Queen’s Speech

Lord Young of Norwood Green Excerpts

Thursday 29th June 2017 Lords Chamber

[Lord Young of Norwood Green (Lab)]

My Lords, I welcome some of what the Minister said about education and skills, which are the areas on which I wish to focus. I congratulate my noble friend Lady Sherlock, who is no longer in her place, on her outstanding contribution. She covered the waterfront, and I do not intend to try to match her.

I declare an interest as the recently elected chair of the board of governors of my local primary school. If I make one plea, which echoes what many noble Lords have said, it is about the importance of primary education. We know that if we get it wrong there, there is a cost of dealing with that. Sometimes I wonder whether we realise the size of the challenge that schools face. I can talk only about my school. There is a modest number of languages—about 30—where English is the second language. A significant number of children enter the nursery school not toilet-trained and with very few social skills. The school almost becomes a surrogate parent in those early years and has to overcome those difficulties. My school is doing exceedingly well, and I pay tribute to it. It is now in the top 3%, thanks to the dynamic leadership and the quality of the staff. I hope that we recognise the importance of that.

I want to focus on the need for a more holistic assessment of where we are spending money in education. I could not help but look at the staggering amount of money that is now outstanding in student loan debt: £89.3 billion. New lending and interest added outweighs the repayments being made by those borrowers who are now liable to repay. If I thought that all that investment was focused and if any objective cost-benefit analysis showed that we are getting value for money and that the spending is where it needs to be, perhaps we should not worry, but I query whether it is. Students face leaving university with a debt of £40,000 to £50,000, assuming they complete the course. A worrying article appeared in today’s Times, headlined:

“One in ten students from poor households drops out after first year”.

It said:

“Almost one in ten students from disadvantaged backgrounds is dropping out of university after the first year. Official data showed that 8.8 per cent of young, full-time undergraduates from poorer homes did not return for their second year of study in 2014-15, up from 8.2 per cent the year before … For middle-class students, the figure was less than 5 per cent. More disadvantaged young people are in higher education than ever before but the dropout rate has risen for the second year in a row”.


You cannot help wondering whether university education was appropriate for all those students. That is the first question that we need to be asking. In many cases, it is not. It is the only career path they are encouraged into because secondary schools have the incentive to get students into their sixth form, whereas they should be pointed towards the vocational path, which I will come to in a bit.

A further comment on university education is that here we are, in 2017, and yet we still focus mainly on three-year degrees. But does it really? Are we getting value for money? Most university students I speak to do not give year 1 much of a tick, other than to say that they enjoyed it—whether they learned much is another matter.

I focus briefly on further education. I welcome the £0.5 billion, but I am not so sure that that will be enough to deal with the challenge of what is needed in vocational education. T-levels are a good idea, and we certainly need to up the standard and status of vocational education. Unfortunately, it is still seen by many as a second-class career path.

There is a need for high-level apprenticeships in STEM areas. The Royal Academy of Engineering estimates that 830,000 more science, engineering and technology technicians will be needed by 2020 to meet the industrial demand. The latest apprenticeships statistics show that we are nowhere near that figure.

To conclude on the subject that arouses my greatest interest, I am not particularly worried that the Government are unlikely to meet their target of 3 million apprenticeships because I still think the focus should be on quality rather than quantity. If you look at the analysis of those apprenticeships, you will see that the vast majority are in care and hospitality. It is not that there is not a need in those areas, but we also need apprenticeships in the STEM areas, such as construction and engineering.

I have two final questions for the Minister—he has only 100 or 200 to answer already in his right of reply. Are we getting an impact from the apprenticeship levy? Can we see the needle on the dial for the number of small and medium-sized enterprises that are actually employing apprentices? In my view, if that number is not increasing, the levy has failed.

I have one final point. I was interested in all the efforts we will make on new technology, et cetera, but I noticed that in all the points made by the noble Lord, Lord Ashton, there was no reference to cybersecurity, which rather baffled me. Apart from the vested interest we have in this House, having suffered an attack ourselves, there were more serious attacks on the National Health Service. We know that the whole of this country needs to up its game. I would welcome some comment on that.