Skills and Post-16 Education Bill [HL]

Lord Lucas Excerpts

Report stage
Thursday 21st October 2021 Lords Chamber

Moved by

[Lord Lucas]

47: Clause 17, page 20, line 22, at end insert—
“(e) the mental health and wellbeing of persons who undertake a higher education course with the institution is supported.”Member’s explanatory statement
To ensure that the Office for Students has a sufficiently powerful lever to enforce its policies on student support, mental health and suicide.

[Lord Lucas (Con)]

My Lords, the origins of this, for me, lie 10 years ago, when one of my work colleagues was rung by a friend of her son to say, “I think you need to come down to Cardiff.” That was the first she knew about her son being suicidal. Fortunately, it all ended well, but there are many other such stories that have ended badly.

The universal point in this is that the universities really have not looked after their students well enough. We get platitudes from them, every now and again, about what they will do, but they do not even follow the basic medical procedures of who to contact if they are really worried about someone. Nor do they, in their substance, take care of students in the way that we as parents might hope.

I tried, a few years ago, to see if universities would switch a bit in the American direction and pay close attention to what teachers said about students in their applications. The answer came back: “No, we cannot do that; we never get to know our students well enough in the three years they are with us to judge whether what a teacher said was right, so there is no way that we can build up a system of reputation and ability to judge teachers’ comments in the way that American universities do.” This is changing, and it is changing because of the Office for Students.

The Office for Students has produced an extremely good paper on what it expects universities to do on mental health. It is getting a real grip on access, saying that it is not only about how many disadvantaged people you let in but how you look after them while they are there. The fact that so many of them are dropping out is down to the universities. Universities must not blame what came before or do as the Government did last week and try to blame the examinations that students took before: these are your students; you have admitted them, so you look after them—we expect you to make a success of them. That is an enormously important change, and I really want the Office for Students to be in a position where it can enforce the ambitions that I just set out and make sure that universities come up to the mark.

Reading the underlying legislation, I was not at all sure that that was the case, which is why I put down these amendments. I am assured, in correspondence with my noble friend the Minister, that this is the case and the OfS has the powers it needs. I very much hope that that is what I will hear from the lips of my noble friend, when she comes to reply on this amendment.

[Lord Adonis (Lab)]

My Lords, obviously the House is deeply sympathetic to the points made by the noble Lord, Lord Lucas.

I want to extend those points. The biggest cause of mental health stress for students over the past 18 months has of course been Covid. Over the past two years, a substantial part of their courses has not been physical; indeed, in many cases, they have had almost no contact at all with fellow students. Obviously, in a public health emergency, that situation was substantially unavoidable, although some universities dealt with the situation better than others. It is clear that there was a difficulty in students being able to meet in large groups and have physical contact. However, that is no longer the case.

I know—because they have been taken up with me personally, as I am sure is true of other noble Lords—that there are concerns about continuing restrictions on students meeting and face-to-face tuition. To me, such restrictions seem totally without justification now; if I may put it somewhat undiplomatically, they may be suited more to the convenience of university administrators and lecturers than to the well-being of their students. I know that the Government have been robust in their statements about the importance of returning to the full educational experience in universities, but this is clearly an ongoing issue. I think that the House would welcome a robust assurance from the Minister that universities should now be expected to return to offering the full educational experience; the Office for Students should also be making this clear to them.

On a related point, I find it extraordinary, given the serious diminution in teaching and learning that many students have experienced over the past two years, that universities have still charged them full fees. I was the guy who persuaded Tony Blair to introduce fees in the first place, so I have nothing against fees—we need properly funded universities and properly paid academics —but it is supposed to be something for something. The reason for paying the fees is to get the full educational experience. Indeed, part of the justification for the fees was that they would enhance the educational experience; we wanted universities to be able to staff up properly and offer proper facilities.

The other half of that contract applies too. Where students have not been able to gain the full experience and the quality of teaching and learning to which they are entitled in return for their fees of more than £9,000, the universities should have discounted those fees. I am surprised that the Government did not apply more pressure to them to do so; I assume the reason is that the Treasury was worried that, if the Government applied pressure on universities to discount fees, the universities would come and ask for the money. I have a feeling that what happened here was a kind of Faustian pact: the Government did not pressure universities because they did not want the consequential action of the universities asking them for money. But actually, it would be perfectly possible for universities, like almost every other enterprise in the country, to realign their outlays with their income and themselves take on the consequences of a reduction in fees. The idea that state funding is the only alternative to fee funding is wrong.

