Moved by Lord Aberdare To move that this House takes note of the
importance of skills for the success of the United Kingdom economy
and for the quality of life of individuals. Lord Aberdare (CB) My
Lords, skills are central to the future of our young people and
central to the future of our nation. Every one of the main
challenges we face depends for its resolution on our having the
right skills, now and in the future. Yet it seems to me that we,
including in...Request free trial
Moved by
To move that this House takes note of the importance of skills
for the success of the United Kingdom economy and for the quality
of life of individuals.
(CB)
My Lords, skills are central to the future of our young people
and central to the future of our nation. Every one of the main
challenges we face depends for its resolution on our having the
right skills, now and in the future. Yet it seems to me that we,
including in this House, do not focus enough on how to develop,
maintain and enhance the skills needed to achieve net zero; to
become a science and technology superpower; to realise the
potential of AI; to meet our energy needs; to defend ourselves in
an increasingly fractious world; to improve the quality of our
health and care systems; to build enough new homes; to upgrade
our transport infrastructure; to support our brilliant creative
sector; and to pursue numerous other aims. All of these depend on
skills.
My belief in the importance of skills is partly personal. I
emerged from a very privileged education with an Oxford classics
degree, an impressive academic record, virtually no practical
skills and little idea of what sort of career to pursue. I
believe that we can and should do better for our young people. I
am also struck by the contrast between attitudes to education and
skills today, and the burning desire to improve themselves that
led some 200,000 Welsh people to learn to read the Bible in the
circulating schools set up by Griffith Jones of Llanddowror, in
my home county of Carmarthen, in the 18th century.
I am absolutely delighted to have obtained this debate to explore
how we can better meet our skills needs, and greatly look forward
to hearing the contributions of all noble Lords who are speaking,
not least the maiden speeches of the noble Lords, and of Hale, and of course the
response of the Minister. I am grateful to the House of Lords
Library for its briefing for the debate, for additional research
that Thomas Weston has done for me, and to the many organisations
which have deluged me with helpful and insightful briefings, to
which I fear I shall do less than justice in the time
available.
Virtually every sector of our economy currently faces worker
shortages; so-called skills-shortage vacancies have risen from
about 91,500 in 2011 to over 531,000 in 2022—up from 16% to 36%
of all vacancies. A recent British Chambers of Commerce survey
found that 73% of organisations are facing skills shortages. We
have stubbornly high levels of young people who are not in
education, employment or training: 12% of young people, some
850,000, are NEET. At the same time, employers complain that
young people leaving education lack work-ready skills: 60% of
employers struggle to find the right technical skills and 50%
cannot find the transferable skills that they need. UK
productivity seems to be stuck in a rut and falling behind that
of other countries. Teacher recruitment and retention is not
keeping up with demand. We face a serious skills challenge.
What sorts of skills do we need? I know other noble Lords will
talk about specific skills, so I will just outline some of the
categories needed. First, all of us need basic skills, including
literacy, numeracy, digital literacy and no doubt oracy, which
had not been invented when I was at school—your Lordships may
have reason to regret that. Literacy and numeracy are, rightly,
required elements of the school curriculum, although the
Education for 11-16 Year Olds Committee, on which I served,
argued that there should be more functional alternatives to the
current requirement to achieve a level 4 GCSE pass, which has a
highly damaging effect on the subsequent educational progress of
the one-third of young people who fail to attain it.
Secondly, there are specific work or job-related skills,
including technical and practical skills, for which training may
be delivered by FE colleges, independent training providers or
employers themselves. The much-needed green skills belong in this
category.
Thirdly, there are the skills variously described as life skills,
soft skills or transferable skills. The Skills Builder
Partnership identifies eight essential skills: speaking;
listening; problem-solving; creativity; aiming high; staying
positive; teamwork; and leadership. It has developed a universal
framework resource for teaching and assessing these, which is
being used in a growing number of schools. These are increasingly
important in the modern world, in both our work and personal
lives. They are also the skills which employers are crying out
for most of all: 57% of employers say they value transferable
over technical skills. Employers find that the education system
prepares students well for academic progression, rather than
vocational pathways, on which there is insufficient focus. Yet
98% of teachers recognise essential skills as important for their
learners' employment opportunities and 86% agree that the
national curriculum should include them.
The Local Government Association identifies no fewer than 49
national employment and skills-related schemes or services across
England. They spend an estimated £20 billion in total and are
managed by at least nine Whitehall departments and agencies. The
Minister will have a lot to cover in her response.
I will briefly mention three initiatives within the remit of the
DfE about which I feel strongly. Apprenticeships are a key part
of skills policy. The apprenticeship levy is an important means
of securing employer funding for skills training. There has been
a disappointing decline in apprenticeship starts in recent
years—from more than 509,000 in 2015-16 to about 337,000 in
2022-23. I will highlight two concerns about the current system.
First, the number of apprenticeships for young people aged under
19 has declined even more steeply—from more than 131,000 to less
than 78,000, as has the number of entry-level—level
2—apprenticeships, which are most suitable for many in this age
group. The levy, in effect, incentivises employers to offer more
expensive higher-level apprenticeships, often to upskill or
reskill existing employees. This is also important, of course,
but the balance seems wrong and needs to be adjusted to ensure a
greater intake of younger apprentices, especially at level 2.
Secondly, there is a long-standing need to reduce the barriers of
cost, complexity and bureaucracy which deter small employers from
offering apprenticeships. Many employers are calling for greater
flexibility as to how levy funds can be spent—for example to
cover other forms of accredited training. The Government have
made some improvements, but take-up by SMEs is still much too
low.
A successful skills system depends on the availability of
first-rate careers education and information for everyone from
primary school age to adulthood. Much progress has been made in
recent years, thanks largely to the efforts of the Careers &
Enterprise Company and other careers organisations. Some 92% of
schools are now part of local career hubs. More than 3,000
careers leaders have been trained, and the average number of the
eight Gatsby benchmarks of good career guidance achieved by
schools has risen from 2.1 to 5.5 in the last five years.
Encouragingly, schools serving the most disadvantaged groups
perform above the average. There is still much more to do in
improving the quality of careers provision and business
engagement, especially at local level and outside schools,
tackling barriers to progression into jobs, and firmly
establishing careers education as the bridge between young people
and business.
The Skills and Post-16 Education Act 2022 led to the creation of
local skills improvement plans across all 38 areas of
England—most of them are led by chambers of commerce—which set
out actionable priorities to tackle local skills needs. My noble
friend Lady Lane-Fox, who is the president of the British
Chambers of Commerce, will talk more about them. These should be
a powerful tool for understanding and addressing skills needs and
opportunities across England. Perhaps the Minister could tell us
how implementation of the plans will be monitored and assessed.
