Education (Careers Guidance in Schools) Bill
Toby Perkins Excerpts(3 years, 1 month ago)
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The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Education (Alex Burghart)
It is a real pleasure to serve under your chairmanship in this, my first Bill Committee as a Minister, Mr Davies. I hope it is not my last. I must congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Workington; he is, as the hon. Member for Hove said, the boy with the golden ticket. He may remember what happens to the boy who finds that golden ticket: Charlie goes on to run the chocolate factory. I can think of no finer job for my hon. Friend. It is a real achievement to get this Bill into Committee, and we in the Government are delighted to support it, because it really supports the aims of our skills reform agenda, which will drive up the quality and availability of technical skills for young people, and that will help them to get the great jobs that they deserve—the great jobs of tomorrow.
I pay tribute to my predecessor, my hon. Friend the Member for Chichester (Gillian Keegan), who has gone on to an even greater job, in the Department of Health. I cannot hope to match her panache and stylishness, but I promise the House that I will do my best for this agenda, because it is something I believe in deeply. I also thank the Opposition for their support for the Bill and the cross-party consensus that has broken out over this important agenda. I hope such consensus will continue throughout the day, as we go on to the Chancellor’s statement.
The Government support the Bill because we want to level up opportunity. The reforms set out in our “Skills for Jobs” White Paper will give people a genuine choice between a high-quality technical route and a high-quality academic route. As part of that, it is vital that everyone has access to careers guidance of the very highest standard.
Alex Burghart
I am honoured to give way to my opposite number for the first time.
Mr Perkins
Does the Minister agree that in order to meet the careers guidance needs of every child, we need to meet every child, and so every child should be entitled to face-to-face careers guidance during their career journey?
Alex Burghart
I thank the hon. Gentleman for his contribution. I know that we will not always agree as we stand opposite each other, but I know that he cares deeply about the prospects for young people, and I hope he respects that I do, too. Obviously, it is important that young people get high-quality careers advice, and it would be difficult to justify giving that without a degree of face-to-face support, but we respect schools’ abilities to find new, interesting ways of delivering this agenda.
As we emerge from the pandemic, it is important that we make sure that all young people have access to high-quality guidance, because if they do not, they will not know whether they are making the right choices and taking the right opportunities.
Oral Answers to Questions
Toby Perkins Excerpts(3 years, 2 months ago)
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Gillian Keegan
My hon. Friend the Member for Chippenham (Michelle Donelan) and I went to visit Lackham very recently and were delighted to see its investment in agritech facilities, which are groundbreaking and world class. It will mean that young people in that area will have the opportunity to study the very latest technology and techniques that will be required for our agriculture industry. In addition, there will also be a land management and agriculture T-level, which has been designed with the industry sector to make sure that many people across the country get the opportunity to study at that level with that investment.
Mr Toby Perkins (Chesterfield) (Lab)
Some 230,000 students have just studied BTEC level 3 qualifications. For the Minister to stand there, as she just has, and dismiss those qualifications as poor quality will disgust those students and many of the people who have supported them. The Minister suggests she has widespread support, but 86% of respondents to the Department for Education’s own consultation disagreed with the Government’s plan to scrap funding for qualifications that overlapped with T-levels. Even the former Conservative Education Secretary, Lord Baker described it as
“an act of educational vandalism.”
Why are the Government intent on removing the ladder of opportunity from so many students, particularly those from the most deprived communities, when there is such widespread opposition to this move?
Gillian Keegan
I assure the hon. Gentleman that I would definitely not dismiss the BTEC qualification or its quality, and the reason I would not is that I am one of the very few people in this place who has taken a BTEC as part of their apprenticeship. I very much appreciated my BTEC as part of my apprenticeship, as I did my other qualifications.
T-levels are unashamedly rigorous. They are high-quality qualifications, and there is no point giving access to qualifications that are out of date and have not kept up with the requirements of the workforce. The skills gap between what our employers need and what young people study should not be there. This is an employer-led system. I will tell the House what is a tragedy—a tragedy is having young people not able to get on in the workplace because they have spent two or three years studying something that does not offer the value that employers need in this high-tech economy.