If I may say so—I have said this a lot over the past two years, but it still needs to be said—vice-chancellors are, for the most part, grossly overpaid. One of the less satisfactory outcomes of the fee reform, in particular the trebling of fees to £9,000, was vice-chancellors doubling their own incomes and creating a whole swathe of bureaucrats in universities. I went through the figures and was amazed at the swathes of bureaucrats in universities—all paid more than £100,000, and many of them paid more than £150,000—while none of the junior lecturers or PHD students gets any of this largesse. Apart from a few offers of short-term reductions in salaries, I have not noticed any university vice-chancellors taking this opportunity to apply proper scrutiny to the size and salaries of their senior management teams or, dare I say it, leading by example and cutting their own pay as part of a deal to cut student fees in response to the terrible experience that so many students have had to go through during the pandemic.

--- Later in debate ---

[Baroness Barran (Con)]

I shall be delighted to write.

[Lord Lucas (Con)]

My Lords, I am very grateful for my noble friend’s answer, which included just the words that I was after—that the Government are sure that the Office for Students has the powers that it needs to make progress in this area. I am very happy to leave it at that, given the record of the Office for Students to date.

I share with the noble Baroness, Lady Sherlock, the determination that disadvantaged students should not be disadvantaged further by the systems that we put in place. I think that is entirely possible. I hope that we will see from the OfS a system of better admissions, so that universities put some real effort into understanding how best to detect and attract those disadvantaged students who will do well at university; that this is a collaborative effort, a proper national research effort to solve this national problem; and that they will similarly collaborate on how best to look after those students once they reach university. They should expect them to need additional support because, after all, they are disadvantaged. In both those areas, I feel that the Office for Students is determined to see progress. I am confident that with that determination over the next few years we will see it.

I also hope to see some real diversity of thought as well as intake in our universities. I will know that we have achieved it when an Oxford college asks the noble Lord, Lord Adonis, to be its next master.

Amendment 47 withdrawn.

Skills and Post-16 Education Bill [HL]

Lord Lucas Excerpts

Thursday 21st October 2021 Lords Chamber

[Lord Aberdare (CB)]

My Lords, I will not speak at any length about these two similar amendments, because I agree wholeheartedly with what all three speakers so far have said. Both represent an improvement on the current situation but, as we have heard, Amendment 35A from the noble Lord, Lord Baker, has stronger teeth and would provide for more frequent access—three times during each of the three specified phases, rather than just once. That is much more in line with the requirements of the Gatsby career benchmarks. It would require meetings with a representative range of educational and training providers, including UTCs, rather than just one provider, and it would not rely on any as yet unspecified statutory guidance. For all those reasons, it makes it much more likely that the requirement for pupils to receive these opportunities really takes place. I will certainly support the noble Lord if he puts his Amendment 35A to a vote.

The Minister’s helpful letter to us on Tuesday included a positive section on careers information and guidance, although I continue to regret the absence of a renewed careers strategy to provide an overall context and objectives for the various laudable actions that she set out. She mentions the support given by the Careers & Enterprise Company’s personal guidance fund for activities, including training for careers professionals, and the development of a pipeline of qualified careers professionals for the future. I wonder if she has made any assessment of the numbers of such professionals needing to be trained, what level of qualification they need to be trained to, and whether the funding and other incentives on offer are sufficient to meet those needs—in other words, a sort of workforce development plan for careers professionals. That is one reason why I think it would be helpful to have a strategy that sets out all the elements that are needed to deliver the kind of careers support that we need.

I end by echoing the point made by the noble Lord, Lord Storey: these amendments are important, and it is equally important that we make sure they are in some way enforced and the requirements are met.

[Lord Lucas (Con)]

My Lords, we had a fair old ding- dong last time we met on this Bill, with the Government proposing that we should destroy an entire suite of examinations in order to improve access to T-levels. Yet here they are refusing to make minor changes to the sight that children are given of T-levels—which have many other benefits—as an option.

I do not see how the Government are being consistent on this. If they want T-levels to be fully appreciated as an option by young people, they need them to be put in front of those young people, clearly and frequently. That is what my noble friend Lord Baker’s amendment would do, and the Government’s amendment would not. I am thoroughly with those noble Lords who have spoken in saying that my noble friend’s amendment is a better way forward than the Government are yet proposing.

