Vocational Education and Training

Viscount Bridgeman Excerpts

Monday 28th October 2019 Lords Chamber

Asked by

[Viscount Bridgeman]

To ask Her Majesty’s Government what steps they are taking to strengthen vocational education and training in secondary schools.

[Viscount Bridgeman (Con)]

My Lords, I thank noble Lords who have put their names down at short notice for this debate. I was fortunate to be number one in the ballot for the QSDs following the Queen’s Speech, so the opportunity has come rather earlier than I anticipated.

Your Lordships will be aware that on 6 September 2018, there was an excellent debate initiated by the noble Lord, Lord Aberdare. I am very pleased to see the noble Lord taking his place in this debate today. I mention in passing that we are both playing truant from a key pre-concert rehearsal of the Parliament choir, but there are priorities. I hope that this short debate will enable the Minister to bring us up to date on developments over the past year.

It is perhaps worth recalling the degree of skills shortages across a number of sectors. For this I am indebted to the Edge Foundation. In engineering, there is a need for over 320,000 people per year with Level 3 engineering skills. In the tech industry, there are an estimated 600,000 vacancies in the UK, a figure estimated to reach a million by 2020. The UK hospitality industry is twice the size of financial services, yet it is common for there to be more than 100,000 vacancies at any one time. Lastly, there is the best known one: the NHS is reporting shortages of 100,000 staff, representing one in 11 posts.

Against this background we find that in the 2016-17 academic year the number of students taking vocational subjects at secondary school was 33,000, compared with the 521,000 who took mathematics and science. In the light of the sector figures that I have just quoted, this is a depressingly low figure for vocational subjects. A review of post-18 education and funding, by an independent panel under the chairmanship of Dr Philip Augar, published in May 2019, found that career support is still underfunded. It recommended that career support should be rolled out nationally and, most importantly, that every secondary school should be able to be part of a careers hub, that training should be available for all careers leaders. Further, a new online platform should be created to enable young people to make choices about what to study, similar to the UCAS database for academic education.



A crucial inhibition is the lack of awareness of the various non-academic routes into employment. The Department for Education found that students leaving secondary education and entering levels 4 and 5 had difficulty in navigating the options on offer. The problem is not simply one of vacancies; the figures for various sectors should disabuse us of that. Evidence was given to the House of Lords Economic Affairs Committee that graduates from vocational courses came ill equipped in what one witness described as “soft skills”, such as teamworking and communications.

I would like to speak briefly about the new form of qualification, the T-level, whose crucial aim is to provide an alternative to the academic route into employment provided by A-levels and reduce the stigma attached to non-academic qualification. It will consist of 15 routes, based around occupations with shared training requirements, with some routes subdivided into what are called pathways. The T-level will be equivalent to a three A-level programme and will, on average, consist of 1,800 hours studied full time over two years—around 50% more than the average 16-19 study rate programme at present. All courses will follow the same framework of five features: a technical education; industry placement for around 45 days; maths, English and digital requirements; any occupation-specific requirements, for instance a licence to practise; and any further employability enrichment and pastoral provision, which I take to mean the soft skills that I referred to, and which in the past have been seen as weak spots in careers advice.

These T-levels will be delivered by a small number of providers in 2020. I understand that the Government’s aim is to have all 15 routes introduced by September 2023. It is fair to suggest that the profession has given a cautious welcome to the T-level initiative. However, I have heard of two reservations on which I should be grateful for the Minister’s comments. The first is that it gives less flexibility to students who have second thoughts on whether their careers should lie in academic or vocational skills. The second concern of which I am aware is that there are a number of outstanding courses, currently offered by institutions such as Cambridge Technicals and BTEC, which T-levels are expected to supersede. The profession does not want to see the baby going out with the bathwater.

I will refer only briefly to apprenticeships as I am sure that several noble Lords, who I know are experts on this subject, will be able to speak with knowledge and authority. I will make just two points on the eponymous clause known as the Baker clause, which was a landmark amendment to the Technical and Further Education Act 2017. First, in 2018 a report by the House of Commons Education Committee was highly critical. The publication FE Week found that only two of the 10 large multiacademy trusts which it investigated were fully compliant with the new rules. Secondly, the committee’s recommendations were unequivocal. It said:

“We recommend that the Government, with Ofsted’s support, properly enforces the Baker clause. In its response to this report it should set out how it plans to do this, and what penalties will be imposed”.


I shall be interested to hear from the Minister what progress the Government are making in addressing this recommendation.

The speakers in this debate will, I hope, highlight the thoughts and initiatives from all quarters which are going into the careers of post-16 year-olds. Perhaps I may finish by wandering slightly off the theme of the debate. To put it starkly, for many children this is just too late. They will have entered secondary education three years previously; many will come from dysfunctional family backgrounds and be quite unsuited to academic education. There will be the usual temptations to follow the sadly well-trod paths into truancy, drug addiction, gangs and knife crime. The message to government should, I suggest, be that it is never too early to make provision at secondary school level for an introduction to—for want of a better word—the workbench; and the chance to take the first steps in learning a trade which for many of these young people could prove to be a life-changer.

I thank your Lordships who are participating in this debate and will be grateful to hear the Minister’s comments.