Technical and Further Education Bill

Lord Young of Norwood Green Excerpts

2nd reading (Hansard): House of Lords
Wednesday 1st February 2017 Lords Chamber

[Lord Young of Norwood Green (Lab)]

My Lords, I declare my interests: I am an ex-apprentice, I had a brief ministerial career dealing with skills and apprenticeships and I am a school governor at my local primary school, which I will refer to later. I am indebted to the noble Baroness, Lady Mone, for educating me in the complexities of manufacturing a bra. Most of my knowledge has come from watching “Coronation Street” and the antics in that factory, which I am sure bear very little or no relation to reality. It is amazing what you can learn in a House of Lords debate.

Noble Lords have said that they are disappointed by the attendance at this debate. I put it down to quality versus quantity in relation to the debate on the Higher Education and Research Bill. There is no doubt that this Bill is as important. My noble friend Lady Morris said that it is a pity that we do not have a holistic view of education that embraces higher and further education. Even the titles make you wonder. If that is higher, somehow this must be lower. It is not, and we know that. I slightly disagree with my noble friend’s worry about flexibility. We have always had flexibility. She referred to an organisation that I always praise for its attitude to apprenticeships: McDonald’s. You can start at McDonald’s flipping burgers and you can progress to a foundation degree. Somewhere along the route, there is quite a bit of flexibility.

The history of apprenticeships has been fraught. As I have said on many occasions, when the Labour Government took over in 1997, if apprenticeships had been a National Health Service patient, they would have been in intensive care. They were in intensive care. There were only 65,000 apprentices, and we had a completion rate of 27%. You could not get worse performance than that. I would love to say that by the time we finished there were 10 million apprentices, but we did not manage to drive the number up to anything like that. We raised it to about 290,000, but we got the completion rate up to about 75%. That was good progress, but there is a lot more work to do. We made some mistakes. Kind words have been said about the noble Baroness, Lady Wolf. She said some very unkind words about some of the things that we did. With hindsight, those unkind words were probably merited because we put £1 billion into Train to Gain for people to gain qualifications and they got them, but a lot of them were not worth the paper they were printed on. The advice that the noble Lord, Lord Aberdare, gave the Minister—that if something is not measured, it is not going to be managed—is a good dictum to follow, and I shall return to it.

My slightly different theme is about how to measure success in relation to the Bill. As my noble friend said, what goes around, comes around. On employers setting standards, she reminded us that sector skills councils were set up just for that. Some were good, and some were bad. If you change the name of the organisation without looking at what it is doing, there is a danger that it could be too narrow or too wide. It is going to be quite tricky to get that balance right.

Like other noble Lords, I welcome the Bill. We could not have a more important issue to debate. We know that getting productivity up requires us to improve technical education. Post-16 Skills Plan is an interesting report. I welcome the Government’s commitment to embracing the Sainsbury report, which states:

“We appointed an expert panel chaired by Lord Sainsbury to advise us on reforms to the system and we are delighted with their recommendations, set out in a report published today. We accept these recommendations, unequivocally where that is possible within existing budgets, and will carefully assess the case for those recommendations with wider financial implications”.


Straightaway, we know there are going to be financial constraints, as there are bound to be. I shall make a point that may be a bit controversial but which needs to be said. I probably should have made it in the debate on Higher Education and Research Bill. What are we doing with the vast amounts of money we are investing in higher education? They are truly vast—look at the student loan debt—but do we really think we are getting value for money? Do we really think we are doing what the noble Baroness, Lady Wolf, told us we need to do, which is guarantee a quality outcome when young people invest up to £50,000? I honestly do not think you can put your hand on your heart and say that the answer is yes.

We do not need all this. I do not know where we got the figure from, but we made a mistake in the former Labour Government when we said that we were going to send 50% of young people to university. I thought it was a noble aspiration for social mobility but I did not think about that that nasty little law, the law of unintended consequences. When I do the Lords outreach programme and speak to 16 and 17 year-olds, I ask where they are going, and up go the hands, “We’re all going to uni”. They do not seem to be worried about the debt, as I suppose at that age you would not be. I say to them that although it is not my job to dissuade them from going to university, they should choose the course that they go on and the university they go to carefully. When you ask them what the alternative career options are, if you are lucky, you will get one or two who mention apprenticeships. All the points that were made earlier about career guidance are absolutely essential, and the noble Lord, Lord Baker, is right in his intended amendment. This is enshrined in law at the moment, but it is a law observed more in the omission than the commission in schools, even if, as the noble Lord, Lord Lucas, said, you appoint an expert. Their incentive is to push students down the university route, unless you have a system like the one my noble friend Lady Cohen mentioned.

