the skills to recognise those needs to be able to adapt their own approach to teaching, learning and assessment, and to be able to promptly and appropriately refer students for more specialised or intensive support.

Amendment 44 does precisely what is required and, in addition, poses a challenge. Such high-quality support is very widely available in HE, often in the departments of FE colleges which deliver HE provision and from which it might be made more widely available. Is it not both educationally and ethically desirable that those on FE programmes should have the same access as their fellow students in HE?

--- Later in debate ---

[Baroness Chisholm of Owlpen (Con)]

My Lords, I start by thanking the noble Lord, Lord Addington, for his advocacy for learners with special educational needs and disabilities. I thank the right reverend Prelate for his words as well. I feel that, across the board, we come from a very similar position, even if the Government’s methods are slightly different.

Turning first to Amendment 46, I agree with the noble Lord that it is vital for our teachers to be trained to identify and respond to the needs of all their learners, including those identified as having special educational needs and disabilities. Where the Government differ is on the best way to achieve this aim. Let me explain our position. The new occupational standard for FE teaching, published in September, has been developed by sector experts who employ teachers. The standard sets out key knowledge, skills and behaviour, including a specific duty that focuses on the importance of inclusion, which—I hope that this vital point will ease the noble Lord’s concerns—will support the early identification of learners’ needs and enable teachers to respond to them effectively.

The occupational standard is the right place to set the expectations of our teachers. We have been clear that we intend to make public funding available only to training programmes that meet the new standard. For the reasons I have just set out, I believe that it would be inappropriate to specify particular course requirements in the Bill when a standard newly developed by sector experts already achieves this. I can assure the noble Lord that our intention is to drive up the quality of FE teacher training so that it can meet the varied and often complex needs of learners in the sector.

Turning to Amendment 44, the Government are committed to driving up the quality of teaching in further education and strengthening the professional development of the FE workforce. To that end, we are already providing significant funding for programmes to help spread good, evidence-based practice in professional development, including provision currently being delivered by the Education and Training Foundation to support the professional development of teachers working with SEND learners. It is also important to note that, under the SEND code of practice, colleges

“should ensure that there is a named person in the college with oversight of SEN provision to ensure co-ordination of support … This person should contribute to the strategic and operational management of the college. Curriculum and support staff in a college should know who to go to if they need help in identifying a student’s SEN, are concerned about their progress or need further advice.”

Ultimately, decisions must be made by providers themselves about what training is relevant and necessary in response to the specific needs of their learners and those who teach them. Of course, students with SEND must get the support they need to benefit from the lifelong loan entitlement. Students with SEND are an important part of our vision for and motivation behind a flexible skills system. We believe that this kind of flexible provision will be of particular benefit to these students. We plan to use the LLE consultation to build our evidence base on how to support all people to access or benefit from the LLE offer.

The noble Lord, Lord Storey, mentioned the importance of primary schools and nurseries in picking up pupils who may have problems. The number of primary school-age pupils identified with SEND has increased over the past five years. In 2021, pupils with SEND represented 17.2% of primary school-age pupils. The most common SEND support needs are usually in speech, language and communication. Among pupils with an EHC plan, autistic spectrum disorder is the most common type of SEN. This shows that children with SEND are being picked up earlier, which is so important and means that they can get support from the age of five onwards. I know this from personal experience, because I have a grandson who has mild autism. His support in his state primary school has been second to none, and I know that that will carry on right through for the rest of his education.

There would also be a further issue if this was mentioned on the face of the Bill. The Secretary of State would then have to specify requirements relating to one particular element of the training programme, SEN awareness, even if others were not identified.

I thank the noble Lord again for submitting these amendments and hope he is satisfied with the work being done in these areas. I hope he will feel comfortable to withdraw this amendment and not move his other amendment.

[Lord Addington (LD)]

My Lords, here we go again. They say that they will take out pupils if they spot them, they will really get on with it, but they will not specify that you have the skills to spot them. They will not turn around and say that you are trained to spot that somebody has a moderate difficulty.

Pupils may get to having a plan, but local authorities have spent over £100 million resisting plans and—I repeat this—on a good day, around 85% of appeals are lost, but it is normally about 90%. Only tiger parents with sharp claws get their kids through that process. Most pupils are not picked up because of the education system we have at the moment, from school to college and onwards. Noble Lords should remember that most of those in college were not given the correct support at school, and most are not spotted or are spotted late. Without staff who are in a position to identify them and give support, the only way in which pupils can get support is by getting plans or higher levels of definition, which is expensive, slow and damaging to that person. The person trying to teach them cannot do it, so you have someone who is a pain in whichever part of their anatomy you care to choose in that classroom. That is what happens when people are not given a basic level of training.

I would like the Minister to come back on what I said about support for people in colleges—technical support, including information capture—as she said nothing about it in her reply. Does she have anything in her notes on this?

