Polytechnics

Lord Stevenson of Balmacara Excerpts

Thursday 5th May 2016 Lords Chamber

[Lord Stevenson of Balmacara (Lab)]

My Lords, I congratulate the noble Lord, Lord Lucas, on having this debate and on his introduction, which set the scene very well. He has sparked responses from a number of us who will, I think, follow him part of the way, if not all the way, to where he is trying to get. It was also clever of him to arrange the debate for last business on a relatively light day, so that we each have a bit of time to expand our ideas. Last time I stood at the Dispatch Box for a QSD I had one minute to encapsulate the entirety of the debate. I was then criticised, not by the Minister who is here today but by another Minister, for not expanding my speech, because I obviously had so much to say. I pointed out that I had had only a minute and she was appalled by that. It is a silly way of doing business; we did not do that today and we are all the better for it.

I should declare two interests. The first is that I have three children still—unbelievably, after all these years—doing higher education. One is an economist now and is going to be an accountant; one is still doing maths, I think; and the third is a girl, doing engineering. The words from the noble Baroness, Lady Redfern, were very redolent. For your Lordships’ interest, I can tell you that my daughter started in a class of 150 people; there were 120 men and 30 women. There are now fewer than that—only 20 women left in year three of a four-year course. I think that she has had many of the experiences that the noble Baroness mentioned. It is still an important qualification and I am sure that she will survive and become a productive engineer at the end of it.

I also declare that I was, for 13 years, secretary and academic registrar of a polytechnic. It was not actually called a polytechnic until just after I left, ironically, because it was in Scotland—Napier College became a central institution which, although different in name, was really identical to the polytechnics in England. We had a range of higher national diplomas, which were gradually converted to CNAA-validated degrees. I am sorry that I did not run into the noble Lord, Lord Pearson, as I could have given him a run for his money on some of his thoughts on Marxism. The CNAA was not the body that he described—I think that it was a lot better than that, but we can discuss that later.

The key element of the courses that we offered—it was as true of the HNDs and HNCs as it was of the CNAA degrees—was that they were sandwich courses. A question that has come through today loud and clear is: what happened to sandwich courses? Thick and thin, it did not matter. Whatever the filling and whatever the size of the sandwich, they were good things. They were consumed avidly by students—my metaphor is going to run out but I will carry on a little further. The great thing for me observing it all was that the nature of the student experience changed as they went out into the street and then came back. In other words, they went out after a year or 18 months within the college and, when they came back having had industrial placements, they were different. They had motivation, they had commitment and they did much better in terms of student activity.

Like my noble friend Lady Morris, I think that we lost a great deal when the binary divide was abolished—the regionality, the vocational routes, the sandwich elements. One thing that I do not think anyone has mentioned but which was important is that we always felt proud of the fact that every student was taught in our institution by a trained teacher. In other words, the FE ethic—which carried forward into the polytechnics—that teachers were teachers and not just lecturers was put into practice by making sure that they all had a course of teacher training, which was very valuable.

This Question is narrowly focused on the need to get support for,

“a new generation of polytechnics to address the technical skills gap”.

It needs a bit of unpicking, as a number of noble Lords have said. We should remember that when the polytechnics emerged in the 1960s there was a national admissions system and a national grant system, ensuring that we enjoyed not only world-class universities but a world-class university system. It is important to point out the difference between the institutions and the system within which they operated, very much under the control and guidance of the department and the Ministers concerned. It was sad to see the further decline of our universities in the rankings, published in the papers today, both in terms of numbers and the rankings they occupy. Perhaps the Minister might comment on that when she replies.

We are having this debate in the context of the possibility of there being a higher education Bill. It has been widely trailed as possibly being in the Queen’s Speech due to come to this House in a couple of weeks’ time. I hope, therefore, that some of the points raised here might be brought through into that debate. It is important that we get our principles right. We have an academic tradition, as I mentioned, but we are also living, as the noble Lord, Lord Haskel, said, in a world that is very different, a world that is turning east, where technology is moving faster than ever and we in Britain need new answers to help us collectively earn our way to a better standard of living.

In a country where our living standards are under such acute pressure and the deficit still looms so large, innovation is really the only route we can possibly plot out of austerity. We need a high-productivity, high-skilled, innovation-led economy. That is why our universities and higher education institutions are so important. They are the powerhouses of the knowledge economy. They need to be bigger, stronger and more central to our economy in the years to come. Britain needs to put science and innovation at the heart of a strategy for long-term economic growth. Unless we grow smarter, we will grow poorer.