The noble Lord, Lord Storey, was right that when Ofsted inspects, schools should not get good or outstanding ratings unless they can demonstrate that they really have genuinely objective career guidance that shows all the possible career alternatives and options. Every secondary school ought to have business links and ought to ensure that young apprentices go into that school, because there is nothing like peer group recommendation for showing young people you do not have to go down one particular route. As I try to say to them, it is not an either/or choice: you can earn while you learn, and still progress to a degree. Getting that message over is vital, and I do not much care how it is done. I will support the amendment of the noble Lord, Lord Baker—who has now resumed his seat—because it is much needed, but on its own I do not think it will be enough, for the reasons I have outlined and which will be found in Hansard.

I do not want to come down either way on another point the noble Lord raised, about those aged 14. I think we called them pre-apprenticeships, and they played a valuable role because they gave young people work experience but, more interestingly, gave the employer or potential employer a look at the young people. That was quite an interesting experience.

There are many big challenges in the Bill, and a serious one is how the apprenticeship levy will work. You dread the reports of the Institute for Fiscal Studies, as you cannot dismiss them, but it is right to signal some concerns. There are concerns from employers. I went to one large employer, which I will not name, which said to me, “Well, the first year will be all right, and I will recruit 100 or whatever it is on the three-year apprenticeship. But the next year I have got to do it again—it does not take into account that I have to maintain them for three years”. The temptation next year is to have batch of one-year apprenticeships. I do not think that is what the Government want, but it is another possible example of the law of unintended consequences. I just make a plea to the Minister—no doubt we will explore this in Committee—to think carefully about the application of the apprenticeship levy.

That brings me to the question of how success will be judged. The Times recently published a supplement, “Guide to Elite Apprenticeships”. I do not particularly like the word “elite”, but it was a guide to higher and degree-type apprenticeships. What was interesting was that the numbers were pretty small. The highest number I found in it was PwC accounting, which was taking on 295. A vocational route into that kind of job is a change in culture, which is good news, but we know the challenges—I think it was the noble Lord, Lord Aberdare, who said only 15% of SMEs have apprenticeships. What puts them off? When you speak to them, two things they mention are administration and cost. They undervalue the positive things that an apprenticeship can bring to their organisation, especially if they have not had experience of it. I stress to the Minister that he needs to take a long, hard look at this. When you measure this over a period of time, if you have not got that figure up and moved the needle on the dial from 15% to at least 40%, we are not getting anywhere. We have not changed that culture, that climate, within the country to one where most companies think that, to succeed, they need to sow the seeds of future success through employing apprentices. I hope the Minister will address that aspect.

Then, there are standards. That was such a powerful message from the noble Baroness, Lady Wolf, who made the interesting point that we are increasingly asking young people to borrow money to undertake this further part of their education. I am not sure that is the right path, but it is the path we are on. I am interested that we have returned to having a vocational entry point into nursing—not before time. But we have a desperate shortage of nurses, and what do we do? We say to them that they will now have to pay for it. I cannot quite work out how that is going to help the situation, but maybe I will be proved wrong.

Looking at the time, I have probably gone on far too long, for which I apologise, but I too want to end by saying that, like my noble friend Lord Watson on the Opposition Front Bench, I endorse the aims of the Bill and look forward to the challenges we will face in Committee in ensuring that the process of refining and honing in the House of Lords makes this the Bill it deserves to be.

--- Later in debate ---

[Lord Nash]

I will write to the noble Lord about that, checking carefully before I respond.

I was very interested to hear from the noble Baroness, Lady Cohen of Pimlico, about her involvement with the Cambridge UTC and the Parkside educational trust MAT, and about the advantages. For the very reasons that she mentioned, it is our policy to encourage all UTCs to join MATs. On her point about the evaluation of UTCs and the fact that apprenticeships are not recognised in outcomes, this is something that we are looking at very closely at the moment. She also made the point that institutes should not approve degree apprenticeships. Degree apprenticeship standards are currently approved by my department. I can reassure her that, although the institute will take on this approval function, it will not be responsible for investigating or engaging with individual universities. However, it will of course work with the Office for Students in the future.

Many noble Lords raised the important matter of careers and careers advice. We take this extremely seriously. That is why the industrial strategy set out that we will publish, later this year, a comprehensive strategy for careers information, advice and guidance across all ages, expanding the quantity and quality of careers advice. As my noble friend Lord Lucas rightly pointed out, the development of careers leadership in schools and colleges will be an important element of this.

We are investing £90 million in this Parliament to improve the quality and coverage of careers advice for young people, and the Careers & Enterprise Company continues its excellent work. I echo the praise expressed by the noble Lord, Lord Aberdare, for this organisation, which is very ably run by Claudia Harris. Picking up on the point made by the noble Lord, Lord Storey, about the importance of careers education, the advisers will also support schools and colleges to develop comprehensive strategies. However, more needs to be done to inform pupils of their options. We have recently agreed to institute a requirement for local authorities to write to the parents of year 9 students, informing them of the existence of UTCs, further education colleges and studio schools that offer courses for students starting at the age of 14.

