Skills and Post-16 Education Bill [HL]

Lord Johnson of Marylebone Excerpts

2nd reading
Tuesday 15th June 2021 Lords Chamber

[Lord Johnson of Marylebone (Con)]

My Lords, I too congratulate the noble Baroness, Lady Black of Strome, on her extraordinarily fine maiden speech. I am looking forward to learning a lot from her in a lot of different areas.

I too welcome this Bill. It is an important bit of legislation, possibly the most important for the levelling-up agenda in this Parliament. I have a few reservations and would appreciate reassurance on a couple of points from the Minister. I declare my interest as a visiting professor at King’s College London, a senior fellow at Harvard Kennedy School and chair of two private education companies Tes, and Access Creative College, a provider of further education training for the creative industries.

There is a huge amount to welcome in this Bill, but for me there are two features in particular: the lifelong loan allowance, which is being put on a statutory footing; and the introduction of modular funding, which a long-overdue reform that will bring valuable flexibility into our student funding system. However, I have some concern that the Treasury may water down the rocket fuel of the promised skills revolution. A number of noble Lords have already hinted at where this might arise. One of my concerns is around the rigidity of the current system that prevents people from studying at an equivalent or lower level than an award that they already have, as the noble Lord, Lord Puttnam, said in his excellent speech. To my mind, that makes a nonsense of the lifelong loan entitlement. I appreciate that the Government are consulting on it. I hope that the results of that consultation come out the right way, because if we stick to it, it will prevent people from reskilling effectively.

My other area of concern is around what I see as the Treasury’s persistently flawed conception of how to measure value for money in post-16 education. The idea that you can measure the worth of a course by the proportion of the student loan that ends up being repaid is far too reductive. If we stick with it, it will stop us from properly funding what are socially useful and valuable but lower-earning professions and paths in life. We already see hints that this is the prevailing view and that it will continue to be the prevailing view in the list of some 400 qualifications that are eligible for funding in the lifetime skills guarantee. That list of 400 qualifications is still too restrictive. As far as I can see, it does not include any creative arts courses, for example.

My concern, as this Bill makes its way through this place and the other place, is that when the section lands on the new student finance system, the Treasury uses this legislation’s fine print to further defund those areas of provision that have lower rates of repayment associated with them, through a mix of potential policy tools, including student number controls by subject, higher minimum entry requirements by subject and a variety of others, most notably the potential for much lower fee levels for those courses.

Those are all big risks as this Bill makes its way through this place. I would appreciate any reassurance that the Minister can give on that front. I am particularly concerned about what it would do for the provision of creative education courses. It is highly likely that, if we go down that path and defund courses on that basis, it will starve the supply of talent into some of our most promising industries as an economy—performing arts, creative design, creative computing, music technology, music performance and so on. That would be a sad outcome for us as a society and it would also be an economic nonsense. These were industries that were growing at five times the rate of GDP before the crisis, and we should not do them the disservice of starving them of talent as we come out of it.

My sense is that if the Treasury wants to save money, and I understand that it wants to invest money in other areas or education systems to support catch-up elsewhere, which is entirely understandable, I recommend that it looks at lowering the repayment threshold on the student loan as a far more sensible source of much larger sums of money. The Higher Education Policy Institute, for example, has calculated that lowering the repayment threshold to just below £20,000 from the current level of £27,295 would save £3.8 billion and reduce the proportion of the student loan that is not repaid to one-third, from current levels of over one-half. That seems a very sensible and more fruitful area of reform for the Treasury to look at.

Time is running out, but I welcome this Bill. It is a really important Bill. I congratulate the Minister and the Secretary of State for bringing it to Parliament. I will certainly be supporting it. However, it is clearly something of a down payment on a much bigger set of changes that, ultimately, we will need if we are going to have a joined-up system of post-16 education and skills. We have a rather bewildering array of regulatory and funding bodies out there in the landscape: the OfS, the Education and Skills Funding Agency, the Institute for Apprenticeships and Technical Education, and so on. The time is surely coming, now that through this Bill we are introducing much more flexible systems of funding, for us to move to a joined-up system of regulation and funding for all post-16 education.

Skills and Post-16 Education Bill [HL]

Lord Johnson of Marylebone Excerpts

Committee stage
Wednesday 21st July 2021 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Berridge (Con)]

My Lords, I beg to move Government Amendment 91A and speak to Amendments 91B, 91C, 99C and 99D in my name. These are primarily aimed at amending Clause 15, which in turn amends the definition of “higher education course” in the Higher Education and Research Act 2017, to make express provision for the regulation of modules and to make clear what a module of a higher education course is as distinct from a full course.