Should there not also be an NSIP—a national skills improvement
plan—to ensure that, taken together with LSIPs, they are meeting
identified national skills priorities and that programmes at
national and local government levels are effectively
co-ordinated?
Later speakers will doubtless mention other skills-related
government initiatives, such as T-levels, the lifelong learning
entitlement and the advanced British standard. We will also hear
about some of the Labour Party's proposals, including for a
national skills taskforce. My impression is that existing
initiatives add up to rather less than the sum of their parts,
rather than a coherent and comprehensive package for tackling
skills needs. They seem fragmented and lacking clarity about how
different schemes are supposed to work together.
There are also many excellent organisations outside government
helping to develop young people's skills. The National Citizen
Service, along with the Duke of Edinburgh's Award, recently
launched a report in Parliament on the enrichment activities they
offer. The Scouts seek to empower young people with skills for
life. WorldSkills UK, which is this morning announcing the young
people selected to represent Team UK at this year's Skills
Olympics in Lyon, described one of its aims as “championing
future skills” and helping the UK become a “world-class skills
economy” so as to remain globally competitive. I say amen to
that.
This Government do not seem keen on strategies, but no well-run
organisation of any size would be without a human resources
strategy. We, as a country, need a skills strategy to fulfil a
similar role. What might such a strategy look like? First, skills
should be recognised as a priority for any Government—national,
devolved or local—and every area of policy needs to include
provision for developing required skills. Secondly, the strategy
should be evidence-based, built on sound data about current and
anticipated skills needs, shortages and opportunities. There
needs to be a process for monitoring and reporting on
implementation and progress.
Thirdly, the strategy should be comprehensive and joined up
across relevant government departments—I mentioned the nine that
have programmes in this area—and across the nation, taking
account both of local plans and of regional and national
priorities, and seeking complementarity with the devolved
nations, from which there may be valuable lessons to be
learned.
Fourthly, and very importantly, the strategy should be matched by
an education system fully aligned with its goals at all levels
from primary to tertiary and beyond. This must recognise and seek
to meet the need for skilled technicians and tradespeople, as
well as university graduates, and give all of them a strong
grounding in basic and essential skills. It is high time for the
holy grail of parity of esteem between academic and
technical/vocational education to be seized—although I am not
sure whether that is the right thing to do with a grail. Of
course, the implications of a skills strategy for education
deserve a debate of their own.
Fifthly, a strategy should incorporate measures to increase
teacher motivation and recognition by allowing them greater
flexibility, to teach in a way that best suits their own
abilities, experiences and interests. Highly skilled, highly
motivated and highly regarded teachers must be a central plank of
any skills strategy.
Sixthly, employers must be deeply engaged, both in defining and
in delivering the strategy, including by ensuring that their own
skills needs are recognised, and through offering work experience
placements and apprenticeships.
Finally, the strategy should be vigorously promoted and
publicised to individuals, employers, teachers, schools, parents
and everyone concerned with skills. Such a strategy should aim to
raise skills much higher up the public agenda and recapture some
of the passion for education and skills that drove the success of
Griffith Jones's schools. Developing and delivering it would be
neither easy nor quick and would depend on attracting the
co-operation and commitment of all parties with a stake in
raising skills—which is basically all of us. It might be
supported by a high-profile campaign to build enthusiasm for
pursuing the skills that young people and our economy need and to
incentivise and celebrate investment in skills. The DfE's
existing Skills for Life campaign seems lacking in ambition and
impact.
I am conscious that I have barely scratched the surface of the
issues we are debating. I have every confidence that subsequent
speakers will fill many of the gaps. I hope that this House, with
the benefit of all the wisdom and expertise that it embodies,
will continue to work doggedly with government, education
institutions, employers and others in pursuit of policies to make
the UK a world leader in skills.
When Napoleon supposedly described us as a nation of shopkeepers,
I believe it was meant more as a recognition of our commercial
talents than as an insult. Now is the time to apply our talents
to a new challenge—to show ourselves to the world as a nation of
skills builders. I beg to move.12.18pm
(Con)
My Lords, I congratulate my noble friend on initiating this debate. He
and I meet from time to time at conferences on technical
education around the country. I admire his determination; he
never gives up, he just keeps bashing on.
Today, over 30 speakers in this House want to speak on technical
education, including two maiden speakers. We have a rich
knowledge of education in this House, but we do not hold the
Government to account on education in any effective way. Since
2010, there has been no significant debate in this House on the
curriculum, assessment systems, FE colleges, sixth-form colleges
or even universities. We need a Select Committee on education and
training and my noble friend should be its chairman.
The Government's record on technical education in schools has
been abysmal since 2010. The amount of technical education has
fallen; the annual number of apprentices has dropped for the last
few years because the Government believe—or and Gibb believed—that there
should be no technical education below 16 in our schools. I am
afraid they have succeeded. By imposing Progress 8 and EBacc on
the school system, they have virtually ended design and
technology. There has been a drop of 80% in our schools. In the
cultural subjects of drama, dance, performing arts, music and
art, there has been a drop of 50%. The broad curriculum that I
tried to introduce in the 1980s has disappeared totally. This is
not acceptable; there has got to be a change.
Many years ago, the Labour Party gave and me enough to start two
university technical colleges. Cameron increased that to 12 and
then to 24, and I am glad to say we now have 44 university
technical colleges. They are among some of the best schools in
the country. We have over 20,000 students and 85% of the colleges
get “good” or “outstanding” Ofsteds. What is really dramatic is
that our colleges' level of youth unemployment is between 1% and
3%. As my noble friend said, the level of NEETs in
the country is 12%; in disadvantaged areas such as Stoke and
Newcastle, it is as high as 20%. We have 2%. We are getting two
new colleges in the next 18 months, in Southampton and Doncaster.
They are expensive—they will cost £25 million. I would like 100.
I am not going to get 100 because, in the next 10 years, hardly
any new schools will be built, because of declining rolls. It
will be an era of closing schools, which will be very difficult
to handle for whoever forms the next Government—closing schools
is very tricky and very expensive.
In the UTC movement, we have devised a way of bringing technical
education into ordinary schools. We want to introduce a sleeve of
14 to 18 technical education into an ordinary 11 to 18 year-old
school. That sleeve will have its own classrooms, teachers and
equipment and will be separate from the academic route. We will
of course continue to teach English, maths and science—as
academic subjects, they will probably be shared with the academic
route—but there will be a technical route in the school. It will
have separate examinations and will be supported by the local
university and local companies.
The department has known about this scheme for over a year. We
have found 10 schools that want to do it and the Secretary of
State and the Minister have been provided with their details. We
are waiting for a decision. I believe this will be the only way
for whoever wins the next election to get technical education
into schools. It means you have to abandon and scrap Progress 8
and EBacc. In the last two years, there have been seven reports
advocating exactly that, including two from Select Committees in
this House, which said that EBacc and Progress 8 should be
abolished and that the exam system of GCSEs should be reduced
dramatically and reformed, or even ended.
