Lifelong Learning

Lord Bichard Excerpts

Thursday 6th February 2025 Lords Chamber

[Lord Bichard (CB)]

My Lords, I declare an interest as chancellor of the University of Gloucestershire. I congratulate the noble Lord, Lord Knight, on securing the debate, and the noble Baroness, Lady Curran, on her maiden speech. It is a short congratulations because I am already running out of time; I apologise for that.

In the mid-1990s, I was Permanent Secretary at what was then the Department for Education and Employment. In that role, I worked for several of the speakers in this evening’s debate—sorry, I should have said, “I was privileged to work for several of the speakers in this evening’s debate”. One of the department’s three objectives was lifelong learning—to create a learning society. I was passionate about it at the time, not just because those noble Lords were too but because it seemed to be a no-brainer, as they say now. It is the route to growth and increased productivity. It will deliver higher tax revenues—if the Treasury is listening—reduced welfare dependency, better public health outcomes and greater social mobility. It enables citizens to better fulfil their personal potential and improve their quality of life, and it helps older people like me to retain their independence. In a world that is being reshaped by AI and digital technology, lifelong learning has never been more important.

No other investment gives you that kind of return, so why is it proving so difficult to deliver a learning society? After all, as the noble Lord, Lord Monks, said, we have tried every conceivable delivery agency, from training and enterprise councils to the Learning and Skills Council and now Skills England—I wish it well. We have tried a whole range of different qualification frameworks and incentives, but participation in lifelong learning remains stubbornly low.

The noble Lord, Lord Knight, referred to participation of 50%, but I think, year on year, it is somewhere between 40 and 50% of adults who say they are currently learning or have done so in the last three years, and 30% of people say they have never learnt since full-time education. With a new Government now focused on growth, the question is: how are we going to change that? What do we need to do differently? What are the lessons of history?

First, the Government need genuinely to believe that economic growth depends not just on increased investment in projects, which we have heard a lot about recently, but as much, if not more, on investment in people and in skills. They need genuinely to believe that, if they are to make the investment that is necessary to deliver it. The system needs significant additional investment to right the wrongs of the recent past. There has been a substantial real-terms reduction in spending on adult skills since the early 2000s, despite what we have all been saying in places like the House of Lords, and many of the incentives to learn, relearn and retrain have been withdrawn. The additional funding in the recent Budget was very welcome, but it is nowhere near enough to restore the situation.

Some of the new investment, if we are able to achieve it, has to go towards tackling the problem of flexible part-time learning. The current tertiary system does not support flexible learning. The catastrophic fall in the number of part-time students in HE has been worrying, and the Sutton Trust report, entitled The Lost Part-Timers, says it all. The lifelong learning entitlement is not perfect, but it is an opportunity to improve, so students can better fit study around work and other responsibilities. Can the Minister commit to implementing the lifelong learning entitlement in 2027? I think my Ministers would have said that this is a fairly relaxed target, so are we able to commit to that? Can we commit to credit-based fee caps to facilitate increasing demand for accelerated learning? Can we also protect the value of the student premium in the spending review to support institutions that are finding the increased costs of part-time difficult to cope with?