Technical and Further Education Bill

Lord Bishop of Norwich Excerpts

2nd reading (Hansard): House of Lords
Wednesday 1st February 2017 Lords Chamber

[The Lord Bishop of Norwich]

My Lords, I am glad to add my voice to the chorus of welcome for the Bill—on these Benches we are professionally interested in choruses.

Those who read the City & Guilds report Sense & Instability, which was published just over a couple of years ago, will remember the bleak picture painted there of three decades of skills and employment policy. The authors pointed out—with a degree of sardonic humour, I think—that, in 30 years, there have been 13 major Acts of Parliament dealing with these issues, enough reports to fill a medium-sized bookcase, no fewer than 61 Ministers and 10 occasions when skills and employment have shifted between government departments. “Tinkering”, “amnesia” and “disruption” were among the milder terms employed in that very powerful report.

As the authors of that report saw, resolving our long-standing weakness in technical and vocational education would not only be fundamental to improving productivity and creating a more skilled workforce but ought to be a powerful driver of opportunity and social mobility. Of course, it should also be a liberation of the human spirit—the Latin root of “education” reminds us that it is all about being led out into life, as the noble Baroness has just reminded us—and the best education leads to human flourishing not simply in economic terms but socially, aesthetically, spiritually and all the rest. For those reasons, I strongly support the Bill’s ambition to place technical professional education on the same footing as the more academic routes.

From these Benches, we welcome especially a number of the Bill’s principal objectives, including: the structural importance of having clear responsibility for apprenticeships and technical education through the extensive role given to the institute; the radical simplification of the great maze of vocational qualifications currently offered; and a more rigorous process for the development of standards.

While the prominence given to insolvency in the Bill seems at first sight disturbing, given the hand-to-mouth precariousness of further education finance, at least this is the first time, as far as I can see, that an insolvency regime has given explicit priority to the safeguarding of the interests of the students themselves. So we warmly welcome the Bill, even if there are a few caveats.

Another caveat seems obvious: I could not see any explicit definition of “technical education” in the Bill or the accompanying literature. Some clarification here would surely be desirable and would have practical implications. For example, many schools and sixth-form colleges offer a combination of GCSE and A-level qualifications, identified in the Post-16 Skills Plan as one of the main academic routes, alongside subjects generally considered technical or general vocational courses, such as BTEC national diplomas, City & Guilds programmes and the like. I am also glad to see a growing emphasis on higher and degree apprenticeships, to which the noble Lord, Lord Baker, referred.

The recently announced industrial strategy emphasises —one might even say that it presupposes—much greater collaboration across the sectors involved, between colleges and employers and between FE institutions and universities and so on. In my own diocese we have a first-rate example of this, in my view, in City College Norwich, which is not only the largest provider of education for 16 to 18 year-olds in Norfolk but also offers a wide range of apprenticeships and degree and other higher education programmes.

Each year at least 500 students come to Norwich Cathedral for City College graduation ceremonies. I have heard there a good many stories of young people who thought themselves failures at school, in their early years of secondary education, but gradually progressed through the range of opportunities offered at City College and ended up with not just first degrees but further degrees and highly skilled work.

Good collaboration with other institutions is absolutely essential to that sort of progress, as well as a breadth of understanding on the part of the institution about what further education may provide. Just last week, I was licensing a new chaplain to City College who is working with the “well-being team”. I did not know that it had a well-being team until recently, but the fact that the college has such a team suggests a healthy and holistic approach to education.

A famous aphorism claims that you can never be too rich or too thin. Perhaps this Bill adds a third criterion: you can never have too many regulatory bodies. As the Institute for Apprenticeships and Technical Education comes, or has come, into being—I am not sure of its acronym yet; IFATE does not seem all that cheerful—there is surely a need to avoid overlap between its remit and so many other bodies, such as Ofqual, not least in its role as regulator for English and maths qualifications, and Ofsted, with its responsibilities for FE and work-based learning. I cannot see quite yet how we will prevent the sort of unhealthy overlap that can result from so many regulatory bodies. But, overall, I sound a note of welcome for the Bill and I wish the Minister well as he guides us through the next stages.