There is a letter in the Times today from the headmaster of
Bedales, which is a very successful school, describing how it is
slowly moving away from GCSEs altogether. There is a private
school in west London, Latymer, which is going to offer only two
GCSE exams in three years' time—just English and maths. The rest
are going to be assessed; the subjects will go on.
As a result of not having the pressure of exams in the summer
term, you will get two extra teaching terms. The spring term is
now all revision and the summer term is all exams. You abolish
all that and you will get extra time for very interesting new
subjects such as anthropology, philosophy, archaeology, the
history of south-east Asia, graphic design and even the history
of pop music. You can get that by abolishing the GCSE system. I
would like to see it, but it is not going to happen.
I am holding in my hand an application from the Bede Academy, a
school in Newcastle and one of the best in the north-east—each
year they get some students into Russell group universities.
Those in the Bede Academy want a sleeve specialising in
engineering, energy and health. It is a very good 12-page thing.
They worked out entirely the quote for the next three years: what
sort of teachers they want and the cost of it, including the
buildings. They have the strong support of Northumbria University
on health, and to introduce the health changes they need
£200,000. They also need two digital computing units to teach
artificial intelligence and virtual reality, which are not taught
at all in Newcastle's schools. They want six engineering rooms,
metal-working and welding workshops, mechatronics workshops, CAD
workshops, laser cutting and 3D printer sites. They want all of
that and they have put the cost at £1.5 million to £1.8
million.
This, Minister, is an enormous bargain. If you wanted to set up a
technical college in Newcastle, it would cost £12 million to £15
million. This is for only £1.5 million to £1.8 million. Before I
sit down—and I am about to sit down—I will give this application
to the Minister. I do not know whether she has received it or
read it. I will give it to her and I hope that, before she sits
down, if she is listening to me, she will be able to say when she
is going to give approval to it.
Noble Lords
Oh!
12.26pm
of Burry Port (Lab)
My Lords, I give the noble Baroness the Minister the assurance
that I will not repeat that party trick in a moment.
I stepped down from the Communications and Digital Select
Committee just three months ago. It was an invigorating
experience, spending three years looking at developments in the
fields we were examining and interrogating various experts from
the top of a number of industries and experiences. It seems that
there is a paucity of contributors from that committee, so I
bring to the attention of noble Lords an inkling of just two of
the reports we brought out. Since the work has been done, I want
to emphasise that we can refer to it at any time we like.
One report, on our creative future, was published just a year ago
and there is a whole chapter on the skills that we need. Some 88%
of employers in the creative occupations find it hard to recruit
high-level skilled individuals, compared with 38% of employers
across the economy. Someone we interrogated said that skills were
currently the single biggest inhibitor of growth. Meanwhile,
international competition for creative skills is growing,
including creative, technical, cultural management and business
skills, and this is likely to intensify. Those are just three or
four allusions to a rich chapter that fleshes out the need for
creative skills of all kinds in our creative industries, which
make such an important contribution to the economy of our
country. Since our country's economy is well stated in the Motion
from the noble Lord, Lord Aberdare—it is lovely to see him in his
place and giving us the opportunity to discuss these things—we
must draw attention to the fact that one sector of our economy is
particularly hard hit by the absence of skills.
The other report to which I draw attention relates to fulfilling
the second requirement of the Motion, which is for our personal
development, and that is Digital Exclusion—or digital inclusion;
which would we prefer? It is a fact that, for ordinary, everyday
tasks, we lack the skills simply to do the things that are
required of us. I left the house this morning, and my poor wife
was coping with problems with our internet provider, needing to
know language, to have patience and to entertain various options
for which she was never trained, though she had a highly
technical education and work pattern as a radiographer in the
health industry. I myself have got yet again today what I
regularly get, which is an imprecation from my bank to do
internet banking. I utterly refuse, because I will not give the
banks the opportunity to say that they have now mopped up all the
remaining recidivists: people like me who will not modernise
themselves or live in the modern world. I will say to my bankers
that they should continue to send me my monthly paper statement,
because that is an important thing for so many people.
We have heard that there has not been a properly developed
strategy for skills since 2014, and it was spelled out just what
needs to be in that strategy. One of the recurring things that we
heard in all the committee meetings was that this need for skills
branches out into so many aspects of ordinary, everyday living
that we must have cross-departmental approaches to evolving this
strategy. It is no good leaving it to the Department for
Education, or science and technology or whatever it is. This
impacts on the whole of our lives. It needs a dedicated body of
people to look at this constantly in relation to the various
departments of government. Formal cross-government evaluations
seem to have stopped. They need to be reworked and rebegun.
The Government, of course, cannot be expected to solve
everything, but they can achieve much by showing interest in
driving change against clearly defined objectives. The committee
said:
“We have no confidence that this is happening. Senior political
leadership to drive joined-up concerted action is sorely
needed”.
I could go on, but the reports are there. I place the underlying
questions of my intervention in the hands of the Minister in the
hope that she can give us some concrete evidence of progress in
these areas. It will also reinforce my confidence that the work
of our Select Committees gets heard and is implemented, and that
their ideas are taken forward.
12.33pm
(LD)
My Lords, I thank the noble Lord, , for introducing this debate
so comprehensively on a subject where he and I regularly end up
at the same meetings and with the same enthusiasms for the world
of skills. I sympathise with the noble Lord, : my home wifi has been down
since Wednesday, and they tell me that they will bring somebody
on Monday to sort it out. It is so infuriating; but that is
enough of that. I warmly welcome the two maiden speakers, who
have chosen a very good subject on which to cut their teeth in
this House.
I, too, was on the recent Education for 11-16 Year Olds
Committee, where members strongly recommended that the
Government's obsession with knowledge needed to be tempered with
the acquisition of skills. Few students would need algebra and
geometry later in life, but they would all need financial
literacy and computer skills. Few would need Shakespeare and the
finer points of grammar—that is not to say that Shakespeare is
not vitally important, of course—but all would need to be able to
read, write and speak. We noted that oracy, as the noble Lord,
, has said, featured very
little in state schools, whereas independent schools were keen on
public speaking and expressing oneself.
It is of concern that many heritage craft skills are endangered.
They require patience and attention to detail, both of which are
often missing in young people who are used to the instant
responses of computers. Yet pottery, silversmithing and weaving
give immense satisfaction, as indeed do stonemasonry, decorating,
fashion, catering and floristry—a whole range. These are skills
which require dedication; they contribute to the happiness and
well-being of others, but they are seldom taught in schools. We
hear from the University of the Arts that the creative industries
generated a £108 billion in economic value in 2021 and grew more
than one and a half times faster than the wider economy between
2010 and 2019, employing more than 2.3 million people—one in 14
jobs.
