Technical and Further Education Bill

Lord Baker of Dorking Excerpts

Report stage (Hansard): House of Lords
Monday 27th March 2017 Lords Chamber

[Lord Lucas (Con)]

My Lords, I entirely agree with what the noble Baroness, Lady Morris of Yardley, has just said. As the House knows, I run the Good Schools Guide. We do what we can to spread information about apprenticeships, but that is extremely difficult because the amount of information available is not good. For universities, by comparison, there is one single source of information. Now, I do not wish the Government to hire UCAS to do apprenticeships, because UCAS is an extremely difficult organisation to deal with and does not let data out to anyone, but something like it which was a single point of information would really help schoolkids and schools because ordinary teachers, let alone career teachers, do not have time to learn their way around 150 different university apprenticeships, let alone all the others. They need a coherent source of information. There is a habit among employers of letting information out only in the two weeks when they want to hire apprentices, rather than all around the year when potential apprentices want to be looking. They are not adjusted to that kind of marketing yet; they are recruiting in penny numbers rather than the tens of thousands, as universities are. There are all sorts of reasons why we need more information and support.

If you want to know where children have gone on to from school, schools will give you—at least English schools will; Scottish schools are more tiresome—a long list of university courses that their students have got on to. Nowhere can you find those data for apprenticeships. You can get data from the Higher Education Statistics Agency so you can publish information from there if you want, but there is no equivalent available for apprenticeships. That makes the whole business of upping the status of apprenticeships, and of technical education generally, much harder than it needs to be. So while I hold no brief for the exact drafting of the two Labour amendments, I am very much with the spirit of them.

On the amendment that followed from the noble Baroness, Lady Garden, there is scope for upping the prestige of the Institute for Apprenticeships in this way. It gives it that much more visibility in public, that much more right to comment and that much more right to be heard. At a time when there is going to be a lot of change, a lot of difficult decisions taken and a lot of need for what is going on to be in the public eye so that things that are not quite right get caught early and commented on early rather than being relegated to the pages of a few specialist magazines, an increase in prestige, as suggested in this amendment, is an excellent idea.

[Lord Baker of Dorking (Con)]

My Lords, we have not had very much information about what the annual statement from the Institute for Apprenticeships will be. As the institute is a quango, it will certainly produce an annual report—there is no question about that—and it is the usual practice of such reports to be debated in one way or another in the House. So we should accept that as a given, as it were.

As to the content of the report, I am encouraged by the fact that the quality of the directors will mean that it is not going to be a soft quango at all; it will be a very tough and well-informed one because they will be very aware of the fact that it is a great new departure in the education system to concentrate on apprentices, and they will want to ensure that the apprentice system that the country develops will be effective for both employers and students. So I expect the Institute for Apprenticeships to take an interest in nearly all the points mentioned in paragraph 1.

Whether that is needed in the Bill, I very much doubt. The best way to do it would probably be for the Secretary of State to formally write a letter to the chief executive of the institute when one is appointed, which I hope will be soon, indicating the range of information that the report should contain. That might be the best way out of it because the nature of the information will change over the years and you do not necessarily want to keep amending this part of the Bill. There are all sorts of other interesting things that the report should contain. I think the time has come for the Minister to make clearer what he thinks will be in the report. If he cannot do so today, perhaps he might be able to before Third Reading.

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We would welcome a meeting between now and Third Reading because I am finding this debate quite confusing. It has introduced new ideas about two sets of old vocational qualifications, some of which are on the A-list because they are really good qualifications and will lead to technical and apprenticeship qualifications. We cannot do away with all the other very valuable qualifications at lower levels which are essential for getting people on the first step of the ladder towards progression into higher levels and which perhaps refer to some of the essential services which are lower level but which employers need and which are skills for which people need to have recognition. I would welcome a meeting with the Minister before Third Reading to establish what these various lists of qualifications will cover. We seem to have a duplicate set of lists, which I do not think we were considering before, unless I have misunderstood.

