Adult Skills and Lifelong Learning

Toby Perkins Excerpts

Thursday 15th April 2021 Westminster Hall

[Mr Toby Perkins (Chesterfield) (Lab)]

It is a great pleasure to serve under your chairpersonship, Ms Rees. I thank the Committee for an excellent report, and I congratulate the right hon. Member for Harlow (Robert Halfon) not just on the report and on securing the debate, but on his wider commitment to this subject. He is a powerful voice speaking up for the sector, and his speech once again reflected that.

The report produced by the Committee is excellent. As my hon. Friend the Member for Birkenhead (Mick Whitley) said, it is a bold report that goes further than the Government’s suggestions, and the Committee has made a number of recommendations that really should be investigated more fully. We have heard a lot about how vital skills are. We have heard not only about the ways we have stepped backwards as a country in adult education and lifelong learning over the course of recent years, but about the scale of the challenge, which has been brought into particularly sharp focus by the coronavirus crisis.

I think the sector has welcomed the rhetoric from the Government and the sense that there is a greater focus on further education and skills, but the sector and, indeed, learners will judge the Government by their actions and funding, not by their words. The sector’s experience over the last 11 years is an important piece of context. It has had a decade of funding cuts. Adult education in particular has been savagely cut. As Members referred to, we have recently seen the clawback of adult education funding and the further education sector excluded from the Government’s main post-covid jobs programme—the failing kickstart programme. We have seen an obsession with programmes aimed at major employers, often excluding towns and rural communities, whose economies are based much more on small and medium-sized enterprises and sole traders. The programmes the Government have introduced have lacked scale, ambition and urgency.

The Minister probably did not help with expectation management regarding the White Paper. She regularly promised in the run-up to its publication that we were going to see transformational reforms that would offer the biggest change to the sector in 60 years. While I recognise, as the hon. Member for Waveney (Peter Aldous) did, that lasting transformation is very difficult when you only have one-year budgets, the White Paper represents a considerable missed opportunity. My initial response was that it was predominantly lacking in ambition and scale and so would not take the sector far enough down the path required at a moment of such seismic challenge. Furthermore, there are genuine worries that, far from not going far enough in the right direction, there are elements of the White Paper that are actually boldly marching in the wrong direction. I shall expand upon my views to that in a moment.

We have heard really powerful testimony from many hon. Members. I particularly enjoyed what my hon. Friend the Member for Putney (Fleur Anderson) said, that the Government just does not really get further education yet. Whatever their narrative says, successive policy and funding decisions suggest that the Government see further education very much as something that narrowly loads skills that an employer needs into a recipient who goes from unemployed to an employee. Of course, skilling people for specific jobs and careers is a vital function of the further education sector, but further education is about so much more than that. My hon. Friend spoke powerfully about what further education and adult education is all about. It is about second chances; it is about alternative learning environments, often for those who did not thrive at school; it is about providing a vehicle that helps local communities, employers, learners and learning institutions to work together.

I sense that this is a White Paper that lacks soul. Further education is not just a service; it is a way of life, a pathway and a staircase. It is transformative, empowering, beautiful, and it changes people’s lives, not just their jobs. That sense of joy and boundless opportunity is entirely missing from the Government’s very narrow approach. Close to where I live, there used to be a college called North Derbyshire Tertiary College. It has long gone now, but it was funded by a penny levy on miners that they paid at the end of their shift on a Friday. Men arriving back at the surface after an exhausting day at the coalface would drop a penny in a tin to help them learn to read and write and to educate their children, so that for the next generation there would be choices other than following their fathers down the pit. It was never about improving their use to their employers; it was about investing in their communities and themselves to widen those opportunities.

It is the Government’s failure to understand that principle that leads them to say stupid things like Unionlearn was of no value, because it mainly worked with people who were already in work. Of course! No one suggested that Unionlearn was the only skills approach the Government needed, but a programme with a great success rate of helping workers to learn skills that will help them get promoted or get a pay rise has real value. People do not need to be out of work to be able to gain value from improving their skills.