Oral Answers to Questions
Toby Perkins Excerpts(3 years, 5 months ago)
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Gillian Keegan
I absolutely agree with my hon. Friend, and that is why I was really delighted to join him and our colleagues—our other Stoke MPs—to visit Stoke-on-Trent College. It was great that we were able to meet students who are on a wide variety of pathways and see the fantastic facilities that our investment has enabled at this brilliant college. There have been nearly 30,000 apprenticeship starts in the Stoke-on-Trent area since May 2010. I encourage learners and employers to take advantage of the support, including the incentive payment of £3,000, and I am sure that he will welcome the establishment of a new Home Office centre that will create more than 500 new roles over five years, with an apprenticeship-first policy for hiring at the entry grades. I agree that they are absolutely vital to the development and economic recovery in Stoke-on-Trent and beyond.
Mr Toby Perkins (Chesterfield) (Lab)
I am afraid the Minister just sounds like she is in denial. Between August and January, under-19 apprenticeship starts were 41% lower than they were in 2018-19. We keep telling the Government that their apprenticeship incentives are inadequate, and there has been widespread support for Labour’s apprenticeship wage subsidy proposal. The Conservative Chair of the Education Committee, the right hon. Member for Harlow (Robert Halfon), has joined those calling for the Government to subsidise the wages of young apprentices and help to tackle this crisis of opportunity. Why will the Minister not work with us and Members right across the House to introduce Labour’s apprenticeship wage subsidy proposal?
Gillian Keegan
I can assure the hon. Gentleman that I am not in denial. Perhaps he is forgetting the kickstart scheme, which also subsidises wages for six months for young people. That scheme is live and is going on for the rest of this year. In addition, it may have escaped his notice, perhaps, that many of the sectors have been in lockdown until relatively recently. If we look at apprenticeship starts, we notice that there is an acceleration in those using the incentive payments to get back to work. Of course, the £3,000 that has been provided can be used in any way that the employer wants to use it, including to subsidise wages. So there is a lot of support and I expect that the numbers will continue to increase.
Oral Answers to Questions
Toby Perkins Excerpts(3 years, 7 months ago)
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Mr Toby Perkins (Chesterfield) (Lab)
The Minister refers to a simpler adult education funding approach, but the decision to increase the adult education clawback threshold from 68% last year to 90% this year, and to impose it at the last minute, will place many colleges in a brutal financial situation. Leicester College, for example, is forecasting that it could be as much as £4 million worse off than expected. The Government can either commit to a skills-based revolution, as they claim they want to do, or endanger the sector by repeatedly cutting its funding; they cannot do both. Why is there such a dangerous discrepancy between what the Government say they want on further education and what they do?
Gillian Keegan
The Government have actually increased funding across the sector quite significantly in many different ways. On the issue that the hon. Gentleman refers to, it is wrong to categorise it as such. We have effectively changed from 97%, which is the clawback this year, down to 90%, thereby giving colleges some leeway. He refers to a previous year, and it is true that we did reduce it to 68%, because that was at the very beginning of the pandemic. We have asked providers to keep provision available, to move online and to give learners that experience, and we have given them time to do so. That is a fair approach.
Adult Skills and Lifelong Learning
Toby Perkins Excerpts(3 years, 7 months ago)
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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.
Education After Covid-19
Toby Perkins Excerpts(3 years, 8 months ago)
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Mr Toby Perkins (Chesterfield) (Lab)
That is very kind; I appreciate it. It is a great pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Ms Rees—even more, now I know that you are feeling benevolent. I congratulate the hon. Member for Isle of Wight (Bob Seely) on securing the debate, and thank him for sight of his speech in advance. I was expecting to have to express my admiration for his optimism that we might, in one hour, address the many areas of improvement required in our educational system. However, as he made clear, he did not propose to have all the answers in his speech or even to address all the questions. He very sensibly identified some of the issues that a royal commission might look at, and he made some practical suggestions for consideration.