[Lord Baker of Dorking]

I warmly support what the noble Baroness is saying. It is not only lower-level qualifications; there are existing upper-level qualifications, for example, at level 4, which are very well regarded by industry and which are progression courses from level 3 to level 5 and a degree. We do not want them to disappear. They are a very important part of the technical education system of our country.

[Baroness Garden of Frognal]

I thank the noble Lord, Lord Baker, for his comments. I am pleased that I am not the only one who is finding this amendment rather more confusing than I thought it was going to be. I thought it was going to be very straightforward, but it has brought in other aspects of the Bill. I hope it will be possible to have a meeting before Third Reading so that we can clarify what these two lists of qualifications will be and whether the B-list will be funded and recognised, or whether only the preferred A-list will lead on to apprenticeships and get the blessing of government. On the basis that further dialogue would be very welcome, I beg leave to withdraw the amendment.

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[Lord Aberdare]

My Lords, I support Amendment 17 in the name of the noble Lord, Lord Storey. It is widely recognised, including in a number of reports published by some of your Lordships’ committees, that the quality of careers education and advice in both schools and colleges has hitherto ranged on a spectrum from patchy to poor. Surely one reason for that is the lack of any real incentive for schools and colleges to up their game and improve their offer. It seems to me that one of the most effective incentives that could be put in place is for schools and colleges to know that the quality of their careers education will be a significant factor in determining what sort of rating they get when they are inspected by Ofsted.

As we have heard, some good things are happening: the National Careers Service is developing its offer and in particular I am very impressed by what I have seen of the Careers & Enterprise Company and its effort to put a network of schools co-ordinators in place. None the less, we still hear constantly that, although schools are good at reporting their academic progressions and the number of people who have gone on to university or further academic education, they are not nearly so good at talking about students who have gone on to apprenticeships or further levels of technical and professional education. I rather like that term “technical and professional”, and thought the Minister in the other place was also rather keen on it, but that does not appear to be necessarily the case.

I very much support the amendment, particularly as it would go no further than requiring Ofsted to take account of the provision of careers advice in carrying out inspections, so it would not appear to be a huge burden on either Ofsted or the schools. It just sends a signal, as we always used to like doing. I support the amendment.

[Lord Baker of Dorking]

My noble friend Lord Lucas’s amendments are an addition to the clause that I introduced in Committee, but quite a useful one. The purpose of the clause is to ensure that schools have a duty to accept—and cannot reject—various people going in and talking to students at the ages of 13, 16, and 18 about the various types of training and education they provide, which is the most effective way to improve careers advice. I have sat through several Governments who have tried to create careers advice by legislation, and it just does not work. You cannot expect many teachers to know a great deal about life outside because they leave school, go to a teacher training college and then go back to school. You have to have real, live people going into schools and talking about what life is like in a factory or a business complex and offering the opportunities—and we will now have this.

In September this year, for the first time, not only the heads of university technical colleges but those of studio schools, career colleges and FE colleges, as well as apprenticeship providers, will have a right to go and speak to 13, 16 and 18 year-olds and explain to them the opportunities that are available to them other than just getting three A-levels and going to university. That is a major change. I strongly support the amendments in the name of my noble friend Lord Lucas. Groups such as Women in Engineering spend a lot time trying to persuade more women to get into engineering. We have courses in the UTC movement to persuade more girls to go into engineering, and the numbers are going up all the time: we sometimes get over 20% or 30% girls. We like that because when a girl decides to be an engineer, she is usually very determined and confident, and in many cases the brightest member of the team. This will help in all of that, so I support it. Careers advice in FE colleges is largely an unknown area, frankly, and they should certainly improve their advice. But they have the advantage of being able to go in and talk to schools from September of this year.

