Skills and Post-16 Education Bill [HL]

Lord Watson of Invergowrie Excerpts

2nd reading
Tuesday 15th June 2021 Lords Chamber

[Lord Watson of Invergowrie (Lab)]

My Lords, this has been a fascinating and in many ways stimulating debate. Perhaps that was inevitable given that participants included four former Secretaries of State for Education. For more than an hour, we had the company of the current holder of that post, which does him some credit. Four former Education Ministers also spoke.

As my noble friend Lord Rooker pointed out, in his typically forthright style, many noble Lords referenced positions held in higher education institutions. To the best of my recollection, the noble Baroness, Lady Hollins, was the only Member to declare a position as a board member of an FE college, far less a school. That is another aspect of the divide that we need to bridge if our calls for parity of esteem are to have the ring of authenticity.

I am pleased to wish the noble Baroness, Lady Black of Strome, a warm welcome to your Lordships’ House. I add my congratulations on her remarkable maiden speech. I do not know the noble Baroness, but I certainly know of her. She was a professor at the University of Dundee, my home city, so I was aware that she had created the Centre for Anatomy and Human Identification there. It has now gained an international reputation.

This Bill has been a long time coming, because it is the first piece of government education legislation laid before Parliament for almost five years. That is so far in the past that the noble Baroness, Lady Morgan of Cotes, was then the Education Secretary. We are now on her third successor.

The data shows that 16 to 19 education in England has suffered a huge funding squeeze, as my noble friends Lady Blackstone and Lord Layard stated. Between 2010-11 and 2018-19, real-terms funding per student in sixth forms and colleges fell by 16%. Technical students received 23% less funding than academic students. Recent additional funding of £400 million announced by the Government focused on technical education will, I am afraid, reverse only a quarter of these cuts.

The Bill does not deal with fundamental resourcing issues, but these have to underpin any serious attempt to transform post-16 education and training, which the policy summary notes claim is the main aim of this legislation. The impact assessment identifies the huge decline in adult education, apparently without appreciating the irony, given that the adult education budget has been slashed by half in real terms, which has led to a sharp decline in adult learners and particularly in workplace learning. The Government’s recent pettiness in axing the Union Learning Fund showed that Ministers are more interested in playing politics than supporting workplace learners. None of the Bill’s objectives will be achieved if these issues remain unaddressed.

The Bill covers only FE providers and sixth-form colleges. It makes no reference to schools, yet they play a vital role in equipping young people with the skills they need to thrive in life. The White Paper stressed the importance of good careers education in schools, a point made in today’s debate by the noble Lord, Lord Storey, and the noble Baroness, Lady Morgan of Cotes, yet the Bill does not mention that either. A significant number of schools deliver technical qualifications —some have been accepted to pilot T-levels —and it is difficult to understand how a meaningful local skills strategy can exclude post-16 provision in schools.

One of the main planks of the Bill is the introduction of a lifetime skills guarantee, albeit, as many noble Lords have said, with a rather narrow focus within the technical disciplines that it will support. Almost 1 million priority jobs will be excluded from the lifetime skills guarantee in sectors facing a skills shortage. What about Wednesbury Woman who wants to retrain as a computer programmer, or Mansfield Man who wants to go into hospitality? What is in the Bill for them? Inexplicably, hospitality—a sector desperate for new staff and suffering terribly from the effects of lockdown—is excluded.

One significant barrier for adult learners is the cost of study, an issue not included in the Bill despite being highlighted in its impact assessment. Perhaps the Minister can explain that conundrum. While provisions are made for a lifetime loan entitlement, it is unfortunate that its details are yet to be revealed. The effect of this is that they cannot be scrutinised by noble Lords today and must be delayed until Committee.

Lifelong learning must mean just that, as many noble Lords have said. People should have access to training and reskilling throughout their lives, but there remain concerns that the LLE may see participants being saddled with substantial debts, especially if the Government fail to deliver on the recommendation of the Augar review that maintenance grants should be reinstated for people from low-income households, as advocated by the noble Lord, Lord Bichard. We are told this is an issue on which the Government will consult. I have to ask: why? Wales has shown that these grants attract many into training, so why yet more delay?