Colleges, which do the lion's share of teaching skills, are too
often sidelined by a Government who are obsessed with academia
and with learning facts, not skills. Like the noble Lord, , I graduated from Oxford with
a passion for medieval French, which has never been of any use to
me whatsoever later in life. Colleges and their hard-working
tutors deserve a much better deal, given the key part that they
play in generating the skills which we all need. Universities
should never be seen as the only respectable route for young
people to take. Even ivory towers need plumbers and bricklayers,
and academics need hairdressers and caterers.
I have already referred to the creative industries as major
players but, as the noble Lord, Lord Baker, bemoaned, music, art,
dance and drama have disappeared from many state schools, as they
have to conform to the demands of the baccalaureate, which
squeezes such skills out of the timetable. Can the Minister tell
us what consideration the Government have given to tempering
their obsession with knowledge and making a place for practical
skills in the school curriculum? What consideration is given to
the happiness of students as they master skills and produce
things other than exam results?
I worked for 20 years for City & Guilds. Founded in 1878 by
the City of London and 16 of the livery companies to promote
training in trade and skills, the organisation continues to award
millions of certificates every year in work-based subjects, all,
of course, designed by employers. I say to the Government that
T-levels are not unique in this respect. Every work-based
qualification since time began has been designed by
employers.
The City of London still puts great resource into encouraging
financial, professional, sustainability and digital sectors and,
like the livery companies, promoting apprenticeships. I declare
an interest as a past master of the world traders livery company,
which is a modern company. I am very proud that this year's Lord
Mayor is one of our past masters. Livery companies are major
contributors to education and charity. I am delighted to see that
we have another past Lord Mayor here—in the noble Lord, Lord
Mountevans—taking part today, because the City and the livery
companies are major players in these areas. Like many others,
they would love to see the apprenticeship levy reformed, so can
the Minister say what steps are being taken to make the levy more
conducive to take-up and more relevant to actual
apprenticeships?
I mentioned colleges being essential to improving skills, yet
their funding is always less generous than that of schools. The
Open University and the WEA also provide invaluable support to
those wishing to acquire skills later in life, for jobs but also
for life and for contributions to the community. However, they
always have to do battle for any government funding.
May I add my voice to the support for BTECs? The Government are
obsessed by their new-found T-levels; they are untried, untested
and currently with only some 26,000 students enrolled, as
compared to 280,000 students studying at least one applied
general qualification. BTECs provide a more effective,
tried-and-tested route to higher education or skilled employment
than A-levels or T-levels. It would be an act of vandalism to
stop funding them and would exacerbate the shortage of qualified,
skilled people in the workplace. Will the Minister do all she can
to stop the Government from ruining life chances for the next
generation and weigh in behind BTEC, City & Guilds and
traditional apprenticeships to ensure that we can find qualified
people from among our own workforce, both doing rewarding jobs
and gaining satisfaction from their skills?
I will end with some stats from Open University, which reported
that
“58% … of organisation leaders … report a mismatch between young
people's skill levels and employer expectations in the past three
years. A decline in soft skills (54%) such as communication,
teamwork, time management and technical skills … suggests there
is a need for more investment in preparing this generation, that
account for 20% of the current workforce, for the workplace”.
So, can the Government please rethink their response to our
committee report and give us some hope for the future and the
quality of life of young people?
12.39pm
(CB)
My Lords, I declare my interest as chair of Peers for the Planet
and congratulate my noble friend , both on securing this debate
and on the way in which he introduced it. He managed to cover
such a wide range of issues, which I am sure will be highlighted
in various respects over the course of the debate. I very much
look forward to the maiden speeches that we are to hear.
I want to concentrate my contribution on the importance of green
skills for the successful economy of the future, and for the
delivery of the Government's stated commitments towards net zero
and a nature-based and nature-positive economy. Those commitments
will mean a shift to jobs in low-carbon industries, and in
providing nature-based solutions as part of a fair transition to
net zero and nature restoration. That change can bring associated
health and other co-benefits to all parts of the UK, particularly
to the most vulnerable and some of the most disadvantaged.
As my noble friend so obviously and clearly
explained, we need a national skills strategy. As part of that,
we need a specific green skills strategy, which sets out a
comprehensive plan for how the Government intend to deliver the
green jobs and skills of the future. It is important to emphasise
that green jobs are not just going to be those in the energy
sector. In the same way that delivering the net-zero transition
will need a concerted effort from all sectors—from government,
education, government departments and local authorities—so the
green jobs of the future will require the same comprehensive
approach, with a huge range of jobs and skills needed in all
sectors, from the health service and social care to education,
transport and the built environment, including learning how to
repair things once again, rather than throwing them away.
I would like to specifically ask the Minister about the
Government's promised net zero and nature workforce action plan.
In 2023, the CCC noted that it was overdue. It has now been
promised for 2024. To echo a remark made yesterday in the House,
can the Minister tell us whether we will see it soon, shortly or
in due course? Also, how will it fit into any broader national
skills and productivity planning, such as the work of the Unit
for Future Skills? It is vital that we have a proper, joined-up
plan to deliver the skills we need for the future in a fair way,
and to seize the opportunities it can bring across all regions of
the UK.
As well as the new roles that will be created by the net-zero
transition—the CCC estimates this to be up to 700,000 jobs by
2030—a recent report from Bain & Company estimates that
around 4 million workers will need reskilling by 2030 to prepare
for the new green economy. The Association of Colleges briefing,
which noble Lords received, highlights the need for reform of the
UK's tertiary education system to help address future skills
gaps, which could be a major constraint in delivering on the
plans and commitments that the Government have made. Practically,
if we are to deliver the Government's target of 600,000 heat pump
installations by 2028, how are we going to train enough heat-pump
engineers when we have 3,000 at the moment and it is estimated
that we need 27,000 to deliver on the Government's promise?
It is also extremely important that we do not leave behind those
who work in high-emitting sectors at the moment, whose
transferable skills could be redirected very easily to the
low-carbon industries of the future. If we do not reskill them,
we will lose them to other countries which are developing their
own green energy projects.
During debate on the Offshore Petroleum Licensing Bill, we
discussed an amendment which proposed the publication of a green
skills retraining plan for the 30,000 or so oil and gas workers
still working in our declining North Sea basin. This included a
skills passport which would provide financial and practical
support so that those workers who wish to do so can easily—and
without additional cost to them—reskill and retrain. In that
debate, the Minister confirmed that the Government are “keen to
take … forward” such a plan and are supporting the delivery of
work being led by Offshore Energies UK, which includes a skills
passport. When she replies, can the Minister let us know when
this work will be delivered? It is now two years since the
industry-led integrated people and skills strategy recommended
it. Will there be financial support for workers looking to move
into green jobs?