The current student finance system does not offer funding for modules, nor is there any fee maximum for such modules or a specific corresponding regulatory system. The lifelong loan entitlement will transform student finance by supporting more flexible and modular provision. This legislative change is needed to ensure that we can deliver modular provision. Taken with the amendments that we have previously laid, this clause makes specific provision for modules in Part 1 of HERA 2017, which relates to the regulatory regime under the Office for Students. The amendments also relieve higher education providers, the OfS and the designated quality body of certain additional burdens which would otherwise arise from the addition of the concept of modules under HERA. These relate to certain requirements to provide or publish information—for example, under Sections 9, 11 and 65 of that Act. We want to reduce bureaucratic burden on providers, and these changes will ensure that the introduction of funding for modules through the LLE will not add to this.

Clause 26 sets out the territorial extent of the provisions in the Bill. This is a standard clause for all legislation. In essence, and with minor technical exceptions, the LLE provisions extend to England and Wales but apply in relation to England, because we are making amendments to the English student finance system. Overall, these changes will help to pave the way for more flexible study and for greater parity between further and higher education. As noble Lords will be aware, we will be consulting on the detail and scope of the lifelong loan entitlement this year. Our commitment to supporting students through the LLE is a key consideration in the public consultation which we will launch in due course. This will include seeking views on specifics of our regulatory system.

[Lord Johnson of Marylebone (Con) [V]]

My Lords, I speak to Amendment 92 in my name and draw attention to my interests in the register, as chair of TES, the education software and information group, and of Access Creative College, an independent provider of training for the digital and creative industries.

Amendment 92 is a probing amendment, to test the Government’s ambitions for the lifelong loan entitlement and to probe their assumptions about what provision is worthy of funding under it. We do not yet have critical details on the LLE, for which the Bill provides the legislative underpinning. That will emerge only following the consultations that the Minister has just mentioned, and then in secondary legislation due in 2024, ahead of the LLE’s actual introduction in 2025. In theory, the combination of the LLE and the introduction of the system of modular funding that the Minister has just mentioned, for sub-degree chunks of study, will make it easier for adults and young people to access learning in a more flexible way, to space out their studies and to earn while they learn if they wish.

Since 2012-13, English HE students have been eligible for loans only if they are studying at an intensity of 25% or more of a full-time equivalent course and are following a full course for a specified qualification, hence students studying individual modules or shorter courses of less intensity have not been eligible for loans. This has been an important factor in the decline of part-time adult learners. The LLE will, in theory, help to address this problem—therefore so far, so good, and I very much welcome it.

However, there is real complexity involved in the introduction of the lifelong loan entitlement, and a danger that theory and practice might diverge in crucial ways in certain respects. One of the main sources of danger is that the Treasury, partly out of its desire for quick savings from higher education in the spending review, may water down the promised skills revolution by insisting on retaining the so-called equivalent or lower qualification rule. Indeed, I expect that the Treasury will put up a valiant attempt to keep the ELQ rule whatever the consultations on the LLE say when they are eventually produced.

The traditional rationale for the ELQ restriction is that funding available for student support is finite and that it is necessary to put in place limits to ensure that all eligible students who wish to enter HE for the first time can do so. Accordingly, the ELQ rule prevents those studying a second HE course, at an equivalent or lower level, from receiving tuition fee loans or maintenance support for the course. For example, if you study classics for an undergraduate degree in your 20s at UCL, you could not then reskill in your 30s by undertaking a diploma in graphic design at UAL.

Restrictions apply even to those who previously followed privately funded courses which they self-financed. These ELQ restrictions seem complex and very unusual, when you look across the global HE landscape. For example, they do not exist in Canada, Australia, or New Zealand, whose HE systems are quite similar to England’s. The obvious trouble is that the ELQ rule not only constrains student choice about how best to retrain if they already have a qualification but treats tertiary education—post-18 education—as a one-off event, rather than as part of a process of lifelong learning in a world in which people can expect to have multiple careers over their working lives. Keeping it will therefore make a nonsense of the entire lifelong loan entitlement.

