Polytechnics

Lord Lucas Excerpts

Thursday 5th May 2016 Lords Chamber

Asked by

[Lord Lucas]

To ask Her Majesty’s Government what assessment they have made of the case for a new generation of polytechnics to address the technical skills gap.

[Lord Lucas (Con)]

My Lords, I welcome the Government’s review of post-16 education. In that context I propose the creation of a network of subregional polytechnics, specialising in levels 4, 5 and 6. That is the biggest gap between supply and needs in our education system. It was identified by Lord Dearing a long time ago and has grown gently worse since then. Our reorganisation of post-16 education provides us with an excellent chance to deal with it.

The polytechnic brand still has resonance. It is a good brand and it describes very well what these colleges would set out to do. Further education at the moment is a fragmented patchwork of too-small colleges, and clustering them under a polytechnic would make the whole system more powerful. It would allow the creation of specialist expertise and top-level facilities, and would provide organisations which are the right size to be responsive to big employers and to create the courses and facilities that they need. It would provide a framework of collaboration and coherence within which such things as the national colleges that the Government are creating would flourish. As a name and a concept it would carry much more prestige than further education does at the moment, to the benefits of its graduates and vocational education as a whole—and the system works well in Switzerland and Austria, so we shall have an example to follow whichever way we vote on 23 June.

I see polytechnics evolving from groups of colleges, creating a strong centre but with the teaching distributed—a lot of it virtual, some of it peripatetic—so that the original colleges remain focused on levels 2 and 3 but through this outreach from the polytechnic are able to offer polytechnic expertise to their students and to local SMEs. As I said, they would run relationships with large employers for the benefit of all the colleges that comprise them. They would focus on HNC and HND and on the qualifications underlying higher and degree apprenticeships, focusing very much on supplying what employers need.

That is a very different mission from that of universities. I do not see these organisations having any ambition to evolve into universities. In some ways, they are quite similar to the Government’s proposed institutes of technology but I see them as having a wider brief—all careers, not just technology careers. They would also have the advantage of having safer acronyms. I do not think that “Sheffield Polytechnic” would cause any problems. Polytechnics, as a concept, would be large enough to afford to be really good, and that is important in advancing further education as a whole.

As I said, I see polytechnics embracing the national college concept. We have two in existence at the moment, one of which is for high-speed rail. Why we are supporting Victorian technology rather than autonomous vehicles, I do not particularly understand—but at least we have nuclear, which is very much a technology of the future. To come, we have advanced manufacturing, wind energy, the creative industries, onshore oil and digital. Those sorts of centres of expertise would fit extremely well within a network of polytechnics because the polytechnics would already have, because they would need it, expertise in delivering high-quality, technical, employer-focused education. Embedding national colleges in the network of polytechnics would give coherence and scalability. It would mean that when you started with one college specialising in, say, 5G technology and it rapidly became apparent that you needed five of them spaced around the country, the structure would already be there in which to embed them. That is very much the pattern that the NHS uses for rare diseases and that I think is implicit in the hub and spoke proposals for national colleges. It would render them coherent and not another source of dissonance.

I see polytechnics as being intensely collaborative with each other, with colleges, with employers and with other education providers, and as having strong local connections. I see them not as national organisations, like universities, but essentially as local organisations. How would one create and enforce such a mission? I do not think that it could be done by representation. Some have proposed that the board should be made up of people from the colleges, the local community, industry and so on. We are hoping to create too many organisations with too many people and too many ways of collaboration for that to be anything but cumbersome and conflicting.

If you want a polytechnic to be run well, it has to have its own governing body focused on doing what it is supposed to do and doing it well, not for ever looking over its shoulder at a set of outside interests. I think that we can manage this through giving polytechnics a really strong statement of principles covering collaboration and covering what they are supposed to do, with an independent evaluation of how they are doing against those principles and a backstop of government control if they are failing. That will allow polytechnics, by and large, to remain where they are supposed to be and to be brought back into line if they fall out of it.

If we devolve levels 4, 5 and 6 to polytechnics, we leave behind levels 2 and 3 in the colleges. That is an essential local role but it is another area that is evolving. My noble friend Lord Baker, in the van as always, has his UTCs and career colleges. There are also studio schools. So we are looking at an area in the middle, or perhaps at the beginning, of a long period of improvement which will give us a system which is more diverse and responsive to people’s needs than we have at the moment.

A narrow education in the years from 16 to 19 is not suitable for anyone. We need all our young people to have breadth. We expect them in their lives to have to deal with career changes or becoming self-employed when they have accumulated obligations— families, caring responsibilities and other things which make basic education at that stage extremely difficult. We have to equip all our young people for the world as we expect it to be.

I very much look forward—later this month, I hope—to the report of the noble Lord, Lord Sainsbury, and Professor Wolf in this area. I hope that that will give us a direction that the Government will welcome. If they manage at the same time to row back from some of the weirdly narrow apprenticeships that the current system seems to be generating, that will also be welcome.

I see polytechnics as having a role in supporting schools. They will be centres of careers expertise. They will have to work very closely with local enterprise partnerships, and it may be that having one polytechnic per LEP will be a good pattern that reinforces the work already being done and the structures being develop by the Careers & Enterprise Company.

All in all, I think that developing a pattern of polytechnics would be an excellent outcome for the Government’s FE reforms. It is a direction long advocated by Edge, the FE “do tank” and is well supported by FE principals. I very much hope that it will find a place in government plans.