Digital Skills (Select Committee Report)

Lord Janvrin Excerpts

Monday 13th June 2016 Lords Chamber

[Lord Janvrin (CB)]

My Lords, it is a pleasure to follow the noble Lord, Lord Kirkwood. Like him, I had the privilege of being a member of the Select Committee. I join him and others in paying tribute to our chair, the noble Baroness, Lady Morgan, and our advisers and staff. The noble Baroness, Lady Morgan, really drove the committee, and it was a huge pleasure, privilege, learning experience—everything else—to be part of that team.

Briefly, I will draw attention to two issues in what was a very wide-ranging report. Before doing so, I, too, would like to mention a bit of the context in which we are operating, because I will return to this point of urgency at the end. In our lifetimes we are seeing all sorts of megatrends—globalisation, demographics, climate change, et cetera—but the trend that is undoubtedly having the largest and most direct effect on our daily lives is the second machine age, the digital revolution. Our lives are being and will increasingly be transformed by the increasing processing power and interconnectivity of the mobile world: big data, the internet of things, advanced robotics—artificial intelligence that will lead to the automation of knowledge work as well as physical work. It is not for nothing that these are described as disruptive technologies.

These technologies present opportunities as well as challenges. The opportunities to manage old age, to encourage innovation and enterprise, to address issues of productivity, and to improve social interaction are all part of the life that we are seeing evolving. But the challenges are huge, and they were identified in our report. I draw particular attention to the infrastructure challenge to provide digital access to all and the whole question of skills—to produce, in the very useful terminology of the UK Digital Skills Taskforce, the,

“digital makers … digital citizens and digital workers”,

who we will need now and in the future to ensure economic and social progress. It is very timely for this House to focus on how we can meet these challenges on the day that the Science and Technology Committee in another place has issued its report on what it describes as the “digital skills crisis”.

The two issues from our report that I want to focus on are the importance of lifelong learning and the role of the Government. Both have been well touched on, not surprisingly, by other speakers. The report has much to say on the demands of the educational system, and I listened very carefully to the expertise of the noble Lord, Lord Knight, on this issue. We spoke about the importance of seeing digital literacy in the same way as maths and English: as the core of the educational curriculum. We looked at how you provide teachers to do that—who teaches the teachers? Others have made the crucial point about the importance of encouraging more women into the digital world.

The point I want to focus on is that in this new digital age we must recognise that formal education at school and, indeed, university will probably prepare many people only for their first job. As the report suggests, if something like 30% of the jobs currently around will not exist in 20 years’ time, many in the UK workforce will have a massive need for opportunities to reskill throughout their working lives. When we talk about digital skills, the question of lifelong learning needs to be addressed with urgency, and I would like to highlight what the report says about this.

First, there is a need for a cultural shift to prepare learners to learn for themselves. Is there scope for more activity from the behavioural economists and nudge units to work out how to bring this about? Part of that is the importance of online learning. Many excellent sites exist, but much more can be done, so the whole question of how learners can learn for themselves needs to be addressed. Secondly, there is the importance of the further education sector in making lifelong learning accessible, in the redesign of courses, in ensuring that digital skills are part of any reskilling package, and in making shorter, more targeted and modular courses available in new ways and at new venues. In looking at how further education can cope with this reskilling process, there must be closer involvement of business in the design, delivery and funding of courses. It is recognised that the debate about digital skills is about not just schools and universities; it is a lifelong learning process that will now be part of all our lives.

My second area is the Government’s leadership role, as I mentioned. It was a constant theme of our report that the Government have a role as the conductor of the orchestra. They are the essential enabler in bringing together their efforts, business, education and the third sector—we should never forget the third sector in all this—to orchestrate what they are doing to reskill or upskill, to have a skills agenda and to solve the skills challenge. As other speakers have mentioned, our recommendations therefore focused on the Government producing a digital agenda to have that orchestrating role of bringing together other actors to ensure that we address the skills challenge. We mentioned the need for senior ministerial oversight at Cabinet level. Above all, we stressed the importance of priority and urgency.

It was a little disappointing that the Government’s response to our 144-page report, published five months later, was four and a quarter pages long and that we have had to wait until now for news of the digital economy Bill, which will undoubtedly be important in addressing some of the infrastructure challenges. However, we are still waiting for the digital strategy. It is very good news that it is in the pipeline and we all look forward to what the Minister may or may not say in trailing its publication.

We owe it to a huge number of people to get this right. We in the post-war generation have been brought up to believe in linear change—that yesterday is probably a good guide to tomorrow. But the second machine age means that we are living in a completely different world of disruptive change. There is therefore a question of how we produce the flexibility and pragmatism, the imagination and innovation and the willingness to take risks in an age of change and uncertainty that this skills challenge will require. A lot of people are going to need a lot of help. The Government have a crucial role in orchestrating the response, the way to address this problem. I look forward hugely to hearing that sense of priority from the Government in how they will address it.