Technical and Further Education Bill

Lord Lucas Excerpts

2nd reading (Hansard): House of Lords
Wednesday 1st February 2017 Lords Chamber

[Lord Lucas (Con)]

My Lords, I welcome this Bill and declare my associations with City & Guilds and the Good Careers Guide, as recorded in the register. I will start by looking at the interface between what this Bill does and schools. As the right reverend Prelate has just said, on the supply side of technical education we have IFATE—which is actually an astrology website, so perhaps we need a different name for it—and in the interface between technical education and schools, we have the Careers & Enterprise Company, which is showing immense promise. But we are missing the bit inside schools. How do you manage the interface within a school, with all these multifarious opportunities and things that need to be understood and looked at, when you have, as the noble Baroness, Lady Morris, said, a very straightforward system of teaching children to some very well-defined exams?

The answer, as the Minister suggested to me on other occasions, is to have a dedicated person within each school whose responsibility it is to interface between everything going on in the school and the plethora of opportunities outside and to make sure that a lot of it gets in and is understood. Without that flow we will be in serious danger of having blocked pipework. All these opportunities we are creating outside are just not getting into schools—not being seen by the pupils who need them and not being understood by schools, or indeed by parents.

The answer, or at least an answer that we should look at, is to allow employers to devote some, say 5%, of their apprenticeship levy to unblocking this pipe—through, I would suggest, the Careers & Enterprise Company, because we want to know that it will be well managed—to allow employers to say, to some degree, “I want to work with this school and that school”, but allowing the Careers & Enterprise Company to divert some money to its cold spots. Then we could start to build a really active and close association between employers, schools and pupils.

This would influence the direction that pupils take in life in the sort of way that my noble friend Lord Baker was talking about. If there is a really active understanding and appreciation of what employers want, it would encourage pupils to move in that direction. Estonia is a good place to learn lessons from, and we could pick up on its idea of computer-based maths, too. To go in the direction of greater connectedness between schools, and to do it now because we are creating so much extra technical education, would be a useful thing that we could move forward on with the Bill.

I will also pick up on certification. It seems to some of the people who have been writing to me a bit odd that the Government should be taking on the role of certification of technical qualifications—but I think it is a great opportunity. We will suddenly have a consolidated list of former apprentices and holders of technical qualifications. There are all sorts of uses for that. We can push continuous professional development, and we can get a lot of feedback on the qualifications and apprenticeships that we are providing and feed that into the system for improvement. We will have a register of people who have been through these things, which will make it much easier for them to get employed and for us to understand where shortages are.

The other thing we should do in that instance is to give these people something to put after their name. We give university graduates BA, or something similar. What are we going to do for apprentices? They cannot call themselves “former apprentices”. We need something in which they can take pride and which enables them to say, “I am an apprentice and I passed”. It should not be just university graduates or, indeed, school leavers, who can put something after their name.

My next question on the Bill concerns how the 15 routes—I do not know what you call them; since this involves Sainsbury’s, they should probably be called “aisles”—work. How do we get from standards which are quite loose, with phrases such as, “must be good at IT”, to something which is well specified, absolutely clear and has a set of deliverables on which qualifications and assessment materials can be built? I do not understand who it is intended will do what job in that process. I shall be quite content for the Minister to give me some homework in this area; I just have not found what I need at the moment and would be grateful for his help. But I hope that we are not going into something which is too top-down. We have tried this before with technical qualifications. I liked the feel of diplomas but we just did not get it right—and nor did we with individual learning accounts. This needs to be a much more bottom-up process as well as the top-down organisation, and I hope that that is what we shall see.

Who in this structure is really doing quality assurance? Who is making sure that the process is running well, and how does that work? How do industries such as utilities interface with it? There is no utilities aisle; it is sort of scattered between three or four of them, but it is an area where we are looking at some very big employment opportunities as technology changes. How does it work for an industry such as that?

I have another question in this area: how do single awarding organisations work? This is a discussion we had concerning GCSEs a few years ago. We settled on keeping a multiplicity, and I think for very good reasons: you get flexibility; you avoid single points of failure; and it is much easier to spur on improvement and to change something that is not working well. Why are the Government going in a different direction in a much more complicated area, where it is very difficult, even within one aisle, for one awarding organisation to be expert at everything and to cover every variation within that aisle?

The Bill as drafted takes intellectual property away from awarding organisations and gives it to IFATE. That is a very unusual structure. Usually, if an organisation has put a lot of investment into creating assessment and qualification structures, that is the intellectual property of the organisation—and for good reasons, too, because that gives it an incentive to continue to develop and keep the quality up.

We are also looking at a lot of qualifications that will embed vendor qualifications, certainly in the tech area, because that is what employers want. Are we really saying that their IP will also be ceded to IFATE? We need to look at this corner carefully to make sure that we have the incentives and the practicalities right.

On insolvency, as the noble Baroness, Lady Wolf, has already said, we need to think about what happens with training providers and, indeed, awarding organisations when they go bust, as the Bill will put them under a lot of stress. We need to understand how they work, because they are just as capable of tipping learners into an abyss if they go under.

I look forward to the Bill’s Committee stage—I think that it will be a great deal less stressful for the Minister than the Higher Education and Research Bill was for his colleague—and I wish it well.