My noble friend Lady Pidding made a good point about the need to do more to promote apprenticeships. We launched a new apprenticeships communications campaign in May last year, promoting the benefits of apprenticeships for young people. It builds on the previous successful Get In Go Far campaign. National Apprenticeship Week 2017 will take place in March, celebrating the positive impact of apprenticeships and traineeships.

As the noble Lord, Lord Watson, said, getting careers advice right is an important area—as the Minister, my honourable friend Robert Halfon, noted in his careers speech on Monday. I look forward to hearing more from noble Lords in Committee, including my noble friend Lord Baker, about approaches to strengthening careers advice.

My noble friend Lord Baker talked about maths, as did the noble Earl, Lord Listowel. We now have maths hubs and are supporting many maths programmes, such as Singapore maths and Shanghai maths. Over the last few years there has been a substantial increase in the number of pupils taking maths GCSEs and A-levels. My noble friend Lord Baker talked about the skills gap in STEM subjects and computing. We have introduced coding and computing into the curriculum for the first time. He said that there were just over 60,000 pupils taking computing at GCSE. I accept that that is a small number, but it is from a standing start. I pay tribute to my noble friend’s engagement in the digital economy through UTCs.

My noble friend Lord Lucas talked about schools having a dedicated person to engage with the world of work. I consider that to be very important. I know that before the last election the noble Lord, Lord Adonis, had the idea that this should be the case in every school. We are not as prescriptive as that, but certainly it happens in my schools. I think it is very important that schools try to find the money in their budget to do that because, when you see the effect of pupils’ engagement with the world of work, the payback is obvious. Regarding the school sector’s engagement with the world of work, we have certainly found that the door is wide open, with businesses and the professions being extremely willing to help.

The noble Baroness, Lady Morris, talked about the importance of flexibility, and I entirely agree. A framework of routes will ensure that choices are clearer for young people. She also raised concerns about assessment and the approach to assessment for apprentices, and I look forward to discussing this with her further in Committee. We recognise that there is more to do to ensure the breadth of the high-quality assessment organisations that we need, but we have been making good progress through the register for assessment organisations, run by the Skills Funding Agency.

The noble Lord, Lord Watson, asked why less money was spent on post-16 education. The best predictor of attainment at age 19 is attainment at age 16, and that is why we prioritise school funding. As we all know, students have many more pastoral issues, which are expensive to deal with, in the earlier years.

The noble Lord, Lord Hunt, referred to the governance of FE colleges. We talked about this when we met yesterday, and I have already discussed it with my ministerial colleague, Robert Halfon. For the academies programme, we have started something called Academy Ambassadors, recruiting pro bono non-executive directors from businesses and the professions to the boards of multi-academy trusts. As of this morning, we have already made 417 appointments, which is quite a pro bono movement up and down the country. I have discussed with my fellow Minister the possibility of encouraging FE colleges which need further support on their boards to engage with this programme.

The noble Baroness, Lady Garden, asked whether craft, creative and service skills are intended to be covered by technical education. The answer is that they are. The noble Lord, Lord Storey, talked about the relevance of courses, rather than students just doing courses that are popular. Of course, our destination data and data on jobs and pay rates, as well as on payback from courses for students, will in future enable students to make much more informed decisions.

My noble friend Lord Leigh asked about spending on adult education. The total spending power of the FE sector to support adult and 19-plus participation will be £3.4 billion by 2019-20. In cash terms, this is an increase of 40% compared with 2015-16. Within the £3.4 billion, the Government have maintained funding for the adult education budget, which supports adult skills participation in cash terms at £1.5 billion.

My noble friend Lord Baker used some statistics from Davos which were very persuasive. Industry and all of us are aware of these issues. They create an urgency, but I am as hopeful as the noble Baroness, Lady Morris, that this is the moment when we start to reverse the trend that we have all discussed today.

Today’s debate has been thoughtful and enlightening, and I look forward to further discussions. The noble Baroness, Lady Morris, said—

[Lord Young of Norwood Green]

I asked about the application of the levy and the involvement of SMEs in apprenticeships. I do not know whether the Minister is intending to address those points.

[Lord Nash]

I do not have time now, but I will write to the noble Lord on those points.

The noble Baroness, Lady Morris, said that the Bill looked like somebody who had lost their best friend. I think that it has found a number of new friends during this debate. As I said, I will write in response to the points that I have not covered. That letter will be sent to all noble Lords, with a copy placed in the House Library, alongside policy statements explaining the delegated powers set out in the Bill. I should also be very happy to meet noble Lords to discuss the Bill, along with my ministerial colleagues and officials, if they would find that useful. We are listening and will reflect on the important points raised today, and I look forward to more detailed scrutiny in Committee.