I also encourage the Government to look at a couple of old chestnuts to do with performance tables. If you want head teachers to say to children that they will be better off in an FE college and encourage them to go to it, you ought to give them credit for the results that they achieve there. It ought to be something that appears in the performance tables, credited to the school that has made that decision; otherwise, the incentive is just to hang on to pupils for the money. If schools are risking a blip in the performance tables because the A-level results will be bad and it would have been much better if they had gone to a technical college, there will be a real incentive for schools to encourage children to take that option.

The other aspect is to provide much better data on where children end up after school. At the moment, the information provided on what happens to those who do not go to university is very thin, uninspiring and not the sort of thing that encourages a parent to say, “Oh, that looks interesting; why don’t we look at that?” The provision of data and information is really important in helping parents to help their children make decisions, and the Government are falling a long way short on that. They have the information; it is just a question of deciding that they will publish it or make it available to others who will publish it. I really encourage them to go down that road.

My noble friend the Minister said that she hoped children would be making fully informed choices. I totally agree with her. If we can bring universities up to that standard, I should be delighted as well.

[Baroness Neville-Rolfe (Con)]

My Lords, I share the sentiments of my noble friend Lord Baker about the way that my noble friend the Minister has taken a grip of this Bill, and I thank her for that. I have to say, therefore, that it is with some trepidation, and with the benefit of my business and bureaucratic experience, that I rise to throw a bit of cold water on the detail of both amendments.

As noble Lords will know from earlier discussions, I am very keen to see vocational careers education, training and, above all, apprenticeships advocated in schools—and, in fact, by employers themselves. We clearly have a problem. However, I worry about the bureaucracy that will be created by this provision; it is a concern with either version. To comply with the provisions, a lot of detailed work would have to be done by teachers, who work so hard; by providers—including UTCs, which I agree should be involved—of post-16 education; and by employers, if they join providers in schools, which is something that I think can often work well. They will have to do a lot of form-filling and more recording, health and safety-style. Then, as has been said, there will be extra guidance, but we do not know exactly what will be in that; it could make it easier or it could make it worse.

I worry that this will deter exactly the people and institutions that you want to get into schools to encourage youngsters to think about their futures and choose the right educational option. Too many people, in my view, now go to university and not enough go into good vocational routes. I have experience in Germany and Switzerland and elsewhere. To pick up on something that the noble Lord, Lord Adonis, said, in those countries, they often move at 14 or 16, which can be extremely helpful with the vocational route.

My worry is that the beneficiary of these micro-rules will be, yet again, the consultants who will have to help with process and compliance. I am obviously very sympathetic to the objective of these amendments, but I would like some reassurance from the Minister on how we make this system simple and efficient and how we enforce it sensibly—before we go through the Lobbies. As the noble Lord, Lord Aberdare, was saying, there are costs and resource requirements in doing all these things in schools, and they have to come from somewhere else. So if we are going to make a change of this kind, we need to understand how it will be done and how it will be enforced, and that it will be done in a sensible and effective way, not adding needlessly to the weight of burden on our teachers.

Skills and Post-16 Education Bill [HL]

Lord Lucas Excerpts

Report stage
Tuesday 12th October 2021 Lords Chamber

Can the Minister tell us, so that we can be sure that we are not completely wasting our time this afternoon, how many of these £3,000 incentive payments were made in respect of apprentices under the Chancellor’s Budget this year for new apprentices? That is the acid test that things are going in the right direction, because the great and depressing feature of this Bill is that, with the best will in the world—and all of us here have the best intentions—we are presiding over an increasingly failing state and state-led apprenticeship system which will further widen the gap between the opportunities that graduates have in our economy and those of non-graduates, and nothing that has been said so far during the Bill’s passage gives any confidence whatever that this situation is not going to worsen.

[Lord Lucas (Con)]

My Lords, I will speak to Amendment 11, which I have put my name to, and regret that the rules on Report do not allow the noble Lord, Lord Watson, to launch into his exposition of it before the end, unless he wants to rise now.

[Lord Watson of Invergowrie (Lab)]

I thank the noble Lord. I did intend to speak before the end of the debate.

I will speak to Amendment 11, which has cross-party support and has also been endorsed by the Local Government Association and the Association of Colleges. We support the Government’s ambition to give local employers a strong role in the skills system through local skills improvement plans, but we believe that it should be done as part of an integrated place-based approach to deliver sustained outcomes for local people and local businesses.

