Government Record on Education, Employment and Welfare

Lord Baker of Dorking Excerpts

Thursday 16th July 2026 Lords Chamber

[Lord Baker of Dorking (Con)]

My Lords, the level of youth unemployment in England today is 16.2%. So many youngsters are leaving school at 18 without any employability skills, and that is a disgrace for the fifth-richest country in the world. It is also an indictment of the failure of the education policy of Conservative and Labour Governments since the year 2000, because they have created 1 million people now between 16 and 24 who are unemployed, which is an absolutely shaming figure.

The colleges that I have been trying to stimulate over the last 15 years, university technical colleges, have an unemployment rate of lower than 3%: 20% of our students become apprentices, 50% go to universities to study STEM subjects, and the rest get jobs locally because they have worked with local employers for four years. That is what is needed.

We need a revolution in education. I think that it will be introduced by our new Prime Minister, Andy Burnham, when he is appointed on Monday. He has made many speeches on the importance of technical, practical and vocational education. No Prime Minister since Thatcher, from John Major to Keir Starmer, has made any speech on technical and practical education and learning by hand. No Prime Minister has done it. Search as you will, you will not find them. I think that Andy Burnham will introduce significant changes. About two years ago, he made a statement in Manchester that he wanted to scrap the EBacc, which has an academic curriculum, and replace it with the MBacc. Since then, my charity and organisation of UTCs have been working with him to find a way through.

We have found one. The answer is to look at the curriculum of all secondary schools, particularly Church schools and bog-standard comprehensives, and make sure that you can insert into them good technical education. You can do so only by inserting a sleeve of education from 14 to 18. That is what Andy Burnham asked us to provide him with over the last two years. A school in Manchester will open next September with a sleeve and one will open this September in Barrow-in-Furness. That is the headquarters of BAE Systems, which cannot recruit students who are talented and committed from the schools in Cumbria. Some 120 students will join that school in September. Of those, 90 have already selected the technical sleeve and 30 have selected the academic sleeve. I think the Prime Minister will try to repeat that pattern substantially over the country. We should welcome this. That is the only way that we will get economic growth. It is the only way that we will be able to reduce youth unemployment significantly. We are going to face a revolution, which I very much welcome.

At times in our country, you need to make great changes. I was lucky in the 1980s, when great changes were necessary. I think Andy Burnham will be lucky, because there are now great changes that have to be made. I am not just talking about young men; in our colleges, we have many young women, particularly from ethnic minorities, who desperately want to study and master engineering and computing. I am very optimistic.

I add one warming word for the Minister. She is the only Minister in the Government, including the Commons, who understands education deeply. She is deep into it. If there is any justice, she should be the new Secretary of State. I do not think that the new Prime Minister will appoint a Secretary of State from this House, but I hope that we do not lose her. She likes UTCs. She went to one only last week—one of the most difficult ones to reach, up in the north-west of England next to Sellafield. I hope very much that she keeps her job, because she does like UTCs.