Skills and Post-16 Education Bill [Lords]

Mick Whitley Excerpts

2nd reading
Monday 15th November 2021 Commons Chamber

[Mick Whitley (Birkenhead) (Lab)]

I begin by paying tribute to everything that Wirral Met College in my constituency does to equip young people with the skills they need to thrive in a fast-changing world. Even during the darkest days of the pandemic, when colleges across our country were forced to shutter their doors, educators never wavered in their commitment to their students, but our colleges and sixth forms simply cannot be expected to survive on goodwill alone.

Since 2010, the post-16 education sector has been decimated by sweeping funding cuts. Further education budgets have been slashed by a third, while spending on adult education has fallen by more than half in real terms. Even with the recent announcement of additional funding in last month’s Budget, Government spending still falls way short of what it was when Labour was last in power. The Government can talk as much as they like about the importance of lifelong learning, but their promises will always ring hollow while spending levels remain so woefully inadequate.

I hope the Minister will soon come before the House to explain what steps the Government will be taking to undo the catastrophic legacy of 10 long years of austerity on this critically important sector. I know that many of the young people I represent feel deeply concerned by the Government’s proposals to defund the vast majority of BTECs. Those qualifications have proved a precious resource for the hundreds of thousands of young people who complete them each year, and no one has benefited more from their introduction than young people living in the north end of my constituency, one of the most deprived areas in the whole UK.

Ofsted and the Government’s own equality impact assessment have warned that those are the young people who stand to lose the most from the Government’s reckless plans to replace BTECs with unproven T-levels. That is why I warmly welcome Lords amendment 29, which will maintain approval for BTECs until such time as T-levels are fully rolled out. With employers, educators, trade unions and a host of former Education Secretaries calling for the retention of BTECs in their entirety, the Minister must explain why he is so intent on pushing ahead with these reforms when there is such broad consensus about the damage they will cause.