The question of delay also concerns the LSG, which will not be introduced until 2024, and the LLE a year later. The Minister referred to complexities in this regard involving the modular system, but the many people facing unemployment in the coming weeks and months needs access to courses now to help them to retrain and upskill. What does the Minister say people should do in the interim while this is being developed?

The Government say that their main focus is on helping the country recover from the pandemic’s damage to the economy and spreading opportunity more evenly across the regions—worthy aims. Local skills improvement plans are identified as the means of achieving that, but the employer representative bodies in the legislation seem designed to be creatures of direct ministerial control; several noble Lords have registered their concern about that. While it is right that our skills system should be better at identifying and meeting the skills needs of employers, designating them the exclusive drivers of technical education, as my noble friend Lady Morris said, gives them too much power. Employers certainly have a contribution to make, but to suggest that no other bodies have anything to offer is surely wrongheaded, not least because employers do not have a great track record in training their employees for future patterns of work and developing skills demands. After all, the Government introduced the apprenticeship levy specifically because encouragement had failed.

The noble Earl, Lord Shrewsbury, referenced the West Midlands metro mayor. I wonder what Mr Street’s reaction is to being completely sidelined, along with other metro mayors, combined authorities, local enterprise partnerships and universities. We will bring forward amendments that empower these bodies to co-produce local plans in recognition of their own vital roles.

The Minister has important questions to answer here. Top of the list is to explain the membership, functions and central government control of employer representative bodies. How will they undertake their planning, particularly when starting from scratch? How will ERBs be held to account, and how will the extent to which providers are meeting local needs be measured and assessed? What will happen if a metro mayor disagrees with the ERB? What role is envisaged for local enterprise partnerships, which are not mentioned in the Bill at all? Yesterday’s issue of the Local Government Chronicle carried an article claiming LEPs were to be evolved rather than abolished. Can the Minister confirm that, and whether such evolution will be the subject of consultation?

My noble friend Lady Wilcox made the important point that supported internships, which can play a major role in supporting learners with learning difficulties to prepare for and enter the world of work, must be added to the Bill. The noble Lord, Lord Addington, also spoke passionately of the need for the inclusion of supported internships, which should be an integral part of local skills plans. This is sure to be addressed in Committee.

The Bill’s centralising theme also extends to two aspects of further education. It hands the Secretary of State powers of intervention if he does not like what a particular college is teaching, even if the quality of that teaching has been shown to be good. The Secretary of State can dismiss the local leadership team if the college is deemed not to be following the LSIP. Independent training providers will also be cowering at the thought of being targeted by Ministers for the same reason—a warning we heard issued by the noble Lord, Lord Bichard.

That seems draconian, but the Bill also gives Ministers the ability to regulate initial teacher training for further education. Such a system did exist; it was introduced by the Education Act 2002 but abolished by the Deregulation Act 2015. I ask the Minister what has led to the need for change just six years later. It seems the intention is to introduce standards for ITT in further education and to accredit providers to deliver them. On the face of it, there is nothing wrong with that, but it sounds like the politicisation of initial teacher training—something that, as my noble friend Lord Knight highlighted, is already happening in ITT for schools, as a result of Ministers’ commitment to a particular educational ideology.

In opening the debate, the Minister referenced the Augar review’s call for parity of esteem, and many noble Lords followed her lead. If one theme has dominated the debate, it is the need to end the division between academic and technical routes, which, as the noble Lord, Lord Willetts, rightly said, is a false one. He illustrated that by reminding us that academic courses are offered at FE colleges, while technical subjects can be studied in universities. The divide was characterised by the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Leeds as a “crazy distinction”. While my noble friend Lord Puttnam stressed that this is not a zero-sum game, my noble friend Lord Liddle called for “collaboration, not polarisation”. I echo these sentiments and very much hope that the Bill will at least begin to bridge that divide.

While we welcome the Bill’s aims, there remain many areas of detail—some not in the Bill, as drafted—that require extensive scrutiny and testing. We look forward to engaging with both Ministers in Committee, with a view to enabling the Bill to achieve a joined-up system of education, including regulation and funding.