This debate is timely, and the need for substantial action is acute, as we heard from many contributors. The hon. Member for Isle of Wight understandably spent some time on the specifics of the education challenges on the Island. He also identified three national areas for consideration—term and holiday periods, the use of technology, and the coherence of the DFE’s wider approach to education. On term times, he raised some interesting issues. There are many challenges that come with the kind of approaches that he outlined, but I agree that it is useful to discuss them.
My hon. Friend the Member for Mitcham and Morden (Siobhain McDonagh) spoke passionately about the remote support scheme and the digital divide. She said that each click had increased the attainment gap. Notwithstanding the number of schools that have struggled to access devices and the number of colleges that have been completely left out, on technology, I echo the endorsement that the hon. Member for Isle of Wight made of the fine work done by many schools and colleges to address the academic vacuum that existed in the first lockdown and ensure that things were much improved in subsequent ones. I agree that, at a time when we need young people to leave our educational establishments totally tech savvy, this crisis has opened opportunities that must not simply be set aside in a return to business as usual, post covid.
On the coherence of the current system, I could not agree more on schools, further education, the closing of Sure Start, the huge growth in different apprenticeship standards, and the extent to which so many academies leave parents feeling they have no voice. We feel strongly that this Government have removed the sense of a systematic approach to education. I go further than the hon. Member for Isle of Wight and say that, while there are good providers in all areas of our educational system, there has to be a more systematic approach that empowers learners and their parents, supports educators, and involves employers and local decision makers. I am afraid to say that the skills White Paper offers little hope that the Government’s approach is likely to become much more systematic in the future.
I would like to touch on the contributions of many hon. Friends and Members. My hon. Friend the Member for Kingston upon Hull West and Hessle (Emma Hardy) spoke passionately about the forgotten children with special educational needs and posed a challenge that we look forward to the Minister responding to. The hon. Member for Bath (Wera Hobhouse) was right about the pressures on our further education system and the need for a more holistic approach that recognises the need for FE and HE to work together. The hon. Member for North Devon (Selaine Saxby) described this as a watershed moment for education and spoke of the need, which a lot of us feel, for a Government response that matches the scale of the moment. My hon. Friend the Member for Mitcham and Morden was excoriating in her analysis of the Government’s education record over the covid crisis. The hon. Member for Westmorland and Lonsdale (Tim Farron) focused on the challenges facing our outdoor education centres, and the hon. Member for Strangford (Jim Shannon) spoke about the number of children falling behind, the pressure throughout the education system and the need to recognise that in the response post covid.
The Labour Party recognises that a decade of underinvestment in our educational system in general—and, as the shadow skills Minister, I would say in further education and skills in particular—has left our nation less well prepared for the challenges of the next decade. Covid has simply exposed many of those challenges more graphically. Labour also recognises the need for an evidence-based response to these challenges post covid and recently launched the Bright Future taskforce, with a dazzling array of contributors who have agreed to take part. I think they will provide an excellent piece of work to address this area.
The taskforce aims to identify the causes of the academic attainment gap, as it pertains to poverty, economic disadvantage, race, and many other areas. It will identify measures that a future Labour Government could take to address those causes. Specifically, the Government must acknowledge that there is a race attainment gap, which goes wider than class disparities, and set specific targets and positive steps to address the number of black, Asian and minority ethnic students who go from outperforming white students at level 2 to getting worse university and work offers and outcomes at level 3 and beyond.
We also identify many systematic failings with the Government’s approach to skills. Many of these have been caused by the missteps of the last 10 years, but we are anxious that the skills White Paper will continue to envisage an approach to education and skills that is far too corporate, and continues to leave thousands of small and medium-sized enterprises and young people on the side lines.
Apprenticeships must be the gold standard, and the Government should recognise that their failure on apprenticeship incentives and on Kickstart means that they need a fresh approach. I urge the Minister to look again at Labour’s apprenticeship wage subsidy proposal.
This has been a welcome debate, Ms Rees, and I share the view of the hon. Member for Isle of Wight that the Government need to move with real urgency and at scale if, after all their hard work, our educators are not to be left facing an uphill challenge in giving English youngsters the opportunity to compete in the global race with the very best in the world.