The Committee’s report makes some really sensible suggestions. I find very unconvincing the Government’s assurances that many of the issues raised by the Committee are already in hand. For example, we already know that there has been a 50% real-terms reduction in adult education funding under this Government, so the dismissal of the Committee’s suggestion that the spending increase required for adult education should be properly costed is most unconvincing.

My hon. Friend the Member for York Central (Rachael Maskell) spoke about the value of adult learning, but also about how large the real-terms reduction has been. We cannot get away from the importance of that funding, and we know that adult education has seen catastrophic reductions in funding during the past 11 years. The right hon. Member for Harlow referred to well intentioned reforms, and I am sure that in many areas there were well intentioned reforms, but it is impossible to argue that the specific cuts made to adult education were well intentioned. That was a positive decision that the Government made. The Government can address that or choose not to, but they should not pretend that those funding losses are not real or that they have been in any way addressed since the right hon. Member for Uxbridge and South Ruislip (Boris Johnson) became Prime Minister.

I welcome the Committee’s call for funding streams to be consolidated and streamlined. The Government outlined their ambitions to do that, but their approach so far has added barriers and complexities, not reduced them, so there is—I will be generous—widespread scepticism about whether the Government will deliver on their ambitions in that regard. I welcome the lifelong learning entitlement proposal, but given that the lifetime skills guarantee has turned out to be far more limited in scope than expected, as the hon. Member for Stoke-on-Trent North (Jonathan Gullis) said, the line

“We will consult on the detail”

is doing a lot of heavy lifting in the Government response to that recommendation.

The Government have huge confidence that their desire to put employers in the driving seat will address Britain’s skills challenges, but the right hon. Member for Harlow was right to say that 39% of employers admit to providing no training whatever, so the idea that employers being in the driving seat will resolve all these challenges is, I think, deeply concerning. Of course employers are crucial stakeholders in this approach and absolutely have to be in the room, but there is considerable doubt as to the extent to which they want or are able to drive the vehicle.

It is a stunning indictment of the Government’s approach to working with businesses that local enterprise partnerships seem to be entirely missing from the White Paper. The report, in recommendation 11, refers to attempts to bring local enterprise partnerships back in, but the Government response does not even mention that recommendation on local enterprise partnerships. Clearly, they are entirely shut out. Chambers of commerce have some brilliant branches and great people and they are capable of excellent practice, but there is a large gap between where those organisations’ current capacity is and their ability to play the kind of role that the Government appear to envisage.

It is telling that 50% of the Government’s adult education budget is devolved to the seven mayoral combined authority areas and London. It is depressing that the Government seem to be doing an about-turn on devolution. The Government’s dismissal of the Committee’s suggestion about devolving the National Careers Service is an example of that. They have no plan for devolution to those areas not in the shadow of a major city, and therefore a very limited plan for addressing the skills approach needed to target town and rural areas. That is particularly damaging because those are the areas most likely to be without the major employers that seem to drive so much of this Government’s approach to skills. Many of us live in towns dominated not by three or four employers of thousands of people, but by thousands of employers of three or four people. They have been widely shut out of the Government’s reforms thus far, and there is nothing in the skills White Paper that goes close to addressing those challenges.

Turning for a moment to the specific challenges that face the Government now, I remain mystified that the Government have failed to take up the apprenticeship wage subsidy idea put forward by Labour, utilising the money that remains unspent in the apprenticeship levy pot to support funding for the first year of new apprenticeships. I would also like the Minister to offer some justification for the ridiculous and damaging decision referred to by the hon. Member for Waveney to claw back adult education funds where providers have provided less than 90% of the contracted amount. For those colleges that do most back-to-work courses or focus particularly on ESOL work, that target is totally unrealistic. It will inevitably fall to colleges to at best cancel pay awards and, in many cases, make redundancies.

I really welcome this report and the contribution that the right hon. Member for Harlow and his Committee continue to make to this incredibly important area, but I think that the Government response to the report shows that there is still a long, long way to go before these challenges are properly tackled.