I cannot understand the Government’s determination to exclude major players in the localities where the employer representative bodies are based. There needs to be a much more clearly defined and significant role for local and mayoral combined authorities, as well as colleges and other training providers. There has to be an appreciation of differing labour markets, and the way they have developed and are likely to develop. Surely that is best understood at local and regional level. I suggest, as I did in Committee, that it is impossible to prescribe the skills needed for the whole of England from DfE headquarters, yet that is what the Bill’s measures effectively currently propose.

There has been a change since then because we now have a new Secretary of State, who, we are led to believe, has less centralising tendencies than his predecessor. Making the role of local authorities, MCAs, colleges and training providers clear and more effective would be a positive sign by the new Minister to that effect.

To achieve the best outcomes in every area, local authorities and providers should be named as a core and strategic partner in the LSIP process alongside employer representative bodies. To that end, Amendment 11 would provide for ERBs to develop LSIPs—sorry about all these contractions—in partnership with local authorities, mayoral combined authorities and further education providers to ensure that they reflect the needs of learners, employers and, as I said, the local community. Adults and young people have the right to expect access to quality education and training opportunities provided by a joined-up, place-based employment, skills and careers system. Integration at the local level will be vital to support the skills talent pipeline and to join up those skills and occupational pathways of progression.

Amendment 11 would also require local skills improvement plans to consider social and economic development strategies in the local area and long-term national needs that may not apply to local employers. Unless local authorities have a meaningful role in the development and approval of LSIPs there is a risk that these reforms could create further fragmentation within the skills system, which may result in further education providers being subject to different skills plans, disruption of progression pathways for learners and a lack of local democratic accountability, which I do not think we should lose sight of.

I can tell the Minister that local and combined authorities are ambitious to do more to join up local provision to create integrated skills and employment offers tailored to the needs of local economies and residents. This amendment would make use of local government’s expertise to deliver the best outcomes for every community.

Finally, Amendment 11 would require LSIPs to identify actions that relevant providers and other local bodies can take regarding any post-16 technical education or training that they provide. This is drafted to avoid being too prescriptive but would allow LSIPs to work closely with other agencies, including Jobcentre Plus and careers advisory services. As Amendment 12 from the noble Lord, Lord Aberdare, says, bodies providing careers information, advice and guidance, and independent training are also crucial to the development and success of a local skills improvement plan.

I want to mention the LSIP trailblazers. Less than 24 hours ago, the Minister circulated to noble Lords a 20-page draft guide for employers on LSIP trailblazers. This was promised by her predecessor in Committee 12 weeks ago, so I have to ask why we received it quite literally at the 11th hour, which was not helpful. I do not claim to have gone through it in depth, partly because I was still trying to digest the 69 pages of additional policy notes I found on the DfE website last week that had not been drawn to our attention—yes, I do sometimes have trouble sleeping. There are ways in which communication of some of these papers could be improved, not least in their timing.

Colleges and employer representative bodies in the recently announced successful LSIP trailblazers and strategic development fund pilots will be considering how best they can work in partnership and how they can work with other key partners. There is considerable scope for the sector to lead the way in building new linkages between colleges, universities, schools and other providers; strengthening relationships with mayoral combined authorities and local government; and embedding the voice of students, staff and the wider community in all of this, in so doing demonstrating and strengthening the new environment that they want to operate in. The Government should do everything that they can to facilitate that. It would be to everybody’s benefit.

I am very sympathetic to Amendments 10 and 66 in the name of my noble friend Lady Whitaker, who is yet to speak to them, which aim to ensure that the DfE has a plan for closing the attainment gap and that employer representative bodies have regard to it. The latest annual report from the Education Policy Institute found that the gap between what poorer pupils and their richer peers achieve at school had stopped closing even before the disruption of the pandemic. Disadvantaged pupils in England are now 18 months of learning behind their peers by the time they finish their GCSEs—a huge gap, but the same as five years ago. Disparities at primary school age are also widening for the first time since 2007.

However, a plan will not be worth the paper it is written on unless it includes substantive proposals backed by funding. Noble Lords will be well aware that the Government’s education recovery plan has been roundly criticised as insufficient, including by Tory Members of Parliament and the Government’s own, now departed, Education Recovery Commissioner, Sir Kevan Collins, who said that it did not come close to what was needed. I do not expect the Minister to answer me on that point now, but it is an issue that had an impact on Oral Questions earlier today and which must be taken forward and dealt with if the full effects of the pandemic are to be dealt with. I like to think that we might see a much-needed policy change shortly in the spending review, although, like other noble Lords, I obviously will not hold my breath.