12.45pm
of Hale (Con) (Maiden
Speech)
My Lords, it is a privilege to follow the noble Baroness, Lady
Hayman. I share many of her views on net zero and how we equip
young people with the skills to deliver a green strategy.
With much pride, and some emotion, tempered with a healthy dose
of butterflies, I rise to speak for the first time in this
Chamber. Debating excellence is a hallmark of this House and we
have already heard some outstanding speeches today. Therefore, on
the advice of noble friends, I have spent time listening and
learning before venturing to make my maiden speech.
Given the kindness and the size of the welcome I have been given
since my introduction, I would like my first words to be those of
gratitude and appreciation to everyone, but especially to my
supporters: my noble friend Lady Williams of Trafford and my
close party colleague and political mentor, my noble friend
. I also extend my
thanks to my Whip, my noble friend Lady Sanderson of Welton; to
my mentor, my noble friend ; and for the advice
proffered to me by Black Rod and the Clerk of the Parliaments. I
also thank the doorkeepers, who have never lost patience with me
as I have asked—for at least the 20th time—the way to the Peers'
cloakroom. One corridor looks very much like another when you are
a newbie.
I have many reasons to be passionate about skills and the need
for skill equality across the country but before that, just a
little about myself. My seat bears the title of Hale, a beautiful
village in lovely countryside just to the south of Manchester,
where I was brought up and still live with my devoted wife, and
where we raised our four children. I am also an avid runner;
since entering the House, I have chanced upon a new training
programme. Sprinting from the Chamber to the platform at Euston,
via the tube, has completely transformed my fitness, especially
when trying to crack a sub-20 minutes. I invite any Mancunians in
the House to join me.
As noble Lords will have gathered, I am a man of faith, so
entering the Chamber for the first time from the Moses Room was
very special to me. I was raised in a traditional Jewish
household, where my parents—both businesspeople—left a deep
impression on me of the pillars defining Judaism: belief in God,
kindness to others, charity, justice and prayer. I have, over
time, increased my observance and religiosity to become what is
known as shomer Shabbat: someone who guards and observes the
Sabbath, which is the most wonderful 25-hour weekly digital
detox. I highly recommend it to everyone. As a hard-working
entrepreneur, I like to say that I am available 24/6.
On Tuesday, we remembered the Holocaust, with our annual Yom
HaShoah events around the country. It is with great sadness and
despair that within living memory of the Holocaust, anti-Semitism
has returned around the world. Like many Jews in this country, I
am horrified and frightened by what I see, what I hear, and what
I feel, whether on the streets, through social and other media,
or of course in our universities.
I am therefore very grateful for the outpouring of support from
noble Lords of all religions and backgrounds, who have been
united in their condemnation of this. If we fight together and
fight hard enough, we can and will stamp out this virus. I am
also particularly thankful to our Prime Minister for his
unwavering support of the Jewish community and for everything
that he and the Government are doing to ensure that anti-Semitism
has no place in society, including today meeting university
leaders to ensure a zero-tolerance approach to anti-Semitic abuse
on all campuses.
Although I went to a grammar school, my academic interests waned
somewhat towards the end, shutting off the option of a university
education for me. That was actually no big deal, as I was itching
to embrace the world of commerce. I have been blessed with a
successful career building a number of substantial companies,
mostly in disruptive technologies—even taking one of them to the
London Stock Exchange—and have always learned along the way from
inspiring colleagues and clients. My business of the last 10
years has been at the forefront of corporate innovation, bringing
talented start-ups to the attention of multinational companies
and creating an environment for collaboration between David and
Goliath. However, it was the skills I learned at school that
prepared the way for my career. I therefore congratulate the
noble Lord, , on bringing this important
debate to the House.
In my business, I am privileged to see thousands of technology
and manufacturing solutions from around the world and to witness
real innovation. While I believe that you cannot teach the drive,
ambition, risk-taking and work ethic that makes an entrepreneur,
you can teach them the skills they need to build and run our
unicorns of the future. As the report outlines, essential skills
include teamwork and communication, which all companies need in
order to thrive. Likewise, the many people who believe that
skills are particularly important in overcoming adversity and
difficulties in life should not be overlooked. Many do not have
the privilege of an easy or affluent childhood, but that should
never be a barrier to success in future life.
Indeed, we all have a moral duty to ensure that we take the
resilience that is often endowed as a result of a challenging
childhood and combine it with everything a person needs to
succeed, including apprenticeships, which I know can be a
lifeline and bridge to a much happier world. Ensuring that young
people are properly trained and equipped with the skills that
suit their capability and temperament will facilitate favourable
outcomes, whether entering the factory floor, rising up the
corporate managerial ladder or building their own businesses.
That must be the number one goal for UK plc.
The report also addresses levelling up, which I am completely in
agreement with. Of course, it does not refer only to the north.
The imbalance in skills across the country means that many areas
are left behind, which leads to proportionately lower investment
in innovation and R&D. However, some of the most successful
companies, old and new, have thrived in some of the poorer parts
of the country. I know that because I built my first company in
Nelson in east Lancashire, one of the most deprived areas in the
UK. However, we became an employment magnet and rewarded the
workforce with training and career progression, and I am proud
that many of our employees rose through the ranks at my company
or transferred their skills to find new, exciting jobs elsewhere.
We should gravitate to the leaders of these companies, embrace
them and learn from them, so that we can copy the formula that
works, thereby encouraging more businesses to open and relocate
to these areas, which, in turn, addresses the economic imbalance
and provides a marketplace for skilled workers. That, in turn,
creates wealth, attracts more investment, improves the quality of
life and raises the standards of living and education. As John F
Kennedy said:
“A rising tide lifts all … boats”.
My only disappointment on joining this House is that I have not
been able to spend time with the towering late Rabbi , a true spiritual leader and a
sage of our time. He was—and still is—my inspiration on all
matters Judaic and, indeed, in life. He was taken away from us
far too early. I will devote my final words to something he
said:
“Where what you want to do meets what needs to be done”
is your mission in life. I hope that my contribution to public
life, through my attendance in this House and participation in
future debates, enables me to do exactly that and, in turn, to
make a valuable contribution to this wonderful country.
12.55pm
(Con)
My Lords, I congratulate my noble friend of Hale on a wonderful maiden
speech. He is assured of a very warm welcome to our House. He
gave an important and topical reminder of the dangers of
anti-Semitism. For many of us, is an excellent example of how
the wisdom of the Jewish tradition can be of value to us all. The
athleticism of the noble Lord, of Hale, is also clearly very
impressive. We look forward to seeing his running shoes alongside
the mobility scooters downstairs. I am sure that he will be an
important contributor to our debates in this House.
I also congratulate the noble Lord, , on opening and setting the
scene for this important debate on skills. I draw the House's
attention to my interests.