My contention is that any savings which the Exchequer might make on the subsidy in the loan book from retaining it are outweighed by the broader economic costs incurred by making it so difficult for students to change subject and retrain for new careers. We need a serious economic impact analysis of the ELQ rule before we can consider the secondary legislation on the LLE. Indeed, since it was introduced in 2008, various Governments have already effectively acknowledged the flaws with the ELQ by peppering it with ever more complicated exceptions, such as those applying for medicine, dentistry, and initial teacher training. Part-time ELQ exemptions have been made for engineering, computer science and technology, extended to STEM courses in 2016-17. In 2018 further exceptions were made for nursing, midwifery, allied health professions, and so on.

ELQ restrictions were possibly appropriate for a restricted grant-based HE system, but, under the current loans-based system, they are anachronistic and antithetical to the broader objectives of the Government’s skills reforms. That is why the 2019 Augar report rightly recommended that the ELQ rules be scrapped entirely for those taking out loans for levels 4, 5 and 6—yet nothing has happened since.

Skills and Post-16 Education Bill [HL]

Lord Johnson of Marylebone Excerpts

Consideration of Commons amendments
Thursday 24th March 2022 Lords Chamber

[Lord Shipley (LD)]

My Lords, I agree with what the noble Lord, Lord Willetts, has just said about the timescales. I had the privilege of chairing your Lordships’ Select Committee on Youth Unemployment, which reported in November. I am grateful to the noble Baroness, Lady Wolf, for giving us her time and the benefit of her expertise to advise the committee, which was much appreciated.

We reported in November and have just had the reply from Her Majesty’s Government. What we concluded from the evidence given to us was substantial. I shall read to the House our recommendation 40 on this issue:

“The Government must reconsider its decision to defund tried and tested level 3 qualifications like BTECs, Extended Diplomas and AGQs”—


that is, applied general qualifications.

“We support the amendment to the Skills and Post-16 Education Bill requiring a four-year moratorium on defunding these qualifications and urge the Government to reconsider this policy in its entirety.”

That was the unanimous conclusion of the committee.

The Government’s reply came to us a few days ago, and the word “overlap” appears in it again. They say they will

“remove funding from qualifications that overlap with T Levels … at a pace that allows growth of T Levels and time for providers, awarding organisations, employers, students, and parents to prepare.”

They conclude that one year is enough. I conclude that it requires four years and, as the noble Lord, Lord Willetts, has just said, it may be more than that. In introducing these amendments, the Minister talked about two consultations that have taken place on the issue but, as I recall, she did not say, as the noble Baroness, Lady Blackstone, has reminded us, that 86% of respondents thought the Government’s timetable was too complicated.

I will just give the House some statistics that the committee received. We said in our report:

“230,000 students received level 3 BTEC results in August 2021. They are a common route into HE and are particularly taken up by students from disadvantaged backgrounds or those with special educational needs and disabilities … Almost half of black British students accepted into university have at least one BTEC.”


The evidence is conclusive, and the contributions today from around your Lordships’ House have demonstrated that the Government need to think again on this issue. For that reason, in supporting Amendment 15A and indeed Amendment 16A in the name of the noble Lord, Lord Baker, I will say on behalf of these Benches that if the noble Lord, Lord Blunkett, decides to press this matter to a Division, we shall support him.

[Lord Johnson of Marylebone (Con)]

My Lords, I draw attention to my interests in the register as chair of Access Creative College, an independent training provider of further education for the creative industries. Access welcomes many of the measures in the Bill, as do I. However, I have real concerns that we are inadvertently blighting the applied general qualifications, including BTECs, that it provides.

I listened carefully to the Minister’s remarks responding to Amendment 15A, tabled by the noble Lord, Lord Blunkett. I may have misheard but I thought I heard her say that A-levels and T-levels were the best routes for learners. I really worry that that kind of language, which creates a hierarchy between qualifications, will lead us to diminish the applied general qualifications and the place they have in our system. I worry that we are denigrating them, which will make it harder for providers confidently to offer them and for learners to undertake them, not knowing whether they will hold their value over time in the eyes of employers and the Government. We need to be careful to ensure that when we talk of parity of esteem we include applied general qualifications in that, so that it is parity of esteem not just between A-levels and T-levels but between A-levels, T-levels and applied general qualifications, including reformed BTECs if they are to be further reformed.