Finally, the development of local skills improvement plans must be inclusive by demonstrating an awareness of and commitment to equality and diversity. It is crucial that those with learning and other disabilities can benefit from the measures in the Bill and that support for schemes that help, especially supported internships, are on the face of the Bill. It requires a focus on making all the so-called three ships—traineeships, supported internships and apprenticeships—more accessible and widely available, opening up pathways into long-term employment for people with a learning disability. Apprenticeships need to be made more flexible; this should be included as part of reforms to the post-16 education offer. Additionally, we want to see more of a commitment to people with education, health and care plans, as well as those who have disabilities but do not qualify for such care plans. Leaving these groups out will only further entrench the current barriers that people with learning disabilities face in finding sustainable paid employment.

There is much for the Minister to respond to in this group of amendments. I do not expect her to respond to all of it in detail but it would helpful if she could follow up on some of my points by letter after the debate. However, let me be clear: we want both employer representative bodies and local skills improvement plans to be successful but we believe that, as it stands, the Bill will limit what can be achieved. There are so many people and organisations with much to offer. They should be encouraged to play their part fully in developing skills for the future.

--- Later in debate ---

After seven years of conditional funding, there is ample need for a review to see how the current policies are fitting, or not fitting, students for work. For many years this significant proportion—the missing third—has been most damagingly neglected. I beg to move.

[Lord Lucas (Con)]

My Lords, I will pick up where I left off on Amendment 11 and also speak to my Amendment 20. I welcome my noble friend to the Front Bench. There was a period when she was my Whip; she probably thought that she had finally escaped having to deal with me, but now she is back, front and centre of my interests.

I apologise that my first action will be to vote with the noble Lord, Lord Watson, if he pushes his amendment. Like him, I absolutely support the objectives of the Bill, but I will vote with him because I am really unhappy and unclear about it in its current state. I want us to be able to continue this conversation as the Bill winds its way through the Commons. As the noble Lord, Lord Watson, said, the key element of this discussion—the local skills improvement plan trailblazers document—arrived today, at least for me, and I have not managed to look at it properly. There is a lot there that needs attention.

I thoroughly support the idea of local employer involvement in skills provision. For a long time, local employers have complained to me that their local colleges and other providers are not doing the courses they need: the engineering kit that the FE college has is 20 years out of date, and graduates have to be completely retrained if they enter engineering; the building courses do not align with the methods used at the moment; nothing is available for the local foundry; and so on. The need for local employers to be involved in local skills provision is very clear to me.

However, to get successful employer engagement you need both status and longevity. You are asking employers to get senior, good and effective members of staff to spend time on collaborative bodies and arriving at results. They need to do that over a period of years to build up relationships and understanding with each other, among the employer community as much as with education providers. That takes time and an attitude to these bodies that is not, “Oh, we’ve had this for five years—let’s throw it out of the window and start again”. Starting again takes you back to zero.

If I have understood the document right, the trailblazers will exist only for a year or two. Why will any sensible employer spend time trying to make something right when it will be torn up after two or three years? There will be a few, but there will not be the comprehensive effort that would be made if the Government gave themselves a bit more time and, when they know what they want to do, set out to provide employers with something that has a hope of lasting 10 or 20 years.

We have a new ministry for levelling up, which gives it an opportunity to make a decision about what is happening to local enterprise partnerships. These are a source of relationships, understanding and established ways of doing things which might well be drawn on to make a success of local skills improvement plans, but they appear to be ignored entirely. Why? Let us have some coherence in this across government. This is already at least the second way in which the Department for Education is proposing to consult employers; it already has a reasonably well-established network in IfATE, but it does not appear to be tying that in at all to what is happening with local skills improvement plans. There are also networks based in BEIS and in the Department for Work and Pensions. There needs to be more thought and coherence before we set out on this, so that we can really make a success of the idea.

If I read this document right, there is a budget of £4 million for the seven trailblazers, so that is about half a million quid each. In our local area, this is the whole of Sussex, and because of the way Sussex has evolved, the Sussex Chamber of Commerce knows very little about what happens down at the town level. There is almost no relationship between the Sussex chamber and Eastbourne; Eastbourne is dealt with by the Eastbourne Chamber of Commerce. There is also very little relationship between the Sussex Chamber of Commerce and that huge employer of people in Sussex: London. So you are asking this body to build from nothing a knowledge of the skills needs of a very large area—four or five million people’s worth, if you embrace the south of London—on a budget of half a million quid. It is a comfort to the noble Lord, Lord Adonis, that there is no possible way they will have money to pay consultants; they will be really pushed to do this on a few local people. It does not seem to be a recipe for success.

