Digital Skills (Select Committee Report)

Lord Maxton Excerpts

Monday 13th June 2016 Lords Chamber

[Lord Maxton (Lab)]

Before my noble friend leaves that point, there are those who predict that the age of 105 is way out and that the first person who will live to 150 has already been born and is probably in their mid-30s.

[Lord Knight of Weymouth]

My noble friend may well be right, but the point I am making is that we need to think about this in the context of 60-year or 70-year working lives—possibly longer—and of continually having to reskill as we are continually deskilled by technology. That has profound implications for our education system. I think it will mean that qualifications as proxies for skill will become increasingly inadequate, and that increasingly we will need employers to credential skill because we cannot wait for our cumbersome qualification system to keep up. Apprenticeships are part of the solution, but they, too, can be cumbersome. We need much more agility in our skills system. We need more modular skills badging so that we click through digital badges and see the portfolios that are behind that of the skills that people have and what they are able to deliver with them.

I also believe that we will shortly move on from the traditional CV, with employers being able to click through into those portfolios and, essentially, sift through data mining. If employers start to move away from sifting using qualifications, the fundamental basis on which our education system is built starts to erode quite rapidly. That means that we need to think carefully about each stage of education and the consequences in this century as the digital revolution starts to explode.

On higher education, it is starting to feel insane for a young person to frontload their very long working life with a huge amount of debt by going to university in their early 20s when they need to have a lifelong relationship with university that could last 60 or 70 years. For further education, working out the closer relationship with employers that the report talks about and reflecting employer-accredited qualifications rather than waiting around for awarding bodies is key. For both those sectors—if it does not cause my noble friend Lady Morgan too many nightmares—we should revisit the principle of individual learning accounts and see whether there is a system of financing skills that is individualised, and that is an entitlement that we may all have and can draw on through a long working life.

For schools, we need to profoundly challenge a system that is so content-heavy and geared around our ability to regurgitate and memorise content, and move to a system that gives us the resilience to work freelance, because that is the nature of this economy, to start and to close businesses and charities, and to deal with having to reskill as we are deskilled constantly through life. We need a school system that is less about the standardisation of an industrial age and more about designing learning around individuals. We now have the technology and the tools. We can use the technology we are talking about to deliver a more individualised education.

I see a radical agenda that is non-negotiable. The report’s title gives us a hint that its authors perhaps think the same. I will close by quoting from a blog published in March last year on Medium, a blogging platform. It says:

“As the waves of digital disruption wash across our shores, we need to ensure that our government, our institutions and our teachers are not applying old norms and ways of thinking to new technologies, new business models and new economic realities ... We need to ensure that we focus our resources not on protecting the past from the future, but protecting the future from the past. This isn’t simply about learning to code. It’s about learning new skills. New ways of thinking. New ways of learning”.

I am very happy to say that the author of the blog is in government. It is the noble Baroness, Lady Shields. I hope that the education department is talking to her and listening to her wise words.

--- Later in debate ---

[Lord Maxton]

My Lords, I start by thanking my noble friend Lady Morgan—or “Sally”, as I would call her—for the excellent report and for the way she introduced it. I am not the only noble Lord to speak who is not a member of the committee, but I am certainly one of the few, and I hope that noble Lords will therefore allow me to range a little wider than the report itself.

First, I have a confession to make. I know that in this House I am considered to be something of an expert with my iPad, iPhone and computer. I can use them. I know that people laugh at me when I pull my iPad out of my pocket in the Bishops’ Bar. I produced it at the dinner table and played one noble Lord a song on YouTube that he had asked for.

[Lord Burnett (LD)]

I have not had a chance to thank the noble Lord. As I remember, he kindly played “Stardust” by Nat King Cole for me.

[Lord Maxton]

Exactly. That makes the point that I am considered to be almost a nerd by some people in the House of Lords, and certainly I describe myself as the one-eyed man in the kingdom of the blind. But my confession is that while I know exactly what I want to know and how to use a computer, I do not have the foggiest idea of how a computer works. I know how to work it, but I do not know how it works. I can drive a car. I know how to drive it, but I have no idea how the internal combustion engine works. I can turn my television on. By the way, I can even record a programme at home in Hamilton from my iPad or my iPhone from here. I can stand here and record a programme at home. I can do all that, but I have no idea how a television works.

The point I am trying to make is twofold. First, there are two elements to the educational programme that we require. I think that the report highlights that, but so far the comments have been about education in IT skills rather than how to use IT. That is an educational process which ought to cover the whole of the population, not just the few who will be involved in IT skills. We have to ensure that everyone has the computer skills that are required. They do not have to have the actual coding skills that are needed by some experts. It is something that is now desperately important. In fact, my own view is that as a democracy and as political organisations, we are failing to keep up with what is happening in the world of technology.

It was not entirely a joke when I intervened on my noble friend Lord Knight and said that the first person who will live to 150 has already been born and is probably in their mid-30s. That happens to be the case if the developments in genetic engineering continue. We are likely to find genetic cures, which by the way require the use of the internet and computers in order to bring everything together—otherwise it would take hundreds of people years to develop genetic engineering. But those cures are just around the corner. Are we designing our political structures around the fact that people will live to 150? No, of course we are not.

On education, are we talking about the use of computers in education, rather than training people in the skills required in terms of computers? No. I have not picked up a book in the last three years. Why? It is because I read all my books on a Kindle. I read quite a lot, but I read on a Kindle. Why are we not introducing Kindles in schools? Why are we not showing children how we should be doing certain things in schools? Why are teachers standing in front of a class telling children something that they could find out from their iPad by asking the question on Google?

Why do we still vote by putting a cross on a piece of paper with a pencil when we could be using the internet to cast our votes electronically? To be honest, our younger people now laugh at the fact they have to go to a school to vote. That is one of the reasons they do not vote. If they could vote electronically by using some form of ID to ensure safety, they would.

So we are in danger of our democracy failing to keep up with where we are going in technology, with smart cards. We are failing to keep up with the way technology is moving. We have to try to ensure that we move forward all the time and that we keep up with technology. We should educate people in two ways: first, we should educate all people to use the technology; secondly, we must have a skilled workforce. We need to have both education systems working, but the second one does not require everybody receiving the same education as everybody else.