It is really important that the Government try to set out a long-term vision for applied general qualifications. We have to recognise that we have moved quite a long way from the previous government position of there being nothing in between A-levels and T-levels. The Government are now acknowledging that there are going to be a large number of qualifications of the applied general variety, but we need to ensure stability and certainty over their funding and their place in the system, otherwise providers are simply not going to get going and offer them, and learners are not going to be confident about taking them.

In that respect, it would be extremely helpful, for example, if the Government set out when they intend to end the moratorium that has been in place since September 2020 on the creation of new applied general qualifications. To my mind, it does not make any sense to have a moratorium if the Government, in their new policy position, now see value in qualifications in this space between T-levels and A-levels. What purpose does a moratorium serve? To my mind, it crimps and constrains innovation. It prevents providers adapting to the needs of employers and learners and stops them innovating. That is a real issue, and the Government would do well to set out a timeline for ending this moratorium.

I am all for T-levels, and Access Creative College, which I mentioned, is embracing such T-levels as exist that are relevant to its areas of expertise, including the digital T-level—but let us not develop them at the expense of BTECs and other applied qualifications, which meet the needs of their learners extremely well. Let us not create a burning platform for T-levels that does great damage to their needs.

[Lord Adonis (Lab)]

My Lords, as the Minister who gave the authorisation to Crossrail, I can say that it was never the intention that the Central line would close; there would be pandemonium in London if it did. The whole purpose of Crossrail was to supplement and improve the Central line, not to replace it, and indeed it goes out further west and east.

That goes to the heart of what the noble Lord, Lord Johnson, has just said, and indeed there seems to be a consensus in the debate that we want a range of qualifications that meet employers’ and students’ needs and do so because they have a strong currency. That strong currency should of course be decided by the students and employers, not imposed by the Government—at least not until the point where it is so clear that the currency is there that it becomes a kind of tidying-up exercise rather than the straightforward force majeure abolition exercise that it looks like at the moment.

I was struck by the fact that when the noble Baroness, Lady Wolf—whom we hold in extremely high regard—spoke about the local skills plans, she did not speak at all about T-levels and did not reply to my noble friend Lord Blunkett. There was a deafening silence on that issue, and I am not sure whether silence was supposed to mean consent; I suspect it might have. I am sure the House will listen with close attention, since she is the Government’s adviser, if she wants to intervene again to say whether she disagrees.

The point being made here is that there may be a longer-term case for these qualifications continuing together, just as there is a long-term case for Crossrail and the Central line continuing together. At the very least we should not abolish the right of students to have access to BTECs until we can be reasonably confident that the replacement qualifications have a strong currency, not a weak one. I am surprised that it should be us on this side having to say this, because it is an enormously Conservative argument: you do not abolish what is there at the moment until you are clear that what is going to replace it is stronger.

This point was brought out particularly strongly in the remarks of the noble Lord, Lord Shipley, who has chaired a Select Committee looking at some of the underlying issues that these qualifications seek to address. He gave the figure to the House that last year 230,000 students finished BTECs. In preparing for this debate, I read the T Level Action Plan of September 2021, which says that as of last year 5,450 students started on 10 T-levels. Let us recap those figures: 230,000 students finished BTECs last year, while in the rollout of T-levels at the moment 5,450 students have started. The noble Lord, Lord Willetts, said that the plans at the moment for opening T-levels are highly ambitious. Extrapolating from that model for the Central line and Crossrail, we would be opening Crossrail in about the middle of this century—not next year with a one-year delay.

My noble friend Lord Blunkett’s amendment seems extremely reasonable. He is calling for a two-year delay and a review at the end of that to see whether the currency is strong enough. That would seem a very sensible step. Not only is it moderate in its own terms, given the timescales; it could be vital for the life chances of hundreds of thousands of students for whom BTECs are, at the moment, their currency into employment. We should not take that currency away until we are clear that there is an alternative at least as good.

Skills and Post-16 Education Bill [HL]

Lord Johnson of Marylebone Excerpts

Consideration of Commons amendments
Thursday 7th April 2022 Lords Chamber

It is vital to the success of the country that young and old are encouraged to improve their skills in all the areas which are needed for prosperity, and so it is a great relief that the Government are not cutting off their nose to spite their face, and have listened to the many well-argued and passionate arguments from around this House and given this reprieve. I thank the Minister.

[Lord Johnson of Marylebone (Con)]

My Lords, as at previous stages, I draw attention to my interests in the register.