To pick a quote from the document, these partnerships are supposed to look at

“opportunities created by emerging technologies, cleaner growth and new global markets.”

How can you do that based in Sussex, for goodness’ sake? You are not exactly at the middle of any of these industries. Where is the source of knowledge and information to enable them to do that? That sort of thing requires national co-ordination and there is no sign in this plan of how that national understanding will develop.

As the noble Lord, Lord Bird, said, you need an organisation which is looking ahead; ideally, 10 years ahead—though it is getting pretty speculative—but certainly five years. If you talk, as I do, to the jobs board providers, they will say, by and large, that employers look at what they want today and, if you push them hard, they will look a year or so ahead. Local employers do not have that understanding of where their whole industry is going; they have to deal with the problems of today. You need to build in something which is looking further ahead, and there is no reason to try to do that locally. Also, there is a lot of commonality between local problems: the problems we face in Sussex will be replicated in East Anglia, the north-east and elsewhere, one way or another. We do not want to have to create individual, from-the-ground-up solutions to each of these problems; we want to have a mechanism for sharing the problems and approaches and putting the best solutions forward, rather than just creating new things locally. Again, I do not see a sign of that in the Bill.

The system of careers advice for children at school set up by this Government in the Careers and Enterprise Company, of which I have a high opinion, is based on their relationship with local enterprise partnerships. What is proposed under this new system to enable them to continue the rollout of local career hubs? Again, I do not see anything. Where in this structure do we encounter the interests of students? Somewhere in Eastbourne is the engineer that the noble Lord, Lord Ravensdale, wants. Under the LSIP, as described here, the only training available for us will be for hoteliers—that is the main business in Eastbourne. There is no engineering contractor, let alone a nuclear industry. There is not much IT at the moment; there is no obvious source of green growth jobs within our patch. Where is this understanding to come from? Why should our children be restricted in their opportunities to what happens to be available in Sussex? An awful lot of people who live in Sussex work in London. How is the source of demand and need to be factored into the local skills improvement plan in Sussex?

I hope that when the Bill comes back to us from the Commons we will end up with a nationally coherent, long-living system of involving local employers and other sources of information in producing a structure of training that works for local people and local industries. What the noble Lord, Lord Watson, suggests is the right way to do it. As for Boris—if I am allowed that shorthand for my right honourable friend the Prime Minister—he was talking about that last time I read one of his speeches regarding raising the leaders of counties to the same status as local mayors and giving them the same sort of powers and ambit. We will see how that direction works out but at least the understanding is there. A lot of support is available at county level, including a lot of knowledge, skills and people in the workforce, which would really support an enterprise like a local skills improvement partnership. If the two aspects are embedded together, they are likely to work together and benefit from each other. In terms of sending a message to our colleagues in the Commons, the amendment of the noble Lord, Lord Watson, does that pretty well.

[The Lord Bishop of Oxford]

My Lords, I shall speak to Amendments 13, 16 and 19, tabled by the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Durham, who is unable to be present because of his other engagements. Along with others, I welcome the Minister to her new role and join others in offering appreciation to her predecessor, the noble Baroness, Lady Berridge. I should also say, as a member of your Lordships’ Select Committee on the Environment and Climate Change, how much I welcome government Amendment 6, and I add my support to Amendment 64.

The context of my remarks is a general welcome for the Bill and recognition of its role in helping to meet the Government’s ambition on FE and skills. However, there is almost no specific reference to SEND provision in the Bill, despite the significant role that FE plays in provision for students with additional needs or disabilities. Noble Lords will know that around 202,000 students have special educational needs in further education, of whom 90% attend general FE colleges and make up almost one in six of all enrolments. Within those, almost a quarter of students are aged 16 to 18. In contrast to the school sector, there is a small number of specialist institutions. That situation makes a profound difference to the scale and range of support needed in general FE and sixth-form colleges.

During Second Reading, the Minister gave assurances that the overall legislative framework, notably the Equality Act and the Special Educational Needs and Disability Act, provided sufficiently rigorous safeguards for ensuring that the needs of SEN students were met. It was also most helpful to see the updated policy note and to hear the further assurances from the noble Baronesses, Lady Chisholm and Lady Barran, at their meeting with my right reverend friend the Bishop of Durham last week. The Government’s high aspirations for students with learning needs and disabilities is clear, and we warmly welcome that ambition.