Mr Perkins
The Minister has announced many different pots of money. One of the things that really concerns us is that he will allocate money, but these chunks of money will not end up getting spent because the mechanisms, or systems, to get them utilised will end up with those funds not being used. What assurances can he give us that the amounts he is announcing will actually be spent on the things he is announcing they will be spent on?
Nick Gibb
The £650 million, of course, is allocated to schools on a per pupil basis—£80 per pupil—and most of that money has now been distributed. For the £300 million that we announced as part of the £700 million, again, the recovery premium is being allocated to schools on the basis of the pupil premium eligibility in those schools, so that will be allocated to schools to use at their discretion. The national tutoring programme is run by the Education Endowment Foundation, and we have approved 33 tutoring companies: we wanted to make sure that the quality of tutoring was there. So far, 130,000 pupils have been signed up for the programme, but we envisage reaching significantly more—something like three quarters of a million students—in this coming academic year.
Through the get help with technology programme, the Government are investing over £400 million to support access to remote education and online social care services, including making 1.3 million laptops and tablets available for disadvantaged children. The hon. Member for Mitcham and Morden (Siobhain McDonagh) raised this issue today, as she has done in other debates. She will be aware that we are procuring 1.3 million laptops that have to be built from scratch. They have to be ordered, shipped in, checked and have software added. On top of the 1.3 million that we have acquired and procured, there are the 2.9 million devices in schools ready to be lent to pupils that schools had before the pandemic.
Oral Answers to Questions
Toby Perkins Excerpts(3 years, 9 months ago)
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The Secretary of State for Education (Gavin Williamson)
As the Minister for School Standards set out, we have commissioned a study to assess the progress of pupils this academic year, initial findings from which were published last week. That study has informed the development of our £1.7 billion investment to give education settings support to boost our children’s education.
Mr Toby Perkins (Chesterfield) (Lab)
Those listening to the Secretary of State’s answers in this session so far will fear previous failures being repeated. He talks about a targeted approach, but in the next breath says it is up to teachers to decide where those budgets are targeted.
Once again, we have got the Secretary of State showing a complete lack of leadership, which leads to funds being unspent and his initiatives failing. We have seen it on exams, we have seen it on testing, we have seen it on school returns, we have seen it on university student wellbeing, and we have seen it on BTECs. We need a Secretary of State capable of providing the clarity, the leadership and the ambition required to support a generation of schoolchildren. If he cannot, will he please step aside and let us get a Secretary of State who can?
Gavin Williamson
That was a very well read question by the hon. Member. What we are doing is a combination of things, because we on this side of the House understand that teachers will have an acute understanding of those children who have suffered most as a result of being out of the classroom. We have understood that children from the most disadvantaged backgrounds are most helped by small group tuition. We have created the national tutoring programme—a specifically targeted programme—and all the evidence points to the simple fact that by taking this approach, we have the biggest impact in terms of helping children catch up with lost learning.
The hon. Gentleman probably has little interest or regard for facts or evidence, and that is probably evidenced by the fact that that is how the Labour party came up with its last manifesto. But we do care about evidence. Actually, the evidence shows that by having these targeted interventions, yet giving support to teachers to be able to help children who need it most, we will be able to help the maximum number of children.
Oral Answers to Questions
Toby Perkins Excerpts(3 years, 10 months ago)
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Gillian Keegan
My hon. Friend is absolutely correct, and I could not agree more about the importance of ensuring vocational and technical qualification students are treated fairly and not disadvantaged compared with their peers. We have been working at pace with Ofqual to ensure appropriate arrangements are in place specifically for vocational and technical qualification learners, and the joint consultation we published on Friday seeks views specifically on those qualifications. As soon as possible, we will prioritise safe attendance for those students who need to attend on site in order to prepare for practical assessments, where it is impossible for that training to take place remotely. I can confirm that the exam support service is indeed available to colleges as well as schools.
Mr Toby Perkins (Chesterfield) (Lab)
I pay tribute to everyone in the further education sector, and particularly those college leaders who have been left with very difficult decisions to make this January because of the BTEC exam fiasco. The Government’s farcical approach to those exams has left college leaders to show leadership and concern for pupil and teacher safety, in the absence of any from the Government. As the question from the hon. Member for Romford (Andrew Rosindell) has just exposed, we now have students and colleges on different tracks to the same exams. It is all so unnecessary. How many more vocational students must suffer as a result of the Secretary of State’s inability to make the right decisions at the right time?
