Digital Skills (Select Committee Report)

Lord Lucas Excerpts

Monday 13th June 2016 Lords Chamber

[Lord Lucas (Con)]

My Lords, I share my colleagues’ thanks to the most excellent staff and the support that we had on the committee and to all who contributed to our deliberation. Most of all, however, I thank our chair, who did a superb job in holding the committee together and getting it somewhere sensible—she really should be chair of Ofsted. I also share the views of the noble Lord, Lord Aberdare, on the Government’s lack of response. There really is a role for the Government to play in taking leadership and steering the country into and through the digital age. However, when you find out that HMRC still does not have email, you realise that there is a bit to do. We have an Investigatory Powers Bill coming to this House soon which has been drafted without any concept that perhaps the individual citizen needs protecting too in their daily life on the internet. There really is a lot to do, and to have a directed and centralised will in Government to push this through in all departments is a change which is needed. I am very disappointed that the Government have yet to pick this up.

I hope it will be uncontroversial if I say that the Government, when dealing with IT and the consequences of IT for the country, need fewer national, top-down rules and more principles that get worked out locally, with users, so that they actually work on the ground. We are seeing too much centralised thinking, creating a set of rules that the rest of the country is meant to go by. When you come to put this into place, given the local job picture and the training facilities available, it just does not fit. I very much hope that the Government will take the opportunity to support local digital skills partnerships as they emerge. I know that several are under way.

I was very impressed by what the noble Lord, Lord Knight of Weymouth, had to say, not that I agree with him entirely on the subject of the role of knowledge in the curriculum. There is a great deal to be said for knowing things before one spouts opinions but, when it comes to education bearing on digital skills, we have to take a very radical view of what the right structures are. There are university courses out there which are teaching Flash, for goodness’ sake. People are paying good money to be taught something which is certifiably useless to their future career.

Education for the operational level of IT is naturally much shorter than a degree. A lot of the jobs available are essentially technician-style jobs: you need maybe six months of intensive education, a couple of eight-week bursts of blended learning and a bit of experience in between. With that, you can take someone who is NEET and turn them into a useful employee. You do not need long courses, and anyway what is the point of them? The whole of someone’s life when they are in IT is going to be learning and relearning. I am sure it has happened to the noble Lord, Lord Knight, just as it has happened to me. I am having to learn another computer language now because the ones I know are out of date. This is the same for everybody involved in IT: it is an absolutely non-stop, continuous package of learning. To think that you can learn three years of it at the beginning is just mistaken. There are some things about computer education that are permanent: the way to program well; the way to manage a project. Those things change slowly, but the individual packages, programming languages and sets of data that you work with change all the time. That needs to be much more directed towards a lifelong process.

In the report, we call for learning to be based much more on industry requirements—on a fast, up-to-date response to real demand. One example of the way in which the Government are standing in the way of that is the prohibition on funding industry-designed courses. In large chunks of IT, industry courses—things from Cisco, Microsoft, Apple or whatever—are the way that the industry operates. They are what employers want. That is the currency out there. It is a global industry. We cannot change that by fiat in the way that we can change a GCSE spec. We have to fit in and work with the way the world works. If we are educating an apprentice in some generic course that does not focus on an industry-understood capability, all we are doing is turning out people who are not fit for work. They will have to be retrained as soon as they are hired. The industry response to that is to say either, “Hire someone from India if we can”, or, “Export the work to India, because we need the capability and we need the thing done now”. We have to look at how we are working within the realities of the industry and we need short, sharp, totally up-to-date courses, which cannot be devised through the standard ways of Ofqual and slow government processes. They have to be what is accepted by the industry now.

The other thing that distresses me in the way that the Government are proceeding at the moment is how apprenticeships are evolving into myriad tiny compartmentalised qualifications, with job descriptions that probably will not be there in two years’ time. We are in danger of breaching the 1,000 barrier in the number of apprenticeship qualifications out there. It is looking to be worse than the qualifications pattern that underlies it. In IT, few digital jobs do not access other parts of the world. Most of the jobs that we are creating are not just IT but tied into other bits of the real world. Teaching a motor mechanic how a car works, for example, is half IT at the moment.

There is an idea that you can compartmentalise things. The committee visited an entirely undecorated computing department at Imperial where you would think that the arts did not exist at all. That is not where IT belongs. It is part of all our lives. Apprenticeships specifications that are too narrow and rigid will not last. They will not have value for the people who take them because they will be out of date and irrelevant in two or three years’ time. We have to write the specs broadly and allow them to be things that will last. They probably need to last 10 years before someone’s experience in life outlives the fact that they started as an apprentice. They have to have more breadth and reliability than they do now.

Beyond that, I very much hope that the Government will support the efforts of the Tech Partnership to help people initiate an interest in IT careers. It is wrong to think that we can do it through the educational system. It is too slow and it misses too many people. An awful lot of people out there, particularly women, could have taken an IT career early on but did not take the right route. There are lots of people who want to change career, who have got bored with what they are doing or are returning to careers after a period out of work or doing other things, who will have no great concept that a career in IT might be for them. A short introductory course that they can do, and at the end of it have confidence that IT might be for them and that it might be worth taking up an apprenticeship or longer course, is enormously important. TechFuture badges, to echo something that the noble Lord, Lord Knight, said, will become a way in which people’s skills are judged and evaluated by future employers. The Government are getting behind that through the Careers & Enterprise Company and the enterprise passport initiated by my noble friend Lord Young. That is an important way to go, as are the two-day back-to-work courses. People who have never done IT before are given a chance to see if that is a skill set that they might have. The Government need to find ways to make such opportunities easily available to people all through their lives because we will not tackle the skills shortage we have in IT just through education. We need to recruit an awful lot of people who think that they are past that stage but now find they need to do something else.