The first principle we should bear in mind is financial sustainability. We need good research and good teaching, which need good and sure foundations. I do not think that the current student loan system, which is effectively a voucher system that pays for all our universities and, indeed, part of their research, is going to work. It does not pass the test or take the trick. It is storing up debts of perhaps £80 billion or £90 billion—a fiscal drag that will not be repaid. It is now as expensive to operate as it was when students were being charged a third as much. I do not think it is sustainable. I would welcome a comment from the Minister about whether this will continue in her long-term thinking.

The second test is: what is good for our science base, our store of knowledge and wisdom, is good for the country. Whatever is proposed for the future must pass that simple judgment: is it good or bad for science? While other powers, emerging and established, are investing in science like never before, we are cutting science spending across government with the current cash cap system, according to the Campaign for Science and Engineering. We really must rethink this. If we do not have the R&D spend, we will not have the science or the opportunities for young people to get involved in it, and we will be the losers. What are the Government’s plans to try to redress that balance?

The third test is student choice. Are we really offering students a sufficient, real choice of pathways to higher-level skills? We do a decent job of getting A-level and, in Scotland, Higher students on to an academic route to university, but we do a terrible job on apprenticeships. We certainly have yet to crack the problem of how to produce a degree-level route for those people. It may be that the new Institute for Apprenticeships will help but it is unclear because we have yet to hear much detail about it. Perhaps the Minister will be able to give us a bit more when she responds.

For example, firms such as Rolls-Royce train 50% of their apprentices to degree-level skills but we as a country manage just 6% overall. This is not right and must change. We must do more for both the individuals and the country. It will be a much bigger task than simply addressing individual points. We need to think about credit accumulation so that people can get moving between institutions, if that is what they want. We have to reform FE, as a number of noble Lords have said, as a second-chance alternative for those who missed out when leaving school, but also to continue the good work at levels 2 and 3 and sometimes 4 and 5 that FE colleges do. UTCs, which we have been talking about, offer so much but they need scale and we need to support them as much as we can. We need to reverse completely the collapse in the number of part-time students and the course provision for part-timers, which has been so starkly brought out in the past couple of years, mainly because of the changes to fees. That is a tragedy for many people and a disaster for the economy.

However, this is really mainly about my fourth principle: the skills base. We have regional skills gaps opening up and we must have a bigger conversation about what we really mean to do about them. Simply calling for a new class of institution will not do it. Education for education’s sake is an important part of what we have always held and cherished in our country, but a good job is fundamental to the way in which we can live our lives and the paradigm that we must live them under. Right now, half our graduates are not in graduate-level jobs. How did that happen, and is there any way in which we might get ourselves out of it?

As I said, institutions might be an answer to that, but it is more about a determination, as many noble Lords have said, to fix this long-running problem which we have with vocational courses. In this country we still think that vocationality is somehow second class. We have to change that culture. We still have to turn engineering away from being a male profession to being the envy of all the courses that people could do, because it provides brilliant jobs and of course helps with our economy. We have to ensure integrated transferability across the sectors and must make sure that funding will enable policy changes to be made, not just be responsive to students.

Finally in this list of woes—the noble Lord, Lord Baker, said this first but I want to repeat it—it all starts in the school. If we do not get the schools right, we will never have that spark in the pupils who are coming forward. It will not happen unless properly trained STEM teachers are used. We have to rework the curriculum.

[Lord Pearson of Rannoch]

My Lords, does the noble Lord agree that the soil in which the root of our education system feeds is really teacher training, and that then you get to the schools—the primary schools and so on, all the way up?

[Lord Stevenson of Balmacara]

I can agree with the noble Lord on this point. Teacher training is the key to it but it has to start with primary education.

My time is running out. I would like to go on about social mobility and other points but I will end with just one thought. Perhaps the Minister could respond to this. In a speech today, the director-general of the CBI covered a range of issues on which she felt that the Government could do more in terms of an industrial policy. This is outside the brief of this debate but she mentioned in particular the need to get a grip on skills strategy. She called for an ambition that she says she has not seen yet in government. When the Minister comes to respond, can she tell us what that ambition is and whether it really exists within the Government today?