Digital Skills (Select Committee Report)

Lord Knight of Weymouth Excerpts

Monday 13th June 2016 Lords Chamber

[Lord Knight of Weymouth (Lab)]

My Lords, it is a great pleasure to follow my friend the noble Lord, Lord Holmes of Richmond. He was my friend even before he chose to join the wrong political side when he came into this House. I agree with much of what he said and I pay tribute to this fine report and the chairmanship of my noble friend Lady Morgan. I was especially pleased to see the emphasis on hard infrastructure in the report. I personally think that it is a higher priority for us to connect everyone with reliable high-bandwidth broadband than to connect a couple of urban areas through High Speed 2.

I was particularly pleased to see mention of soft infrastructure. I am the chair of the Tinder Foundation, which has an amusing name these days and delivers digital inclusion largely on behalf of government but for other people as well. We try to get online those people who currently do not have the skills and confidence to be online. We get about £6 million to £8 million-worth of government money to do that, for which we are very grateful.

I also certainly endorse the call from the Science and Technology Committee of the other House today that we need to continue our efforts to ensure that the 10 million people in this country—the committee puts the figure at 12.8 million, but that is probably overegging it—who at the moment are excluded from the digital world. That costs them dear financially, culturally and socially.

I will focus most of my comments on education, and the implications for that in the report, where perhaps I would have hoped for the committee to be even more radical than it was. I shall start with some statistics from the Tech Nation 2016 report prepared by Tech City in partnership with Nesta to remind noble Lords of quite how important this area is. There is some easy stuff around the digital tech economy being worth 1.5 million jobs with job creation between 2011 to 2014 running at 2.8 times the rate in the rest of the economy, and that digital tech industries had a turnover of £161 billion and grew 32% faster than the rest of the economy in that time. But what particularly struck me is that 41% of digital tech economy jobs exist within traditionally non-digital industries. That underscores a really important perspective for noble Lords, which is that this is not a sector. We cannot think of digital as just another industrial sector; it is universal and is of universal importance.

The noble Lord, Lord Holmes, talked about digital jobs growth and the deskilling effect of digital at the same time. I know a number of roboticists and I am full of wonder, trepidation and fear at what robots can now do. I am excited by the potential of artificial intelligence to help us mere humans be more effective in what we do, but I am nervous that technology is and will continue to take jobs of brain as well as brawn and will continue to hollow out the labour market. But I am also one who thinks that the dystopian future is a choice and that we can chase after a more utopian one in the labour market. There will be enough work, but in terms of the effect on unemployment the key will be to have in any particular geography the right mix of the supply and demand of skills to service the labour market.

I was interested in the publication a couple of weeks ago by Professor Lynda Gratton, professor of economics at the London Business School, and a colleague who is a professor of economics at Oxford, of a book entitled The 100-Year Life. In combination with the debate around the effect of technology, it is significant to start thinking about the fact that in this country, a child born today has a more than 50% chance of living to 105. What that means is that a child starting school in September is likely to continue in work until the turn of the century, because there is no way that we will be able to finance the long retirements that many of us understood as being the promise when we went to school: work hard, get a decent qualification, go to a good university, choose a career, get a final salary pension scheme, get a 25-year mortgage, pay it off, retire early and look after our kids—great. That is clearly over.

[Lord Maxton (Lab)]

Before my noble friend leaves that point, there are those who predict that the age of 105 is way out and that the first person who will live to 150 has already been born and is probably in their mid-30s.

[Lord Knight of Weymouth]

My noble friend may well be right, but the point I am making is that we need to think about this in the context of 60-year or 70-year working lives—possibly longer—and of continually having to reskill as we are continually deskilled by technology. That has profound implications for our education system. I think it will mean that qualifications as proxies for skill will become increasingly inadequate, and that increasingly we will need employers to credential skill because we cannot wait for our cumbersome qualification system to keep up. Apprenticeships are part of the solution, but they, too, can be cumbersome. We need much more agility in our skills system. We need more modular skills badging so that we click through digital badges and see the portfolios that are behind that of the skills that people have and what they are able to deliver with them.

I also believe that we will shortly move on from the traditional CV, with employers being able to click through into those portfolios and, essentially, sift through data mining. If employers start to move away from sifting using qualifications, the fundamental basis on which our education system is built starts to erode quite rapidly. That means that we need to think carefully about each stage of education and the consequences in this century as the digital revolution starts to explode.

On higher education, it is starting to feel insane for a young person to frontload their very long working life with a huge amount of debt by going to university in their early 20s when they need to have a lifelong relationship with university that could last 60 or 70 years. For further education, working out the closer relationship with employers that the report talks about and reflecting employer-accredited qualifications rather than waiting around for awarding bodies is key. For both those sectors—if it does not cause my noble friend Lady Morgan too many nightmares—we should revisit the principle of individual learning accounts and see whether there is a system of financing skills that is individualised, and that is an entitlement that we may all have and can draw on through a long working life.

For schools, we need to profoundly challenge a system that is so content-heavy and geared around our ability to regurgitate and memorise content, and move to a system that gives us the resilience to work freelance, because that is the nature of this economy, to start and to close businesses and charities, and to deal with having to reskill as we are deskilled constantly through life. We need a school system that is less about the standardisation of an industrial age and more about designing learning around individuals. We now have the technology and the tools. We can use the technology we are talking about to deliver a more individualised education.

I see a radical agenda that is non-negotiable. The report’s title gives us a hint that its authors perhaps think the same. I will close by quoting from a blog published in March last year on Medium, a blogging platform. It says:

“As the waves of digital disruption wash across our shores, we need to ensure that our government, our institutions and our teachers are not applying old norms and ways of thinking to new technologies, new business models and new economic realities ... We need to ensure that we focus our resources not on protecting the past from the future, but protecting the future from the past. This isn’t simply about learning to code. It’s about learning new skills. New ways of thinking. New ways of learning”.

I am very happy to say that the author of the blog is in government. It is the noble Baroness, Lady Shields. I hope that the education department is talking to her and listening to her wise words.