Lifelong Learning

Lord Monks Excerpts

Thursday 6th February 2025 Lords Chamber

[Lord Monks (Lab)]

My Lords, it is a real pleasure and privilege to follow my noble friend Lady Curran and the excellent maiden speech we have just been treated to. She is a graduate of a tough school. Clydeside politics is not for wimps and the faint-hearted, but it is a rich academy producing gifted political figures—my noble friend is certainly one of those. We all wish her son Chris very well; he is MP for Edinburgh East and Musselburgh. I am sure I speak for everyone in congratulating my noble friend on her powerful speech here today. We are looking forward to many other interventions by her in the work of this House.

I turn to the subject of today’s debate, lifelong learning, which is an area where the UK—let us be frank—continues to struggle compared to the best. Over my years at the TUC, I worked with industrial training boards, sector skills councils, the Manpower Services Commission and the Learning and Skills Council, among other prominent institutions that have been involved. None survived political change. Regular institutional upheaval has been a feature of our efforts at lifelong learning in this country, and in my view a very damaging one. It contrasts with some other leading countries and with the higher education world, which has enjoyed relative stability at the same time as there has been turmoil on the vocational front.

It is very depressing to see the decline in the number of students at colleges of further education and in the adult learning world—down by 70% over the decade that has just passed. It is a sign of a sector in trouble, and we are nowhere near achieving the parity of esteem objective that many of us have long sought. Even apprenticeships, the strongest brand in the vocational learning armoury, have been subject to many changes and alterations to the rules. It is complicated territory.

I hope the Bill being piloted through Parliament at the moment by my noble friend on the Front Bench will address these weaknesses and launch a new surge of interest in lifelong learning. I also hope that it will be the last of the regular institutional changes, which I believe have been a drag anchor on progress. Lifelong learning has not been a glamorous subject, and it needs to be. I saw a report produced for the World Economic Forum earlier this week. It forecasted that two-fifths of the existing jobs will be outdated by artificial intelligence in the next five years. That is 40%, and if it is anything like accurate, this shows graphically the scale of the challenges.

How are we to help the people affected to adjust and adapt to the new world? It will not necessarily be a brave new world for many of them. Then there are the cohorts of people who did not succeed at school and struggled to get decent work. Many of them are a long way from achieving some of the basic skills that are necessary for life. One of the pleasures I have had was handing out qualification certificates to successful students in the union learning programme that the TUC ran, supported by my noble friend Lord Blunkett when he was Secretary of State. At that stage, in our peak years, we managed to bring 250,000 students through the processes and through the different courses. I am sorry to say that tribal politics took over and that was abolished by Gavin Williamson when he was Secretary of State.

In my view, it is very important that we concentrate on this Bill—on making it succeed and tackle some of the problems that we have. The country deserves it and the people of this country, particularly the ones who missed out at school, really deserve it. It is vital that we get on with it.