However, the evidence from the Special Educational Consortium and Natspec, which are key voices promoting the rights of disabled children and young people, those with special educational needs and specialist further education, is that far more explicit duties should be incorporated into the Bill to ensure that high ambitions and good intentions are subsequently consistently turned into effective action.

--- Later in debate ---

Moved by

[Lord Lucas]

27: Clause 7, page 7, line 32, at end insert—
“(c) must specify a range of qualifications with a teaching and learning requirement equivalent to one GCSE (at level 2) and one A level (at level 3) which allow students to combine academic and vocational education.”

[Lord Lucas (Con)]

My Lords, there are a number of other amendments in this group. I very much hope that we will pursue one or more of them to a Division if we do not get some very clear reassurances from my noble friend, because it is my conviction that BTECs should continue to be widely available for some good long time yet at least, and that the Government’s suggestion that we should quickly move to a system of A-levels and T-levels only is profoundly mistaken. I have a number of reasons for this.

First, BTECs are respected. When it comes to educational qualifications, respect is hard to gain. BTECs are respected by universities, employers and parents, and not just parents of disadvantaged children. My daughter took a BTEC, her friend took three, and my cousin took three. They are something, as editor of the Good Schools Guide, that I would happily advise a child to take. They are a well-respected qualification and to dispose of them in haste and short order is profoundly un-Conservative. I very much hope that my new colleagues in the department will share that view.

I am very grateful to the department for sharing its reasoning with us. Broadly, as I understand it—my noble friend will doubtless correct me if I am wrong—it is that, looking at the people who take BTECs and comparing them with similar people who take A-levels, the people who take BTECs have a higher drop-out rate at university, and those who stay at university go on to learn less than equivalent pupils who take A-levels. That analysis is deeply statistically unsound. I will explain why.

A definitive and careful choice is made by a pupil and the people advising them as to whether they should go down the A-level or BTEC route. It is not a question of random allocation. Unless you really analyse what is going on in that process of differentiation, you absolutely cannot legitimately statistically compare the subsequent path of the two groups. You can remark on and look at them, but to compare them and say that one is therefore better than the other is not something you can do because you do not have the data to understand what that process of differentiation was. They are two different groups. They are swallows and crows—both birds, but to compare them is just to describe. It is not something you can draw conclusions from.

Nor is that the only point at which these two streams have different processes applied to them. When it comes to applying to university, they receive advice as to which course they should take at which university. The quality of that advice might well differ markedly for people taking BTECs as opposed to people taking A-levels. It certainly differs markedly between institutions. When, a few years ago, I was working with HESA statistics it was quite remarkable how drop-outs focused on the products of particular institutions rather than particular types of students or courses they were going for. So there is a second point at which this stream is different, which destroys the ability to compare.

Then there is what happens at universities. Universities are supposed, under their access policies, to support students from disadvantaged backgrounds. It is quite clear that they have not been doing this properly. I am delighted that the OfS is picking them up on this, but universities have not been looking at how they make the best of a student and give them the best possible outcome. They have been providing them with a relatively standard product and seeing how they get on with it.

Students who take BTECs are likely to have a different set of requirements in terms of teaching and support from students who take A-levels, so the differentiation may be entirely down to the practices of universities in not supporting BTEC students properly. That means that you cannot tell what is going on. The department is using this data to evince the reasons for its proposals on BTECs, but the data applies to the old pattern BTECs only—those that existed before the 2016 reforms. The new BTECs were specifically designed to deal with the worries people had about how BTEC students were doing at university. All the changes made to BTECs in the first teaching in 2016 were directed at helping students do better at university, but there is as yet no data available on how those students do at university. There were big changes—it is a different qualification in many ways—but the Government are treating it as if they can apply the data from the old qualification.

There is then another set of data which the Government do not seem to have applied themselves to: the data that comes before the surge in popularity of BTECs. The data for disadvantaged students in 2013-15 shows that almost all of them took A-levels and there was a huge rate of dropout, because these were not suitable for them. Go on a few years and there was a much lower school dropout rate because BTECs were holding these students in school. That does not seem to have been taken into the Government’s calculations. The department talks of getting these students back to doing A-levels, but we used to do that, and it had terrible results. Why does it want to do that again?

