Skills and Post-16 Education Bill [HL]

Lord Parekh Excerpts

2nd reading
Tuesday 15th June 2021 Lords Chamber

[Lord Parekh (Lab) [V]]

My Lords, the problem that the Bill addresses has been with us for a very long time. Our education system has long been guided by a single model of human excellence: you start your education in a school and keep progressing until you get to a university degree. If you are smart enough and have the resources and inclination, you might do post- graduate work and end your education with a doctorate. But that is not important; what is important is that you must have a university degree—you must be certified by the university to have acquired a certain body of knowledge and skills. If you are not good enough to go to university, what do you do? You turn to technical education, to the polytechnic, and if you cannot make that, you walk out of the education system altogether.

In short, there has been a deep divide between university and technical education, between higher and further education, and between successfully negotiating the obstacles to higher education and failing to do so. This divide has had some profound consequences for our society and economy. Since university education is the only marker of success and the basis of individuals’ self-respect, everyone wants to go for it, with the result that there is inflation in the pursuit of degrees. Secondly, just as a GP thinks of himself as a failed consultant, the person who fails to make it to university thinks of himself as a failed university graduate. This leads to a tremendous amount of bitterness and sadness, and a lack of self-worth on the part of the individual. The system also means that practical intelligence, being good with one’s hands and mechanical skills are treated as inferior and not valued at all.

Obviously, there is no movement from university to technical education; they are parallel universes and you are confined to one or the other. This has been our problem for the last 150 years. Various attempts have been made to tackle the problem; this Bill is a very sincere and profound attempt to do so. It has some very good ideas—I do not need to spell them out—and the idea that individuals who are interested in higher education would have lifelong access to resources is one that levels up opportunities and is to be greatly welcomed.

Before ending, I want very briefly to point out three or four limitations of the Bill, and I very much hope that the Minister will take account of them. First, it concentrates on technical education and treats it as wholly separate from university education. As in the present system, there is no movement from one to the other; each is encapsulated in its own little stream.

Secondly, and this worries me even more than the first point, technical education is seen and justified almost entirely in instrumental terms. There are skills that a society or region needs, and the question is how you persuade students to go for those skills. What is now suggested, therefore, is a kind of industrial fodder—like parliamentary fodder perhaps, but in the case of industrial fodder students will become not so much respectable individuals trained in the art of thinking for themselves but rather individuals who are masters of certain skills, which they are able to sell.

This has a very important consequence, which I must emphasise, on the regional or local orientation of the education system. Each locality, area or region must indicate its employment needs, but how is this to be done? By employer representative bodies providing a list of skills. That, in my view, is to give employers an enormous amount of power and influence. They will suggest which skills are to be produced, and we know what the limitations of that will be. They are not democratically elected, and so the result will be that you create almost a kind of corporate state, where the state works hand in glove with large employer organisations. I fear the consequences of that.

Finally, in order to execute a system of this kind, the state obviously has a tendency to become heavily bureaucratic. This is one noteworthy feature of the Bill that many of your Lordships has pointed out. It gives the Secretary of State the power to indicate which employer representative bodies to recognise and which to withdraw recognition from, and to ask whether the sector is functioning properly and which provider institutions are not satisfactorily run. Again, this gives the state an enormous amount of power in the field of education, the like of which we have not seen in this country before—not even under Mrs Thatcher. So, while the objectives are valuable, I very much hope that the means to realise them will be just as civilised and humane.