I echo the noble Lord, Lord Blunkett, and others in welcoming that we are no longer planning to move straight to a binary world of A-levels and T-levels. I was glad to see that the Secretary of State, in his letter to Peers today, said that BTECs and similar qualifications will have a continuing and important role alongside T-levels and A-levels.

Can the Minister please reassure us on two further points? First, will the Government seek parity of esteem for all quality technical and academic options, so that there is no hierarchy between A-levels, T-levels, BTECs and similarly applied general qualifications? This would mean that the Government would cease to refer to T-levels as the best option and the best technical route. Secondly, can she address the continuing issue of the blight that hangs over the provision of BTECs and other applied general qualifications during this extended reform process, so that it does not deter providers from offering these important and valued technical options and discourage students from embarking on them out of concern that these qualifications will be disparaged by the Government in the process of the reforms and lose their value over time?

[Lord Watson of Invergowrie (Lab)]

My Lords, it has been a long and winding road with this Bill, stretching back over 10 months from the position that we find ourselves in today. There is very little to add to what noble Lords have said in the last 20 minutes or so, but of course that does not mean that I will not make an attempt at it.

It is very pleasing that we have reached this position because, when the Bill arrived here, it was skeletal in form and many noble Lords made the point that it would be fleshed out only through secondary legislation. I do not think that many find that an acceptable means of legislating, given the restrictions on scrutiny that it entails. But we have had some fleshing out. We have the lifetime skills guarantee—albeit from only level 3 upwards—which will be introduced in 2024. We have the lifelong loan entitlement, which we know a bit more about and which is out for consultation at the moment; it will not come into play until 2025. There are also other consultations ongoing on level 2 and level 3 qualifications, so there is still quite a lot out in the ether and what will finally emerge is for the future.

I echo the points of noble Lords, particularly my noble friend Lord Blunkett, about the discussions into which the Minister, the noble Baroness, Lady Penn, and officials entered with us in the last few days. They have been productive.

I was slightly disappointed to get a message this morning from someone in the higher education sector who said that they were disappointed that the fight against BTECs being defunded, had fizzled out. Being a fairly forthright Scot, I replied that this was, shall we say, not quite the case. I have also had messages about the extension to 2024 and the clarity that will be provided in the documents that the Minister referred to—the Secretary of State’s letter and the table. I am not sure whether the table has yet been distributed to noble Lords, but it will be. It sets out the defunding process. The main point, as the noble Baroness, Lady Garden, mentioned, is that when this started, it was said that only a small range of BTECs would survive. We have now come not quite full circle but some considerable distance, with only a small range of BTECs facing defunding and in certain circumstances, as the Minister outlined. That is very much progress, and we welcome it.

To echo the noble Lord, Lord Baker, T-levels will ultimately be a success—we want them to be and they will be; it is a question of time. In our discussions earlier in the week, the Government’s target was 100,000 T-level starts in 2024. That is quite ambitious, given that we have only 5,000 at the moment, but I wish them well. Equally, I welcome that for those young and not so young people for whom T-levels are not appropriate for whatever reason—there are many reasons why that might be the case—there are other options remaining open to them, not least the route into higher education, which has been, as many noble Lords have said, very important. I am pleased that we have got to this. As my noble friend Lord Blunkett said, the Minister has been very helpful in that regard.

The noble Lord, Lord Baker, deserves considerable credit. Through his efforts, the clause bearing his name from the 2017 Act has been beefed up and will carry much more weight and be much more effective than it has hitherto been, with the ability of providers to be brought into schools. There will be much less likelihood of head teachers saying, “No, no, we don’t need that actually. Most of our young people are going to university, we don’t really need to hear about apprenticeships or any form of technical education”. That is wrong in any situation and is now much less likely.

The question of careers education is important. The noble Lord, Lord Blunkett, mentioned it, and I am very proud to say that there is a young man—my son Thomas—sitting on the steps of the Throne who is about to enter senior school. By the time he reaches 16, I hope that these reforms will have bedded in and he will have many options open to him and his cohort, enabling them to make informed decisions on how their lives will pan out, whether through further education, higher education, apprenticeships or whatever. I very much hope that that will be the case.

I do not really have anything else to say, other than that the Bill is in a much better state than it was when it arrived here. Many noble Lords have played an important role in getting us here, and I have to say that the Government have been willing to listen and act. It is important that this Bill is a success. The futures of many young and not so young people depend on it, and the future economy of this country depends on it. I hope it will succeed.