Skills and Post-16 Education Bill [HL]

Lord Clarke of Nottingham Excerpts

Committee stage
Monday 19th July 2021 Lords Chamber

Moved by

[Lord Clarke of Nottingham]

76: After Clause 21, insert the following new Clause—
“Provision of opportunities for education and skills development
(1) Any person of any age has the right to free education on an approved course up to Level 3 supplied by an approved provider of further or technical education, if he or she has not already studied at that level.(2) Any approved provider must receive automatic in-year funding for any student covered by subsection (1), and supported by the Adult Education Budget, at a tariff rate set by the Secretary of State. (3) Any employer receiving apprenticeship funding shall spend at least two thirds of that funding on people who begin apprenticeships at Levels 2 and 3 before the age of 25.”

[Lord Clarke of Nottingham (Con)]

My Lords, I tabled Amendment 76 in collaboration with the noble Lord, Lord Layard, and I am glad to see that my old friend, the noble Lord, Lord Rooker, has added his name in support.

In moving this amendment, I hope to get a reasonably sympathetic response from the Government—I am sure the Minister will endeavour to provide one—because it is very much in the spirit of the Government’s policy of trying to address the skills gap in this country and enable individuals to develop skills relevant to today’s labour market in their area. I therefore hope I can get a sympathetic and even positive response to what I propose for the category of people covered.

The Government’s policy so far, based on their excellent White Paper—to which they are slowly adding some substance as they develop it—is to concentrate particularly on the higher levels of skill to make sure we have an alternative to the traditional route through school and university for the academically able that gives equal status and value to technical and engineering skills. I very much welcome that. This amendment is tabled for a slightly different target, which does not have adequate attention: people who unfortunately did not take advantage of opportunities when they were young and should have devoted at least some of their time to their education and training, who realise that they need to improve their skills to get better career prospects and move to a more sensible job pattern in future.

Teenage angst takes a whole variety of forms, but it leads to some people completely failing to take advantage of the opportunities they had at school or wherever. There are people who have intrinsic intelligence and ability but drop out of school or the labour market because of whatever phase of the world they are going through. They even join the category given the dreadful jargon name of NEETs—people not in education, employment or training. By the time they get to the age of 25, as people begin to mature and face up to the realities of life, quite a lot of them wish to address it. I think society as a whole wishes to give them an opportunity to make themselves better opportunities in the labour market.

For that reason, we are concerned with those seeking skills at level 2, which is the equivalent of GCSE, and level 3, which is the equivalent of A-levels. Anybody who failed to take their opportunities when they had them should have a lifelong opportunity to do so in order to improve the contribution they can make to the local economy and their life prospects.

As I said, the Government are producing quite substantial proposals in the Bill, but so far there is much more support for levels 4, 5 and 6 up to degree level. This is not in any way challenging that—I support all that—but there is a gap that we seek to address in this amendment. The first component of the amendment says:

“Any person of any age has the right”


to free tuition if they wish to make up for what they have omitted so far and to take a level 2 or 3 qualification of some kind. The Government have not covered that. A statutory right would be extremely valuable.

Some financial support will be required. The Government are developing a lifelong loans entitlement for people who at any stage wish to improve their skills, but that is confined to those seeking skills at levels 4, 5 and 6. I hope I have made the case for making available some equivalent to those at levels 2 and 3. The form can be settled, but the legal entitlement would give substance to the Government’s policies. In due course, the Government could provide the sort of funding that should be made available to persons who make the sensible decision to gain qualifications at that level.

It is no good offering people government funding for courses of any kind if the providers are not supplying such courses and if the budgets of the relevant institutions do not allow them to make those courses available. This is all part of a much wider problem in the further education college and sixth-form college sector, which has been the Cinderella of our education and training system for several decades but will have to play a vital part in supplying a response to the skills gap at every level, and will certainly be very important at this level.