I will focus on two issues. The first is the future of BTECs,
which are important vocational qualifications, introduced as a
skills reform in the 1980s—I am looking across to the former
Secretary of State—and which play an important role in providing
vocational qualifications today. The Government appear to believe
that they can defund BTECs and everyone will instead move on to
T-levels, but the figures do not bear that out. In 2021, 5,300
students started T-levels, and one-third dropped out, compared
with one-fifth dropping out from other vocational qualifications
and one in 10 dropping out from A-levels. The Sixth Form Colleges
Association estimates that, in comparison with the low numbers
doing T-levels, defunding BTECs could result in 155,000 students
not having a level 3 qualification that they otherwise would have
secured through the BTEC route. I very much agree with the
warnings from the noble Baroness, Lady Garden, on that issue.
BTECs matter. They are a route into degree apprenticeships, to
which Ministers rightly attach a lot of importance. They are a
route into higher education, with perhaps 60,000 people getting
places in higher education as a result of BTECs in important
vocational courses, such as nursing.
We have discussed BTECs in this House before, and I informed the
Minister that I would raise with her the assurance that she gave
us in a debate in this House on 7 April 2022:
“I know that noble Lords are all interested to see the
provisional list of qualifications that overlap with waves 1 and
2 T-levels. I want to be absolutely clear to your Lordships today
that through this process we expect to remove public funding
approval for just a small proportion of the total level 3 offer,
including BTECs. This will be significantly less than
half[”.—[Official Report, 7/4/22; col.
2202.]](/search/column?VolumeNumber=&ColumnNumber=2202&House=2&ExternalId=299DEAF0-31CA-446C-B6E6-D11C51FDEAD1)
That quotation from Hansard was the assurance she gave us
approximately two years ago. I would be very grateful if she
could update us on how the defunding of BTECs is progressing. It
is possible that, in her statement to us two years ago, when she
referred to “this process” she was not referring to the full
defunding of BTECs but simply to overlap. I would very much like
to hear the Government's estimate of the total number of BTEC and
other advanced qualification enrolments, after they have
completed the full defunding process. A useful baseline is the
248,000 BTEC/AGQ enrolments in 2022-23. What is the Minister's
latest estimate of how many BTEC courses will be defunded? How
many people will be enrolling on BTECs at the end of the full
process of defunding BTECs, compared with that baseline of
248,000? As I said, I gave the department advance notice of this
question and very much hope that, in the light of our previous
debates, we will get those estimates today.
I also ask the Minister—given the slow take-up of T-levels, and
given that we now know the Government do not see T-levels as part
of a long-term framework—whether they are in turn going to be
replaced by this new advanced qualification. Is there not an even
stronger case for pausing the defunding of BTECs to reduce the
risk that tens of thousands of young people might find themselves
without any suitable qualification that they can study and end up
not in education, employment or training? It would be a tragedy
if the defunding of BTECs have that result. Given the latest
information on the uptake of T-levels, I very much hope the
Minister will be able to make some concessions on that.
The second issue I want to briefly touch on is degree
apprenticeships. I very much welcome degree apprenticeships—they
are an important part of the options available. It is just worth,
again, putting the figures in context. There are now about 40,000
enrolments in degree apprenticeships, but half those are by
people aged over 25. They seem to be particularly taken up by
mature learners. We have about 20,000 young people starting
degree apprenticeships, about 10% of the total number starting in
higher education.
The noble Lord, , rightly raised the question
of the apprenticeship levy and the pressures on it. Degree
apprenticeships are funded out of the apprenticeship levy. They
are particularly expensive programs. If they are a significant
claim on the apprenticeship levy, their growth is surely part of
the answer to the question put by the noble Lord, : why are we seeing such a
decline in the number of young people doing apprenticeships and
apprenticeships at levels two and three? The answer is that this
fixed pot of money is being increasingly deployed for degree
apprenticeships.
I wish to see more expansion—as the noble Lord said—of
apprenticeships for younger people and at lower levels. I urge
the Government to consider funding degree apprenticeships out of
fees and loans, just like the rest of higher education, to
liberate funding for more apprenticeships. That would also have
the side effect that, instead of trying to drive people on to
degree apprenticeships by scares about the fees and costs of
higher education, we would have a shared interest in explaining
to young people that they do not pay for their higher education
courses upfront and they should have the option of a growing
number of degree apprenticeships alongside other higher education
qualifications.1.02pm
of Dulwich (CB)
I, too, thank the noble Lord, , most sincerely for securing
this debate and for his wonderful speech. I add my
congratulations to the noble Lord, , on his inspiring maiden speech,
and I look forward to hearing the maiden speech from the noble
Lord, Lord Elliott. I declare an interest as a professor at
King's College London who teaches students and, one hopes,
develops their skills. I have been actively engaged for many
years in skills policy, including as a government adviser.
At one level, I am delighted at the great interest in this debate
on all sides of the House. But, alas, as the old saying goes,
“Fine words butter no parsnips”. If we do not get precise
commitments on non-university skills spending and on individual
access to skills training in forthcoming party manifestos, in my
opinion we will continue to deliver inadequate and inefficient
skills policies that fail repeatedly and systematically to solve
our main skills problems. This is not because politicians and
advisers, let alone Peers, are insincere—it is because not just
underfunding but repeated short-term upheavals and repeated
unpredictable cuts and changes in skills provision are currently
hard-wired into our system.
Skills spending always ends up in the Treasury's and indeed the
DfE's sights when deficits are looming or a bright new initiative
is being marketed—so round we go again. Why skills? In common
with other developed societies, absolutely rightly we guarantee
all children a free education from the age of five to 18 or 19.
We offer free early education to three and four year-olds. We
quite rightly have legislative obligations to children with
special needs and disabilities and, in England and Wales, we
offer support to everyone over 18 who is accepted on to a course
in a registered higher education institution.
These are clear entitlements and are clearly understood by the
population—and, because they are transparent and stable, people
can and do plan ahead to use them. Institutions are also able to
plan and deliver. But when it comes to mid-level skills—the sorts
of skills we are mostly talking about today and the ones for
which our economy is currently desperate—clarity is replaced by
confusion and repeated, inefficient, expensive and often
destructive change. I shall give noble Lords one example. If you
stay at school until you are 18 and you are moderately
successful, you will be offered a free education up to and
including a level 3 award. Level 3 is the skilled trades level,
as well as the usual university entry level; it is the one where
our skills shortages in this country are the most glaring.
