Adult Learning and Vocational Skills: Metropolitan Borough of Dudley

Margot James Excerpts

Tuesday 1st October 2019 Westminster Hall

[Margot James (Stourbridge) (Ind)]

I beg to move,

That this House has considered adult learning and vocational skills training in the metropolitan borough of Dudley.

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mrs Moon. I congratulate my hon. Friend the Minister on assuming her new position at the Department for Education. I am delighted to see the hon. Member for Dudley North (Ian Austin) in his place as this debate is about vocational provision and adult learning in the borough of Dudley. Although I will focus on the provision in Stourbridge, we must assess the need for provision in my constituency of Stourbridge in a borough-wide context.

This debate takes place in the context of the very sad closure of Stourbridge College earlier this summer. Our college dates back over 100 years to the establishment of the Stourbridge College of Art in 1848. That institution merged with the Stourbridge Technical School in 1958. I first visited the college in January 2007 and found a vibrant and welcoming culture. Shortly after that visit, I found myself volunteering as a young enterprise course facilitator at the college, helping students learn about business through the experience of setting up an actual company. I then joined the college board as a governor during 2008-9 and remained close to the college after I was elected and after I stepped down from the board in 2010.

The closure of our college came as a real blow to me, as it did to thousands of other people locally, many of whom had a direct connection with the college. Clearly, those worst affected were today’s students, the teaching staff, the support staff and local small and medium-sized enterprises, particularly small retailers in the vicinity of the campus. When staff and students told me that the closure came as a terrible shock and something of a bereavement, they were not exaggerating. Although I do not want to dwell on the past and cover in too much depth the role played by Birmingham Metropolitan College, known as BMet, which acquired Stourbridge College shortly after 2010, there are a few points to make before I come to the main part of my talk, which is about the need for continued skills provision in my constituency and preferably on the site of the Hagley Road campus.

To cut a long story of mismanagement and financial woes short, by May of this year, BMet had outstanding debts to the banks of £8.9 million and to the Education and Skills Funding Agency of £7.5 million. Debts running out of control was not the only problem. The college had also received three “requires improvement” notices, but each time Ofsted rated the college a 3 and did not award it the worst rating of a 4, and that detail is very relevant to the bigger picture, as a rating of 4 would have triggered automatic intervention much earlier by the ESFA. The Department should learn from that crisis.

BMet now has a legal obligation to bring its debts down to a sustainable level, which of course means the sale of assets that has led directly to the closure of our college. Top of my list of current concerns, which I hope the Minister will take back to discuss with her Secretary of State, is the nature of the sale of the Hagley Road site. The site has been associated with education for many years, and it is the deep wish of our community that the site be protected in future for educational use, at least for the most part, for the generations to come.

When I hear that BMet is expected to realise red book value for the site, alarm bells start to ring and I urge caution on that endeavour and objective. Some colleges within BMet have sought to balance their books by selling off land assets for housing development. We have had experience of that already in Stourbridge; long-suffering residents who live near the Longlands site, which until eight years ago was the proud home of the college’s centre for the study of art and design, have endured years of antisocial behaviour and uncertainty as BMet has negotiated with a trail of developers and the local authority to effect the sale of the site. The ESFA should take note that it took from 2011 until the summer of this year to get planning approval for the residential development on that site.

The board of BMet and the ESFA should reflect hard on the fact that there would be huge opposition to selling the Hagley Road site for residential development and that it would take years to get the change of use and planning consent required. I know that educational providers are in serious talks with BMet about acquiring the site, and I hope those talks will reach a satisfactory conclusion.

That brings me to my main point: the need for vocational skills learning and, in particular, adult learning in Stourbridge. The first thing to acknowledge is that there has been a history of over-provision of 16-to-19 education in our borough of Dudley. Until the closure of Stourbridge College, we had four colleges in the borough, and the problem has been that the 16-to-19 population has been in decline from a high of 12,400 in 2009 to a low of 10,700 across the borough in the current year.

However, there are two points that must be borne in mind. First, if we take a 15-year horizon, 2019 is the low point. From this year, the numbers start to increase again to an estimated 11,800 by 2024. Secondly, it is harder to predict the numbers of adult learners. There were 280 adult learners registered at Stourbridge College in the year 2017-18, and it is that local provision for adult learning that concerns me most, primarily because so many people in adult learning have either part-time employment—sometimes full-time employment—or caring responsibilities, and travelling elsewhere in the borough can present a critical issue for them, such that it will deter them from the studies and upskilling that they acknowledge they need. As I say, it is harder to predict those numbers.

The importance of adult learning should be seen in both a social and an economic context. Indeed, the social and the economic are intertwined. When I was a Minister in the Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy, I had responsibility for labour markets. It was a real eye-opener, and I got to see what lay behind the statistics. We now have close to full employment—a record that this Government can justly be proud of—but there are a great many people living with the assistance of tax credits on low-paid and insecure employment.

I was proud to be associated with the Taylor review of employment practices, commissioned by the previous Prime Minister. The Government accepted the vast majority of Taylor’s recommendations, which centred on improving the quality of work. The opportunity for people to improve their skills throughout their working lives was fundamental to achieving that goal, and nowhere is that improvement greater than among people who are stuck in low-skilled, low-paid employment.

The Government have presided over good and positive changes in the quality of vocational learning. The former Minister for Skills, my right hon. Friend the Member for Guildford (Anne Milton), introduced much-improved apprenticeship standards and the Institute for Apprenticeships, which have been much to the good. However, the emphasis has been on 16 to 19-year-olds and not enough is being done for the huge need that exists for upskilling and lifelong learning among the working-age population.