The problem at the moment is that, while further education colleges do try to provide relevant courses—I welcome the fact that they will be working much more closely with local employers for relevant local skills and I am not remotely hostile to the broad brush of policy—they are, of course, funded on a quite different basis from other parts of our education system. Every school gets a guaranteed sum of money for every pupil it persuades to stay on in the sixth form. Every university gets a very generous sum of money guaranteed for everybody it can entice into any sort of course. Colleges of further education, however, work to cash-limited budgets, which have not been treated generously in recent years; there is a finite limit to what they can offer and they have to make a choice.

This is why the second component of our amendment suggests:

“Any approved provider must receive automatic in-year funding for any student”


who, as we have already said, is seeking a level 2 or level 3-type qualification at a tariff rate to be

“set by the Secretary of State”.

I hope that there will be much wider moves than that to get further education funding, further education college status, and the attractiveness of employment and careers in the further education service made more attractive by the Government—but this proposal would provide automatic funding for all those courses that are taken up by an adequate number of people seeking level 2 and 3 qualifications.

Finally, on a slightly broader point, the amendment addresses the uses to which the apprenticeship levy is being put at the moment. Again, I am not just trying to persuade the Minister to be forthcoming; I very much welcome the apprenticeship levy system, the development of apprentices and the way the Bill addresses very important things, such as the quality and variety of qualifications, trying to sort out the maze of them, and so on—and the levy system has had some extremely beneficial effects. However, in its current form, it has had some unintended side-effects. In recent years, there has been a steady drift in the use of levy money towards higher-level qualifications, and towards existing employees of companies seeking to refresh or modify their skills, go through management training and so on, and a decline in the number of young people getting apprenticeships and in the number of people getting more ordinary-level training in skills.

Management trainees, middle-ranking managers and quite senior managers can be described by large employers as apprentices—most of them are utterly unaware of the fact that they are apprentices—for the purpose of claiming levy money to cover the costs. Public sector bodies do this—as, I suspect, do government departments when they are training civil servants; some high-flying civil servant is probably being described somewhere as an apprentice, in order to recover the levy. In answer to questions from the Select Committee on Youth Unemployment, another Minister told us the other day that they have stopped funding MBA courses out of the apprenticeship levy. However, the whole thing has drifted away from its essential point.

--- Later in debate ---

[The Deputy Chairman of Committees (Baroness McIntosh of Hudnall) (Lab)]

I believe I have no further requests to speak after the Minister. I apologise to the noble Lord, Lord Baker; I am afraid the message arrived rather tardily, but I am sure that that was the technology. I now call the mover, the noble and learned Lord, Lord Clarke of Nottingham.

[Lord Clarke of Nottingham (Con)]

My Lords, I am grateful to my noble friend for her reply, and I realise the constraints a Minister has in replying to a debate of this kind in the Lords. She was obviously trying to be helpful. I was very grateful for the wide level of authoritative support that the amendment received. I hope that, before we return to this subject on Report, she will try to come back with a little more substance in response to the points that were made.

Very briefly, on the first point in the amendment, that we should put the Government’s lifelong learning guarantee on a statutory basis, my noble friend’s only reply was that she saw no need to put it in the Bill. Well, given the problems that often arise between Governments announcing noble intentions and the actual delivery of things on the ground, I beg leave to doubt that. Of course, one can ask the opposite question: what exactly is the reason for resisting putting it in the Bill if the Government are all in favour of it? Given that I so welcome the lifelong learning guarantee, perhaps the Government would consider signing up to it—not in blood exactly, but at least putting themselves under a legal obligation to those who should be entitled to it.

On the questions of expenditure that we have been asking, it is certainly the case that noble Lords kept referring to my being a former Chancellor. I am also a former Minister of Employment and Secretary of State for Education. As a former Chancellor, I am quite traditional; I am fiscally responsible—a bit of a fiscal hawk, sometimes—but I do think there are two subjects on which it is unavoidable for the present Government to spend more money. That means I would probably be at least as hawkish as the present Chancellor in resisting all the other lobbies which are inevitably piling in as the atmosphere of free money prevails. Social care and skills training—filling the skills gap—are irresistible things to which we must devote more resources.