If you leave school without a level 3, our society turns its back
on you. As a citizen, you have a right to a free education while
you are 18, but not when you were 20, 25 or 30. This is a
travesty—it is a travesty in terms of equal treatment of citizens
and a travesty in terms of any coherent skills policy. In the
Augar review, on which I was privileged to serve and contribute,
we strongly recommended that every citizen should have a right to
a free level 3. So have many others, including the Economic
Affairs Committee of this House. The current Government, back in
2020, did not make a formal commitment to an entitlement, but
they acted fast in launching a new funded program which in
practice made this available, on terms that made it feasible and
attractive for colleges to plan and launch new courses, which is
always a high-risk decision. Why did they do so? It was not
because there was a sudden blast of light one day, but because
earlier there was written into the manifesto a new £3 billion
skills fund to be spent over the Parliament, which Treasury could
not just wave away. I am 100% sure that without that manifesto
commitment nothing would have happened.
Crucially, access to this programme was simple. If you did not
have a level 3 qualification, it was open to you—just as now, if
you are offered a place at a university, you have a right to
Student Loans Company support. Normally in our skills system,
working out what you can access at this middle level, and whether
you have to pay and what you have to pay, is a moving minefield.
Not surprisingly, most people walk away. It is not that people do
not want to train or upskill, but the system is completely
non-transparent. In other words, it is designed to cut off our
skills pipeline at the ankles. Of course, one programme did not
transform things, but it was a major step in the right direction.
I say “was”, because now the DfE is announcing new restrictions
that will make most of these programmes completely unviable. Why?
Well, some poor official has written the usual guff about better
targeting, but it is actually because the DfE needs to find some
money and it is looking for things to cut. As always, the
simplest place to look is skills programmes.
This Government have, in my view, done some very good things for
skills—and not only when they were listening to me—but I want to
emphasise that these things happened because there was a
ring-fenced pot and a very clear commitment in a manifesto. No
Minister and no Front-Bench spokesman is going to make a
commitment of that sort to me today, so I am not even going to
ask the Minister to do so. However, if we enter the next election
with only high-level uncosted aspirations and with no clear
commitments to access to those mid-level skills for people who do
not already have a level 3, five years from now we will be making
the same speeches—and, if anything, things will be worse.
1.09pm
(Con)
My Lords, there is a lot of evidence that, once a certain
standard of living is reached—economic security in
particular—good relationships, happy families, and friends and
community quite often follow, although not always necessarily,
and both of these depend on skills and on the effort made by all
of us on improving the quality of life, as the noble Lord said in
his opening speech. There are quite a lot of both of these
attributes, good skills and good quality of life, in the United
Kingdom.
I do not go quite as far as Cecil Rhodes in his bombastic dictum
in another age that to be born an Englishman is to have won first
prize in the lottery of life. There may be one or two on the
wilder shores of my party who have that view of life, but I will
not tempt myself to name them today. However, it is a fact that
lots of people want to come to the United Kingdom, which I am
glad about—I do not speak of the dangerous lives of people
seeking to come to our shores illegally. There are queues of
people who wish to come here for the attributes that the United
Kingdom has, and we should not just forget that and say that
everything is a terrible problem.
I will give some examples. The City of London remains a
destination ranked way above a Paris or a Frankfurt by
generations of polls of those wishing to come to work in the
financial services area, where I work. Our best universities
remain a target, too, for undergraduate and postgraduate students
who want to get proper legal entry into our best universities. We
have some great universities, with always three and sometimes
four in the top 10 and in the top 100—I forget the figure;
doubtless my noble friend will know what it is, but an
awful lot of our universities are ranked in the top 100. We also
always welcome a lot of outside direct investment. The UK remains
the second biggest destination in Europe for foreign direct
investment, and this is led by tough-minded investors from the US
and India. These people must have spotted at least a few useful
skills that we still have around.
Yet the paradox remains that, despite this, decent skill levels
do not automatically lead to increased productivity, which is a
mystery that I think the noble Lord, , referred to when he spoke of
productivity. It is particularly poor in the United Kingdom. It
is a genuine mystery, and a lot of very clever people are trying
to provide the answer as to why it is there, but we have not yet
got it. According to the Office for National Statistics in its
report last week, the biggest drops in productivity are in the
public sector, and they are in education and in health, which are
critically important to all of us.
A lot of effort is being put in via policies of different sorts
to improve this, notably by levelling up. However, a generation
takes a long time, and we are often told that the levelling-up
policy will take a generation. A generation is 20 or 30 years and
change takes time. So I applaud the realism of the Secretary of
State for Levelling Up, as reported by the Financial Times of 30
April, who said that it remains “work in progress”, describing
the process as like “building a cathedral”—and they often take
longer than one or two generations. So it is extremely important
that we deal with the unsolved mystery of why our productivity is
so low.
We must also recognise that skills have lots of attributes that
are hard to teach formally, but, if they are not acquired or
imbued in some way, all the doctorates or degree apprenticeships
in the world will not benefit and bring the skills of life with
them. I pay tribute to the noble Lord, , who said in a speech during
a debate which he initiated back on 7 March that we had to be
realistic about the problems that the university sector is
facing. He is right, I think, that we are facing a bit of a
sub-prime issue—I will not overwork it by calling it a sub-prime
crisis—in a number of our universities, where we have seen, alas,
a lot of sacking of staff and abolition of courses. This is
always brought in with a lot of management speak, even by great
universities such as Goldsmiths, which has announced that it has
a “transformation programme”. Once you see a transformation
programme coming and vice-chancellors running for the hills, you
know there is trouble. We are facing, there and in a number of
our underperforming universities in this country, a bit of a
looming sub-prime problem, which the noble Lord, , was absolutely open in
saying that we have.
1.15pm
of Manor Castle (GP)
My Lords, I thank the noble Lord, , for securing this debate and
particularly thank him for his formulation of the Motion, which
acknowledges that skills are not just for “the economy” but for
life, and indeed are the foundation of quality of life. That
reflects the Green approach to education and skills training—that
it indeed has to be for life, not just for exams or for
vocational training.
I associate myself with the remarks of the noble Lord, . We have an education
system that wastes term after term preparing for exams, which is
not education or learning but is a very narrow skill that most
people will never repeat once they leave the education
system.
I want to particularly focus in one area of my remarks on the
great tragedy of the collapse of lifelong learning provision. The
number of publicly funded qualifications started by adults has
declined by 70% since the early 2000s, dropping from nearly 5.5
million qualifications to 1.5 million qualifications by
2020—those are Institute for Fiscal Studies figures. Essentially,
what is left is an extremely narrow range of courses focused
particularly on education for jobs that might exist at this
particular moment.
The total spend on adult education and apprenticeships combined
will be 25% lower in 2024-25 than in 2010-11, and markers have
already been made on the plan for adults over the age of 24
studying level 3 and 4 qualifications being forced to take on
debt. We are loading our young people down with debt that they
will never be able to repay, and now we are seeking to do the
same thing right through our age ranges. We have seen the damage
it has done to our young people. What damage will it do to people
seeking to get ahead, to have that weight of debt on their
shoulders?