Gillian Keegan
I associate myself with the hon. Gentleman in paying tribute to everyone in the further education sector. They have done an amazing job in keeping learning going, whether remotely—they have been absolutely outstanding in that area—or by preparing colleges to take students.
Learners up and down the country have faced unprecedented challenges this year. For those who have worked so hard over recent months preparing for their January exams, particularly those who require a practical licence to practise, it is right that we allow them the opportunity to progress, because no alternative arrangements are capable of being put in place for those types of exams. Schools and colleges are best placed to know whether they are in a position to deliver the January exams and what mix of students they have, which is why in the light of rapidly evolving public health advice, we took the decision to give them the final say on whether proceeding with January exams was right for their learners. I am sure the hon. Gentleman, and indeed the whole House, will join me in wishing those learners all the very best for their results.
Education
Toby Perkins Excerpts(3 years, 12 months ago)
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Mr Toby Perkins (Chesterfield) (Lab)
The recent Westminster Hall debate on Unionlearn was as illuminating for what was not said as for what was. There was no attempt by the Government to pretend that there had been a serious consultation with employers or educators before ceasing funding, nor was there a single Conservative Back-Bench MP willing to turn up to that debate to speak in favour of this cut. Does the Minister realise that no one will believe that the Government are serious about levelling up while they are cutting access to level 2 skills for the lowest paid workers?
Gillian Keegan
This Government are committed to substantial investment in further education, with priority given to qualifications aligned with our economic need, but, as I said during that debate, we need to focus taxpayers’ money on those who need it. With only 11% of users unemployed, Unionlearn simply is not the solution.
[Official Report, 23 November 2020, Vol. 684, c. 592.]
Letter of correction from the Under-Secretary of State for Education, the hon. Member for Chichester (Gillian Keegan).
An error has been identified in the response I gave to the hon. Member for Chesterfield (Mr Perkins).
The correct response should have been:
Mr Toby Perkins (Chesterfield) (Lab)
The recent Westminster Hall debate on Unionlearn was as illuminating for what was not said as for what was. There was no attempt by the Government to pretend that there had been a serious consultation with employers or educators before ceasing funding, nor was there a single Conservative Back-Bench MP willing to turn up to that debate to speak in favour of this cut. Does the Minister realise that no one will believe that the Government are serious about levelling up while they are cutting access to level 2 skills for the lowest paid workers?
Gillian Keegan
This Government are committed to substantial investment in further education, with priority given to qualifications aligned with our economic need, but, as I said during that debate, we need to focus taxpayers’ money on those who need it. With only 2% of users unemployed, Unionlearn simply is not the solution.
Oral Answers to Questions
Toby Perkins Excerpts(4 years ago)
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Mr Speaker
Let us head up to Wansbeck with Ian Lavery. [Inaudible.] I think he has been cut off in his prime. I therefore call shadow Minister Toby Perkins.
Mr Toby Perkins (Chesterfield) (Lab)
The recent Westminster Hall debate on Unionlearn was as illuminating for what was not said as for what was. There was no attempt by the Government to pretend that there had been a serious consultation with employers or educators before ceasing funding, nor was there a single Conservative Back-Bench MP willing to turn up to that debate to speak in favour of this cut. Does the Minister realise that no one will believe that the Government are serious about levelling up while they are cutting access to level 2 skills for the lowest paid workers?
Gillian Keegan
This Government are committed to substantial investment in further education, with priority given to qualifications aligned with our economic need, but, as I said during that debate, we need to focus taxpayers’ money on those who need it. With only 11% of users unemployed, Unionlearn simply is not the solution.[Official Report, 30 November 2020, Vol. 685, c. 2MC.] That is why, from April 2021, we will be fully funding the first level 3 qualification for adults who do not currently have a level 3 qualification. As I said during the debate, many of the basic provisions to which Unionlearn signposts learners are available right across the country, and have been available and introduced since Unionlearn was in existence.