The figures, I am afraid, speak for themselves: the expenditure on adult learning nationally has been reduced by approximately 40% since 2010. Skills devolved to our own region, the West Midlands Combined Authority. That has been well received, but I am informed that the adult education budget across the west midlands is £2.1 million, which would barely buy a bedroom in a luxury flat not a mile from here.

The funding reduction has been damaging both economically and socially. There are many groups in the working-age population who face greater barriers than most when it comes to securing employment at all and certainly better employment. I am talking about people who have been unemployed for a long time, people with poor literacy and numeracy skills, people who were brought up in the care system, people with disabilities, ex-offenders, sometimes even older workers, and parents who have had a career break. All these groups, and more besides, face significant barriers to improving their skills and getting back into the workplace so that they can progress their careers.

The social consequences of that are dire, but it is also bad news economically. I know the digital and technology sectors particularly well from my role as a Minister at the Department for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport. The skills gap in those sectors will not be narrowed or eliminated just by improving the quality of technical and digital education among the school, university and college-age populations. We need to look at the working-age population as well. The 2018 Lloyds survey found that 21% of people in the working-age population lack basic digital skills, while 8% have zero digital skills and 5.4 million working adults do not have the full range of basic digital skills. Unless we sort this out, it will delay the uptake of technology in industry and dampen the growth of the tech sector, and we can only sort it out through a commitment to adult learning.

This issue also accounts for some regional discrepancies, especially when we look at the five basic skills that people of working age need in the digital space. Some 71% of people in the north-east have all five basic skills, whereas in the south-east the figure is 86%. The ramifications of the skills gap and the inadequate response to it by adult learning are a key issue that needs to be resolved. I am delighted that the Department for Education’s resources have been increased going forward. I congratulate the ministerial team on securing that increase and appeal to them to use some of that money to go some way towards redressing the reduction in funding for adult learning that I have described today.

When it comes to the provision of adult learning in particular and vocational skills generally, I believe there is an economic case for continuing with such provision in Stourbridge, and I am delighted by the reaction of local colleges: the exemplary Dudley College, now rated outstanding by Ofsted, Halesowen College, rated good by Ofsted, and the brilliant King Ed’s—King Edward College—in my constituency. They are all committed to supporting the provision of vocational and adult learning on the Hagley Road site—assuming that it can be sold to an educational provider who welcomes that provision on a subletting basis.

There will need to be some new money, however. Dudley College and Halesowen College absorbed many students and staff from Stourbridge College at the beginning of this term. I commend both colleges for their amazing work on integrating our students and college staff into their new environment. Funding is tight for both colleges, and they will need new money in order to meet the needs of vocational skills provision and adult learners in my constituency. I have my eye on various budgets, including growth deal 3 funding from, I presume, the Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy and the underspend in the local enterprise partnership. Providers in the Black Country can also bid for funding from the almost £97 million skills budget. Local authority level budgets may also need reassessment, but my hon. Friend the Member for Dudley North has been working on securing money from the stronger towns fund. Of course, the combined authority also has devolved funding for skills, and I am grateful to Mayor Andy Street for his close involvement in our bid to get adult educational provision and vocational skills in my constituency—ideally on the Stourbridge Hagley Road site.

I thank everybody involved locally thus far in the bid to secure the future of adult learning and skills provision in Stourbridge. I trust that this afternoon’s debate and my upcoming meeting with the Secretary of State and local colleges towards the end of October will lead to some real movement on this issue, so that my constituents, whether adults or young people, will still be able to access the training needed by both Stourbridge and, importantly, our economy.

--- Later in debate ---

[Margot James]

I must thank my hon. Friend the Member for Dudley North (Ian Austin) for his extremely kind remarks about my work. They are fully reciprocated; I have seen at first hand what an incredible champion he is for his constituents and the wider borough of Dudley. I echo his praise for Dudley College. I, too, have seen its progress over the past 10 years; it has been truly transformational. I join in his tribute to the former principal, Lowell Williams. The Minister made the good point that Halesowen College is in the top 10% of colleges for results; it is a great asset to the wider borough.

My hon. Friend the Member for Dudley North gave the very important context, which is that we need local improvement in skills to attract new industries, which will bring better-paid employment. That is central to the industrial strategy, in which I am a great believer; it is crucial for our borough.

The hon. Member for Blackpool South (Gordon Marsden) showed great understanding of our local situation—I must thank him for that—and deep experience of further and adult education. He mentioned the survey done by locally by Stourbridge College staff and students, which revealed the issues to do with travel locally. The Minister says that there is a safeguard: no student should have to travel more than 10 km. However, that is a huge distance in our borough. As I mentioned, we should not underestimate the difficulty of travel, particularly for adult learners, but also for younger students who have particular needs.

The hon. Gentleman mentioned my dialogue with the National Audit Office. I was pleased to hear the Minister talk about the various inquiries that the Department has set up. I welcome Dame Mary Ney’s inquiry; I look forward to seeing the fruits of that. I thank the Minister for her support. She encouraged local stakeholders in Dudley borough to look for and find a solution to ensuring very local provision, particularly of adult learning. I welcome those remarks and thank her for setting out the funding opportunities at the combined authority level. I am meeting Mayor Andy Street to discuss those opportunities next week.

Question put and agreed to.

Resolved,

That this House has considered adult learning and vocational skills training in the metropolitan borough of Dudley.