I am somewhat in despair at the quality of the DfE’s analysis of why it wants to do away with BTECs quickly. However, its analysis does suggest a test; it suggests that we should look at how new qualifications do when they have run their course and students have got to the point of being in employment. We can then judge how well they are doing. If we look at 2019-21 as the sample cohort for the new BTECs, we should have a reasonable idea of that by 2027. We should have a reasonable idea of how well T-levels are doing by 2029 or 2030.

That gives us a timescale for when we will have legitimate data to compare how T-levels and BTECs have done, if the Government are doing proper research—I do not know that they are—on how decisions are taken as to which qualification is provided, how pupils with the qualifications are supported at university and on careers advice given to different groups of students. All of that is necessary to take a justified decision about which set of qualifications should be provided.

I hope I am right in quoting the Government as saying that T-levels are the best option for 16 to 19 year-olds. How can they possibly know that? These qualifications have only just been created—they are newborn. The emperor’s second wife always wants to kill the older children. It is a natural thing, but we really should not allow that. We ought to insist on a proper period of comparison to find out how they work out. I think the answer will turn out to be that we need not two qualifications but three: A, B and T. We want parity of esteem. If the system has just A-levels and T-levels, we will lose parity of esteem.

I would never, as editor of the Good Schools Guide, advise a child to do a T-level unless they were so clearly committed—at age 16—to the narrow scope of that T-level that they could legitimately take such a decision. There are not many 16 year-olds who are so clear and focused that they can reasonably take that decision. It is really hard to commit yourself to a single, narrow line which leads you away from the generality of university and towards a specific career. There are children for whom this will work, but there are fewer of them than the Government think, and there are an awful lot who need to be kept more general.

--- Later in debate ---

[Baroness Barran (Con)]

Perhaps the noble Lord will allow me to proceed.

Amendment 30 from the noble Lord, Lord Watson, seeks to confirm that the decision to withdraw approval from a technical qualification may be subject to judicial review. I assure your Lordships that the institute is a public authority and its decisions can be reviewed by the courts in the same way as the decisions of any other public authority.

Amendment 32 from the noble Baroness, Lady Garden, would require the institute to publish in advance the criteria which must be met before withdrawing approval of a technical education qualification. It is absolutely right that the institute should publish information so that awarding bodies know in advance the matters the institute will take into account. The Bill already provides for this in new Section A2D6(4).

As I said, approval will be withdrawn when a qualification no longer meets the criteria against which it was approved; for example, where it fails to keep pace with the relevant occupational standard, which will evolve with industrial advances. Specifying criteria that must be met for withdrawal—in addition to criteria that must continue to be met for a qualification to retain approval—would result in duplication and will remove the flexibility the institute requires to meet employer needs.

A number of questions were asked regarding the impact of T-levels on social mobility. Again, if I may, I will set out our position in more detail. However, I would like to be clear that the Government are absolutely committed to levelling up. Social mobility is clearly an integral part of this and education, skills and careers are vital to making a success of those efforts. We believe that T-levels represent a much-needed step change in the quality of the technical offer. As we have heard, they have the endorsement of employers, and alongside T-levels we have introduced the T-level transition programme to support students who are not yet ready to start a T-level at 16 but who have the potential to progress to one. We have also introduced flexibility for SEND learners across all elements of the T-level programme.

In conclusion, our reforms to post-16 qualifications aim to ensure that we will have a system where the choices are clear and learners can be assured that every option is of high quality, whether it supports progression to higher education or to skilled employment. Extending the role of the institute will make certain that the majority of technical qualifications available in England are based on employer-led occupational standards and deliver the skills outcomes that employers need. Given this, I hope that my noble friend Lord Lucas will feel comfortable in withdrawing his amendment, and that other noble Lords will not feel it necessary to move theirs.

[Lord Lucas (Con)]

My Lords, I am grateful to my noble friend for that comprehensive reply. I will start by agreeing with her final words. Let us have qualifications that are clear, where every option is high quality, with employer-led standards and the skills outcomes that employers need. However, whatever language my noble friend dresses this up in, she is saying that the Government intend to abolish BTECs well in advance of having any information to show that T-levels deliver what we all hope they will deliver. Given in particular the effects that my noble friend Lord Baker has outlined on the children we ought to be having most care for—so ought the Government—I very much hope that one of my noble friends, or more of my noble friends than the noble Lord opposite, will choose to move their amendments. As far as my amendment is concerned, I prefer that in the name of my noble friend Lord Baker, so I hope he will consider moving it. However, I will certainly vote for some of the amendments in this group if they are moved to a Division. I beg leave to withdraw my amendment.

Amendment 27 withdrawn.