Skills and Post-16 Education Bill [HL]

Lord Lucas Excerpts

2nd reading
Tuesday 15th June 2021 Lords Chamber

[Lord Lucas (Con) [V]]

My Lords, I declare an interest as a council member of City & Guilds. I am very much looking forward to Committee. It has been a pretty challenging Second Reading so far and I am confident that we can do some things to improve this Bill. My own suggestion will be that we should broaden the definition of outcomes in Clause 17 to cover mental health in higher education.

Going into HE is a huge step change for most children. In JCB’s apprenticeships provision, which is pretty remote and therefore provides the facilities a university might, it goes to immense lengths to look after the mental and general well-being of their apprentices. To my mind, universities fall well short of that standard.

When I tried a few years ago to see whether it might be possible to persuade universities to rely more on teacher recommendations to pick out students who were underperforming for reasons of background but might turn out to be extremely good students none the less, they said that they could not do that as they never got to know their students well enough over the course of three years to evaluate whether the teacher recommendations had been accurate enough.

Universities can be lonely, frightening, isolating places. The NHS mental health provision can take some long while to catch up with the move from home to university. I am sure that many of us have stories of friends or relations who have had a mental health crisis at university. In my case, a colleague of mine had a son at a Russell Group university, who happened to be on a course where there did not seem to be much social life revolving around it. He was going back to his student accommodation, where there was not a lot of social life, and it was a chance telephone call from a fairly distant university friend to this child’s mother that prevented the suicide.

It really is not acceptable these days that we allow these sorts of things to go on, when we know they are happening and we know we can do something about it. Universities can and should come up to speed. I do not think that we should find ourselves in a situation where we are giving universities a bad mark—it is something that they can all do well enough and come up to speed on, given a bit of oversight, so that they know they will be watched on it and that this is something they have to do. Clause 17 gives us an opportunity to make some serious progress in this area.

On local skills, I am very much in the same camp as my noble friend Lord Willetts. This is a matter of our children, not just businesses; it is not just the interests of the businesses that matter but what our children are and could become. It is ridiculous to imagine that all children in Eastbourne, where I live, are destined to become either waiters or brickies. I am sure that there are just as many musicians, programmers and engineers in our cohort as there are in the middle of some well-provided city. We are a town of 100,000 people, with no academic state sixth-form provision. It would be very sad if that same attitude of provision was to be extended to vocational education as well.

There is a big role in this area for a national input on skills, on what is needed and on where the jobs are going to come from over the next 20 years. Not all employer groups have good coverage of industries, good skills and good cohesion; not all know what they need in a changing world. We have to support the local structures that we are going to build with a very strong understanding of what is happening in the world outside, and therefore an understanding of how to support those of our children whose destinies are not to work in the local economy.

In that context, I very much hope, along with the noble Lord, Lord Bilimoria, that we will do something serious about careers information, advice and guidance. There is an opportunity in this Bill to embed that in a structure that can truly nurture it, to build on the current but much divided successful institutions and provide something that will be part of someone’s lifelong education, which they can turn to whenever they need, and to build on a flexible and modular education that they will receive. Perhaps it will move out of schools, where it really struggles, and into the world of FE, making it much easier for people to obtain the information that they need when they think that they want to change a career.