Polytechnics

Lord Baker of Dorking Excerpts

Thursday 5th May 2016 Lords Chamber

[Lord Baker of Dorking (Con)]

My Lords, I should first say that I am chairman of the Edge Foundation, which is the largest educational charity in the country promoting practical, technical and hands-on learning. I am also chairman of the Baker Dearing Educational Trust, which promotes university technical colleges. I draw no remuneration from either of those foundations. I warmly welcome what my noble friend Lord Lucas said. Few people in this House know as much about education as he does. His livelihood is from it and I welcome his enthusiasm for polytechnics.

I think I was the last Education Secretary who defended the difference between polytechnics and universities back in the 1980s. One of my less robust colleagues surrendered to the campaign to make them all universities. There was a big difference between them. There were wonderful polytechnics—some of them in those days were better than some of the new universities. Manchester Poly was a particularly great polytechnic and has now become a great university, Manchester Metropolitan University, but that is history; it has all happened.

Where do we stand now? As the noble Baroness has just said, about 50% of our youngsters now go to university, but what of the rest? The rest get a very raw deal. For example, only 10% in the 20 to 45 age range have reached level 4 and 5. Level 4 is HSE diploma; level 5 is foundation degree. That is the lowest level of any advanced economy in the world. America, Austria, Switzerland, Germany and the Netherlands are very much higher. As a result, we have a massive skills shortage. We are massively short of technicians and engineers, and we have this extraordinary phenomenon of people without jobs—500,000 youngsters are still unemployed—and jobs without people, with many of our companies having to go overseas to recruit skilled workers.

So where should it start? First, it has to start in the schools. I do not support the present policy of the Government of narrowing the curriculum and focusing on academic subjects. Most technical subjects are now thrust out of schools below 16; there are very few left. I introduced design and technology in the 1980s, a very popular course; for the past five years, the numbers of both GCSE and A-level entrants have dropped by 20% and 30% respectively. We are therefore seeing a whole host of youngsters who have had no practical experience of anything technical. This is unique in the world and highly damaging, so the Government should reintroduce technical subjects below 16.

Secondly, I would of course welcome the expansion of the UTC movement—14 to 18 year-old colleges. We have shown that 14 to 18 is a viable and very successful age range to focus on. We now have 10,000 students at UTCs. By September, with new ones opening, we will have 14,500. That seems a very large figure, but it is less than 1% of the cohort for that age group. What we are very proud of with UTCs is that when youngsters leave at 16 or 18, virtually no one joins the ranks of the unemployed. Last July, we reached 99.5% and virtually no school in the country can achieve that record.

The next stage is higher apprenticeships. Higher apprenticeships are apprenticeships at 18. They are now proving very popular, particularly with our colleges. At 18, if you have an A-level in, say, maths, physics or engineering—an academic subject—if you have a technical subject as well, such as a BTEC extended diploma, you are highly employable. Companies such as Rolls-Royce, National Grid or BAE will employ you at £15,000 or £16,000 a year and immediately put you through a foundation degree at their cost, so you can get a degree without any debt. If you are up to it, you can then go on to a part-time honours degree. We already have some students at Warwick doing that; they are gaining a second degree at no cost. Higher apprenticeships are very popular. But if this concentration on academic subjects between 16 and 18 continues, we will find that lots of 18 year-olds, with good academic results, are quite frankly not employable in companies because they have so little to give. It is only those who have some technical qualifications who are likely to be employed at 18 for higher apprenticeships.

Then there are the FE colleges. My noble friend Lord Lucas has mentioned those. They have 1.6 million students doing levels 2 and 3. Levels 2 and 3 are GCSE and advanced level. Only 2.4% of their students, however, get to level 4. That is an amazing failure because those are the jobs that are needed—levels 4, 5, 6 and 7 are needed more than levels 2 and 3. That, again, compares very badly with European performances. I therefore support very strongly the views put forward by my noble friend Lord Lucas to recreate polytechnics.

The polytechnics should prepare people for associate professional and technical jobs, but those should not be limited to the STEM subjects of science, technology, engineering and maths. They should cover things such as catering and hospitality, digital skills, graphic design, business studies, logistics and others. We need a whole range of different subjects of that sort at a higher level of achievement than the FE colleges are offering at the moment.

As my noble friend said, the polytechnics would concentrate on levels 4, 5, 6 and 7. They would be for adults aged 19 and above, and every course should be linked very closely to the local labour market. One of the successes of UTCs is that companies support them very strongly and very generously. They create lessons for them in projects. Network Rail has lessons of eight weeks in level crossing gates. Level crossing gates and train sets are brought in by Network Rail to teach the students. Rolls-Royce has lessons of eight weeks in piston pumps, which its graduates and staff come in and teach. The students like talking to real businesspeople. For most children in schools, the only adults they talk to are their parents and occasionally teachers, whereas they like to talk to adults who have had actual business experience. Local companies should be very much involved in the polytechnics as well.

Most students will already be working in their chosen fields, so they will be part-time earning and learning. They should really have a level 3 qualification before they start. They will study part-time. It will have to be a much more modern institution than the old polytechnics. A lot of the teaching would be delivered remotely using videoconferencing and virtual reality. Students would travel to their polytechnic campus for team projects. Team working is essential: for youngsters to be work-ready, they should have these qualities. They should be able to do problem-solving, team working and be able to make things with their own hands. Those are the work-ready qualities that students at UTCs have. They must be offered on a much wider scale. They would go, as students, back to the campus for team projects, intensive tuition and access to high-cost capital equipment such as cutting-edge mechatronics.

I hope the Government will be sympathetic. I am quite sure that the Minister’s brief will not welcome polytechnics—I could have written it myself. They are already doing a bit, but it is only a bit. My noble friend Lord Lucas correctly said that there are now national colleges linked to certain industries. The one for railways and the other that he mentioned are operating; three more will start up. I find it extraordinary that there are just five for the whole country. I am not at all surprised that there is one for railways, which are now highly technical operations and not a Victorian steam engine sort of thing. We need them, but we need many more.

Then there are institutes of technology, which are much more modest operations. They are for levels 3, 4 and 5. I welcome that, and one is opening on digital skills, but the numbers are tiny. The Government say that the numbers will initially be small. They must be much more ambitious. They have to do something to help close the skills gap, and not rearrange the pieces on the board but find some new pieces that will be better than what they have.

I very much hope that this will happen. It is even more important that it happens quickly. The digital revolution is now happening. I am one of those who believe that the digital revolution, which covers everything from artificial intelligence to big data, driverless cars and lorries, drones and all of that area, will destroy many more jobs than it creates. In the past, industrial revolutions have always created more jobs than they have threatened. I made speeches on that when I was Minister for Information Technology. But I am now quite persuaded that the disruptive technologies of the digital revolution will destroy many other jobs. The Bank of England has already forecast that automation will cost 15 million jobs in this country. There are reports from McKinsey and Davos saying that it will be more than that. Faced with that, the Government have to improve skills training dramatically in our country. I hope that one way will be the re-establishment of polytechnics.