Skills and Growth

Debate between Seema Malhotra and Tristram Hunt

Wednesday 17th June 2015 Commons Chamber

[Tristram Hunt]

Adult skills budgets have faced a 24% cut under this Government, and that will not do anything to meet the productivity challenge in Enfield and right across the UK. I am wholly in agreement with my right hon. Friend on that.

We have the most unequal skills and education system in the developed world and it is our productivity performance that best provides the index for that continued structural failure. The purpose of the debate is to explore the role that education must play in tackling our poor productivity. That is not to deny that the purpose of education is far broader. What is more, the productivity challenge cannot be solved by higher skills alone. Arguably, Governments of all stripes have overly focused in the past on pushing the supply side of the equation, yet at a very basic level our education system must seek to equip all our young people with the skills they need to thrive in this most competitive of centuries.

More and more, our economic strength will come to be defined by the quality of our human capital. The Royal Academy of Engineering forecasts that the UK needs an extra 50,000 science, technology, engineering and maths technicians and 90,000 STEM professionals every year just to replace people retiring from the workforce.

[Seema Malhotra (Feltham and Heston) (Lab/Co-op)]

As usual, my hon. Friend is making a fantastic speech. He has raised the very important question of STEM. I started out as a computer programmer. Does he agree that we must take advantage of new technologies, have a much better national strategy for the next generation and reskill people for digital jobs, including in programming? As more than 90% of our programmers are men, there is also a gender dimension to the problem.

[Tristram Hunt]

My hon. Friend is totally right. One of the cross-party achievements of the previous six or seven years is the state of English education in computing science and the move away from the drawbacks of the information communications technology world and the qualifications surrounding it. We are world leading in some of the qualifications we are now developing in computing science.