[Baroness Chisholm of Owlpen (Con)]

My Lords, I did mean to mention that, so I apologise. There will be details on continuous professional development in the skills White Paper, which is committed to supporting improvements for FE teachers. This will include funding schemes to support educational technology and staff using digital forms of educational delivery, such as the ed-tech demonstrator programme; supporting new and inexperienced teachers by embedding early career support in government-funded programmes such as Taking Teaching Further and enabling access to high-quality mentoring; and running the FE professional development grants pilot, which is supporting collaborative, sector-led professional development approaches in the three key areas of workforce capability to use technology in education, subject-specific professional development, and supporting new and inexperienced teachers.

[Lord Addington (LD)]

I thank the Minister for sharing her notes. It is clear that her department does not get what I am saying. There are higher education institutions that have got this right. Why not simply take that technology which has been set up—if it is not there, you are in trouble—and make sure it is available for people who are slightly lower down the grading system? These people are, after all, trying to get jobs or training at the end of this. Clearly, the Government have not taken that on board.

I feel I must call a Division on this, when the time comes. I would like to divide on both my amendments, but I am prepared to withdraw Amendment 44. I shall seek the opinion of the House on Amendment 46, but I beg leave to withdraw this amendment.

Amendment 44 withdrawn.

--- Later in debate ---

Moved by

[Lord Addington]

46: Clause 16, page 19, line 9, at end insert—
“(2A) Regulations under subsection (1) must include provision to require ITT(FE) courses to include special educational needs awareness training relevant to the students of ITT(FE) courses within an institution.”Member’s explanatory statement
This amendment ensures there is sufficient SEN training for teachers of students of ITT(FE) courses

[Lord Addington (LD)]

My Lords, I beg leave to test the opinion of the House.

Skills and Post-16 Education Bill [HL]

Lord Addington Excerpts

Consideration of Commons amendments
Thursday 24th March 2022 Lords Chamber

[The Lord Bishop of Leeds]

My Lords, this House carried an amendment in the name of the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Durham, who cannot be in his place today, concerning universal credit conditionality—this has been referred to several times—but it was not accepted when the Bill was considered in the other place.

If the Government are to achieve their levelling-up ambitions and enable individuals to secure better-paid employment with improved prospects, then it is essential to achieve greater integration of the support provided for skills development and training by the Department for Education and the Department for Work and Pensions.

The right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Durham wishes me to say that, on these Benches, we are most grateful to the noble Baronesses, Lady Stedman-Scott and Lady Barran, for their very constructive and helpful meeting with the right reverend Prelate and their subsequent letter setting out how this better integration is being actively pursued, the range of provision open to universal credit claimants seeking to retrain, and how work coaches are able to exercise appropriate discretion when applying universal credit conditionality rules.

I know that the right reverend Prelates the Bishop of Durham and the Bishop of Coventry—the latter now in his capacity as lead bishop for FE and HE—welcome the opportunity to contribute to the consultation on equivalent or lower qualifications, which will engage Peers in more detail, along with the outworking of the detail behind the lifelong learning guarantee. In the light of these assurances, the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Durham is content not to press the matter.

[Lord Addington (LD)]

My Lords, as we all struggle through this slightly unfamiliar process, the amendment I have down was inspired by the letter we got from the Secretary of State. I was told, as the noble Baroness has said, that we do not need to do it because the occupational standards will cover it. Great. But what really made me table the amendment was the body that the Government consulted: the Universities’ Council for the Education of Teachers.

My declaration of interest probably comes in here. I am president of the British Dyslexia Association, and my various other interests are on the register. I spoke to that association—the biggest group involved here—which also covers dyscalculia. It has had no contact with that body—and it is giving the advice. Dyslexia is the biggest of the groups involved, but it is not the only one. Dyscalculia is right up there, along with dyspraxia—that is all those beginning with “dys-” covered—and then there is ADHD, autism and the others. Those are the main, non-obvious groups that will occur in an ordinary classroom. This is what the duty was aimed at. Are those doing the teaching capable of understanding the needs of the people they are teaching? Are they giving advice and creating strategies, so that the people they are teaching actually succeed in what they are doing?

All I am talking about is making sure that the duties we have are acknowledged, and jolly good too. We are so well prepared for these duties that we have a growth in law firms making sure they are enforced throughout the education system. The law is so clear and so well provided for that for parents—tiger parents—the best way of getting through the education system is by paying lawyers to make sure they get through.

It is a mess. It is said that you cannot impose standards, but if you are part of the standards, you can update them, and this duty can be updated as well. We are dealing with about 20% to 25% of the cohort—probably more in further education. These are people who do not get the plan. They have a problem that means they will probably underachieve and not handle the classroom well. Expecting the teaching workforce to have a clear understanding of this is not too much to ask.

--- Later in debate ---

Moved by

[Lord Addington]

At end insert “and do propose Amendment 21B instead of the words so left out of the Bill—

21B: After Clause 19, insert the following new Clause—
“Employer-led occupational standards for further education teaching
The employer-led occupational standards for further education teachers must include a working knowledge of how the most commonly occurring special educational needs will affect students in the normal educational and training environment within an institution.””

[Lord Addington (LD)]

I beg to move and wish to test the opinion of the House.