[Lord Watson of Invergowrie]

My Lords, with Amendment 17, I am in the slightly alarming position of being the meat in a Liberal Democrat sandwich as far as the Marshalled List is concerned. This of course is a follow-on from the very valuable amendment to which the noble Lord, Lord Baker, just referred, which now forms Clause 2 of the Bill. We have just further benefited from his wisdom with his remarks on this amendment. I wholly concur with his view that there is a need not so much to improve as to establish careers advice in further education colleges. I very much agree also with the comments of the noble Lord, Lord Storey, in introducing this group of amendments about this being about preparation for careers rather than just giving information.

The quality of what colleges are able to provide is key to so many young people, but much will depend on the ability of Ofsted to carry out inspections of FE colleges to make this amendment effective. It rather surprised me in the debate that followed the announcement of which providers had been successful in gaining access to the register of apprentice training providers last week that before the register came into force, there were 793 apprenticeship providers. The register has nearly doubled that, with 1,473 organisations now in the frame for inspection when the register goes live in May. But that is not the extent of the burden being placed on Ofsted and its responsibility to inspect, because the process for applying to the register is due to take place four times every year, and it is expected that the number will soon rise perhaps to well over 2,000. It was quite instructive that when asked about the implications of this, Ofsted’s new chief inspector, Amanda Spielman, responded:

“It is a huge challenge”.


I think she was being politic because she must have real concerns. Unless the Government plan to increase Ofsted’s resources to enable it to inspect the new environment effectively, there will be very real gaps, which will be a huge shame.

I hope the amendment will be taken seriously by Ministers. It is important that the very least they do is recognise that there has to be a proper system of careers advice being offered by colleges to ensure that young people get the start in life that they deserve.

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[Lord Lucas]

There has been a problem with apprenticeships, at least historically, where people have wanted to include qualifications within them. I would be very grateful if my noble friend would make it clear that this has now passed and that the idea of including qualifications within apprenticeship qualifications, or indeed within qualifications at FE colleges, is now fully accepted. Generally, this is to the advantage of the learner. If I am doing a qualification within one of the 15 proposed Sainsbury routes, and that apprenticeship involves getting to know cybersecurity, I do not want to have a haberdasher’s qualification in cybersecurity: I want to have something which will be recognised in every single industry which might require that skill. The same applies to accountancy, marketing and other skills which are common across the routes, where these are things that you might wish an apprentice to learn in the course of their apprenticeship, or have experience of. It also applies particularly to technical qualifications in IT, where you would expect an apprentice to follow one or more international qualifications produced by the likes of Microsoft because that is what the industry as a whole demands and that is what produces a young person who can move from job to job because they have the qualifications that are recognised in their next job and not just those which are appropriate for the particular patch where they did their apprenticeship.

It is also important in this context that the specifications for apprenticeship should recognise that there are alternative qualifications in some circumstances. You may want your young person to be familiar with computer networking but there are two, maybe three, top-quality international qualifications in computer networking. Which one do you want to use? It will be the one that works with your business. However, the people in charge of the apprenticeship will recognise that these are equivalent and that either one can count and fit in place. I think this has been accepted now. There seems to be some residual difficulty reported to me. However, I would be very grateful for my noble friend’s assurance that the concept of embedding qualifications in apprenticeships or in further education courses is now fully accepted. I beg to move.

[Lord Baker of Dorking]

I support my noble friend’s amendment. I suspect that individual apprentices will work on the basis that he mentioned as certain qualifications in certain industries are not in the regular run of FE colleges, or universities for that matter, but have been accepted by the industry as the accepted standard. My noble friend mentioned Microsoft. Cisco does this as well. It is particularly the case in the whole area of computing, where various companies have established qualifications which have become the standard. In fact, the Cisco qualification for schools is more demanding than GCSE computing, and many people work towards that. We have to make sure that these qualifications do not disappear when the Institute for Apprenticeships clears out a lot of valueless qualifications. These are not valueless, particularly the international ones. Given that the digital revolution is happening so suddenly, a huge variety of examinations and qualifications in artificial intelligence may come our way. Each area will want to protect its own interest. I would hope that the Institute for Apprenticeships would take this message on board. I do not know whether a statutory measure is required.