Skills and Post-16 Education Bill [HL]

Lord Bird Excerpts

Report stage
Tuesday 12th October 2021 Lords Chamber

[Lord Bird (CB)]

I want to support the amendment from the noble Baroness, Lady Neville-Rolfe, but probably from a slightly different angle. People who end up doing apprenticeships and going into vocational work often had problems at earlier stages in their education. I am speaking from my own experience. We have to recognise that 49% of employers say that they do not quite believe in the curriculum that children follow before they go into apprenticeships, or even to university. We always seem to be behind—we run our education system preparing children for jobs that often disappear before they come out of school. I was one of those people: I was trained in a very careful way to be a builder’s labourer when I left school at 15, but unfortunately, they had brought in all this gear, so I had to do things other than dig holes and lay concrete. I am being a bit facetious, but the point is that we have to make sure that, for the period before people enter an apprenticeship and before they wonder whether they are going to go to university, we look at reinventing that kind of education.

The biggest ask among most employers is more creativity, because they know that, with 65% of the jobs not yet invented when children are at school, we need to find a way to up our game. We have a skills shortage now which has led to the fact that there are 1.4 million jobs. If we did not have that—if we had made the adjustments many years ago—we would not have the problem of the law of unintended consequences, which means that we cannot even get gas or petrol from our local garage.

I believe that, if we are to go anywhere, we have to reinvent the whole way in which children are taught creatively. I declare an interest, in that I put my children through the Steiner system: on the first day of school you are taught about nature, on the second day you are taught about making things, and you go on and on. They put enormous emphasis on chess and maths and various other things, and the children who come out at the end are the children people want in the industries of tomorrow.

[Lord Ravensdale (CB)]

My Lords, I declare an interest as an engineer and project director for Atkins, and as a director of Peers for the Planet. I am delighted to support the amendment in the name of the noble Baroness, Lady Neville-Rolfe, to which I have added my name. I apologise to noble Lords for not speaking at earlier stages of the Bill, but I have followed its progress closely and am really pleased to be able to speak on this amendment today. I welcome the noble Baroness, Lady Barran, to her post in the DfE. It is great to see her in her place.

Amendment 8 seeks to ensure that some critical skills development for long-term national skills needs are taken into account in local skills improvement plans.

On digital skills and innovation, these skills areas are critical to the recovery of the economy following the pandemic and to the future, yet we are seeing a crisis in digital skills, with the number of young people taking IT at GCSE falling by around 40% since 2015, and high rates of digital exclusion; 20% of children in one class in a secondary school local to me do not have access to the internet, which is a shocking statistic. Digital skills cut across all areas of the economy and will be part of the key to addressing the flatline in total factor productivity growth across the economy that we have seen since 2008.

I will give noble Lords a simple example. In my consultancy business a few years back we were commissioned to do a project to undertake a large data transfer activity. On reviewing the task, one of our young engineers proposed using robotic process automation techniques to complete the task instead of the original manual approach, whereby an advanced computer script undertook the task in place of engineers. This allowed it to be completed in a third of the time and cost, saving hundreds of thousands of pounds. That is productivity growth in action. In addition to improving productivity, such a process frees people from mundane and repetitive tasks and enables them to take on more value-added work; I liken the technology to the modern equivalent of machine automation, saving people from the drudgery of Adam Smith’s pin factory. Robotic process automation is already leading to data and finance sectors repatriating work that had previously been offshored, and to significant productivity gains, with work being undertaken by teams of software robots overseen by humans.

Time and again I have seen the ability of advanced software skills to automate tasks and radically improve the productivity of teams and projects, yet in my business and in businesses across the UK we are struggling to attract these skills. I am currently building a software team to design the control system software for a new nuclear reactor, and our job adverts for software engineers go largely unanswered. It is possible that this reflects my limited aptitude for advertising, but, in all seriousness, we must ensure that digital skills are prioritised to enable our businesses to grow, innovate, compete, create the jobs of the future and create the high-wage, high-productivity economy that we all want.

Our economy has long seen a shortfall in engineering skills. EngineeringUK estimates an annual shortfall of around 59,000 people in meeting an annual demand for 124,000 core engineering roles requiring level 3-plus skills. As our economy undergoes one of the biggest transformations in its history, engineering will become more important than ever. For example, it is estimated that between nine and 12 gigawatts of new generating capacity must be installed every year between now and 2050 to meet our net zero goals. New gigafactories will need to be constructed and immense infrastructure programmes completed to decarbonise heat and industry. All this will need to be accomplished by engineers. Again, in my consultancy business we are struggling to grow to meet demand from clients because there are simply not enough qualified engineers to go around. This is just to meet current demand. As engineering is a key enabler for the future economy, it too must be prioritised in LSIP developments.

I second the comments of the noble Baroness, Lady Neville-Rolfe, on the built environment and will not expand on them here, but I congratulate the Government on bringing forward amendments on alignment with climate and net zero goals in response to the work led by my noble friend Lady Hayman. Our amendment complements these by focusing on the key enablers for our future economy. I note the synergies with the green skills strategy amendment proposed by my noble friend.

Finally, I have a question for the Minister. I had an excellent skills review meeting with stakeholders from the Midlands Engine yesterday—I declare my interest as co-chair of the Midlands Engine All-Party Parliamentary Group. Given the importance of SMEs to the region and indeed nationally, there was some concern that their voices would not be heard, and that employer representative groups would be dominated by large corporates. This follows on from amendments raised by the noble Baroness, Lady Neville-Rolfe, and the noble Lord, Lord Patel, among others in Committee. Can the Minister provide some reassurance that those important voices will be heard in LSIP development?