Welfare Reforms and Youth Unemployment

Lord Baker of Dorking Excerpts

Thursday 11th June 2026 Lords Chamber

[Lord Baker of Dorking (Con)]

My Lords, I very much welcome the opportunity in this debate to explore why youth unemployment is so high in our education system. It is deplorable that we have 1 million young people aged 16 to 24 who have never had work and who, as the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Leicester said, want to work. The education system has failed. This debate gives us a chance to examine what is wrong with our education system and secondary schools.

The problem with our secondary schools, and the reason why unemployment is so much lower in Europe, is due to the fact that, in Europe, all the countries that my noble friend Lord Evans mentioned teach technical and vocational education to students aged under 16. Our bog-standard comprehensives do not teach students at all, and they leave school with no employability skills. It is not their fault.

When you want to know what employability skills are, you should look at the information that the Nuffield Foundation has sent to all Peers for this debate because it lists employability skills. The first is collaboration; students at school should have experience of working in teams. The second is communication, so that students can persuade their future employer of what they have learned and how it has inspired them. The third is creative thinking: organising, planning, prioritising, problem-solving and decision-making. These are not taught in our secondary schools today. It is an indictment of Conservative Governments and Labour Governments that, since the turn of the century, they have not made any significant change in this, whereas in Europe there is lots of technical education for those aged under 16. That is why, 15 years ago, Lord Dearing and I created a new type of school, a university technical college, for 14 to 18 year-old children. Children who attend those schools leave with employability skills. That is what this country needs in a much greater area, and it is very disappointing that it is not developing at all quickly.

Just before the Government came into power, the unemployment rate in Britain was about 13%. Two and a half years later, it has gone up to 16%, and Alan Milburn thinks that it could well be much higher than that by the time of the next election. It therefore makes sense to consider what changes must be made to our education system.

Some 15 years ago, I developed with Lord Dearing a new type of school called a “university technical college” for 14 to 18 year-old students. We have 21,000 students. Last September, we had to turn 6,000 away because so many of our colleges are oversubscribed. Our unemployment rate is not 15.8%; it less than 4%. That is because 20% of our students become apprentices, whereas that figure is only 3% in an ordinary school. You must realise that heads of schools do not want to encourage apprenticeships because every person they lose to an apprenticeship costs them £6,000 in funding, so they do not promote apprenticeships. Some 50% of our students go to university to study STEM subjects or the humanities. The rest get local jobs because they have worked with the companies that support them.

I believe that we should have many more of these technical schools. We had 300 technical schools in 1945, which were, in fact, abolished by snobbery. The technical schools that we have now are the best we have ever had, and I would like to see expansion. I would like 300 of them, but I am not going to have them, because no schools will be built in this country for about five or 10 years. We have therefore got to change the existing bog-standard comprehensives to include practical technical education. We have devised a scheme whereby we can insert a sleeve of technical education for 14 to 18 year-olds into every comprehensive. We would give advice and explain what equipment they need, the subjects they need to study, et cetera.

We have umpteen schools that now want a sleeve, where students choose whether they follow the technical route or the academic route. I am glad to say that the first of these sleeves will commence in Barrow-in-Furness this September. Currently, BAE Systems cannot recruit from Cumbria any students of the quality that it wants, but soon it will be able to. It costs £2.5 million to provide a sleeve, whereas building a new college would cost £25 million, so it is the cheapest and easiest way of improving technical education in our schools.

The Minister replying this afternoon likes UTCs—she has listed three of them—and the Secretary of State likes them too. Will they please therefore support the idea of the UTC sleeve for bog-standard comprehensives? That is the biggest and cheapest way that we can reduce unemployment.