What is happening here? I will quote one figure: in the last
decade, there have been 4 million “lost learners”. That means
people who have not been able to advance their productivity—to
focus on something this House often looks at—but also have not
been able to improve their health through education and skills
training, which is very much underrated.
One of the ways in which we utterly fail to value skills is by
failing to value the people who teach the skills. In a UCU survey
that came out last year, among further education college staff
77% said that the quantity of work had “increased significantly”
in the past three years. More than four in 10 say their workload
was “unmanageable”. Those who provide education and skills
training need to be valued as essential workers and paid and
treated accordingly—and that is not what is happening now. If the
noble Lord, , wants to look at why
productivity might be low, exhaustion, overwork and lack of being
valued and treated well may well be factors in that figure.
I want to pick up points made by the noble Baroness, Lady Hayman,
on green skills, and particularly, as she said, that they are too
often thought of as relating just to the energy and technology
sectors. I will focus briefly on land-based skills in particular.
We have seen a cascade of closures of agricultural colleges
around the nation, among them recently the 125 year-old Newton
Rigg College in Penrith, which is much mourned and much valued.
It was deemed no longer financially viable. That is the product
of government policy decisions and government funding decisions—a
system that has failed to acknowledge that we need food security
in this country and that that requires skills.
We have seen some movement from the Government in acknowledging
that food security is not just, as I think the Prime Minister
three PMs back said, a matter for the supermarkets. There is now
some acknowledgement that it is a matter for the Government.
Surely land-based skills, the ability to grow food and—I stress
this—the ability to engage in environmental horticulture and care
for our natural spaces are skills in one of the greatest areas of
shortage for our country.
I ask the Minister a question. I know that we are about to start
a GCSE in natural history. Can she update me, now or later, on
how that is progressing, what student numbers are looking like
and how many of those courses are likely to be introduced?
I have two brief final points. Even when a Green Government have
introduced a wonderful education system and lifelong learning
system, there will never be enough skills. We need to think about
where the skills are going. We have an oversized financial
sector, which employs 9 million people and swallows up many of
our physics and maths graduates and many other people with key
levels of skills. We need to think about where those people could
be better used for the state of our society—for the future
resilience and well-being of all of us.
I also briefly note that we need to acknowledge skills that have
been acquired through experience. We need to stop talking about
“unskilled jobs”. Many of the jobs that people do on the minimum
wage are really difficult, and they have to learn to do them, and
we need to acknowledge them in the levels of pay and respect.
I will finish by reflecting on a young woman I met in the
north-east recently. In her mid-20s, she had spent a decade
caring for her father, who had a horrible degenerative disease.
She is a NEET—not in education, employment or training. She has
learned so much and has so many skills, but she does not have a
lot of confidence, because society has not valued what she has
done. We need to value skills that people, particularly women,
have acquired through care, and acknowledge them when they seek
to enter the labour market.
1.22pm
(CB)
My Lords, some people think that learning a foreign language is
just an academic pursuit for the top set, but languages are an
important skill for everyone. They enhance the economy and
individual lives. I declare my interests as set out in the
register.
The UK is often caricatured as no good at languages, partly in
the belief that “Everyone speaks English, so why bother?” But
this is a myth: only 6% of the world's population are native
English speakers, and 75% speak no English at all. In the 21st
century, speaking only English is as much of a disadvantage as
speaking no English. Another myth is that we need not bother
because there is always Google Translate. But when it comes to
nuance, cultural sensitivity and understanding, humans and
interpersonal skills will always be needed. Ask any soldier who
has been deployed to Afghanistan how vital their interpreters
have been and how easy it might have been for a single wrong word
on Google to have made the difference between life and death.
I return to the UK and the value of language skills to our
economy. Research estimates that lack of language skills here
costs an estimated 3.5% of GDP. SMEs making use of languages are
30% more successful in exporting than those that do not. In 2022,
Cambridge University research calculated that, if we invested
more in teaching French, Spanish, Mandarin and Arabic in schools,
we could increase our exports by up to £19 billion a year. The
British Chambers of Commerce sector survey showed that 38% of
businesses expect to need language skills.
Yet employers are frequently forced to recruit from overseas
because they say our school leavers and graduates fall short of
the language skills that they need. A CBI skills survey said that
modern language skills were the ones that employers were the
least satisfied with. Only 9% of English 15-year-olds are
competent in their first foreign language beyond a very basic
level, compared with an average of 42% across 14 European
countries. But tighter immigration rules have had an adverse
impact on recruitment from overseas, making it even more
important to invest more, and more strategically, in language
teaching and learning here in the UK. In 2023, only 33% of the
target for MFL trainee teachers was met.
This is a challenge not just for graduate or international jobs.
One survey showed that the highest level of language skills
shortages is among basic clerical and admin staff. You do not
always need to be fluent: basic conversation in one or two other
languages will often land you the job. Without language skills,
the shutters come down on possible career paths not just into
business but into diplomacy, international relations, defence and
security. Qualified linguists are also needed in key sectors,
such as public service translators and interpreters in the NHS,
the police and the courts.
As well as opening doors to jobs and careers, learning languages
also means learning about other cultures and countries. Trips and
exchanges abroad can be inspirational and life-changing. The
British Academy has shown how languages bring recognised
transferable skills, such as problem-solving, creativity and an
international mindset. Believe it or not, there are also proven
benefits to cognitive function, the delaying of dementia and
helping recovery from stroke. Research has shown that primary
school age children who learn another language perform
significantly better across the whole curriculum, including in
maths.
The fact that the lowest take-up of language GCSEs corresponds
exactly with the UK regions where we have the highest recorded
skills shortages and unemployment, and the most pupils from
low-income families and on free school meals, should in itself be
an enormous red flag to politicians and policymakers concerned
with levelling up. More attention and more investment in language
teaching and learning would be a great help in that regard.
I conclude by flagging up the headlines for six key areas needing
urgent attention if we are to improve language proficiency in the
UK. I hope that the Minister will be able to comment on each of
them, however briefly.
First, double down on boosting take-up of language GCSEs and
A-levels, for example by introducing the advanced language
premium as an incentive to schools, modelled on the advanced
maths premium, which has been successful.
Secondly, sort out the financial and bureaucratic obstacles to
trips and exchanges—the Minister knows from our recent debate
what I mean by that.
Thirdly, encourage more local authorities to replicate the
Hackney transition system, so that key stage 2 language learning
is built on, rather than undermined, when children go to
secondary school.
Fourthly, look at the FE sector: a landmark report from the
British Academy said that FE colleges were a language learning
cold spot.
Fifthly, deal with the haemorrhaging of languages from
universities. Over 60 of them have cut some or all their modern
language degrees since 2000. We must return to a system which
protects languages as a strategically vulnerable subject.
Sixthly and finally, do not forget our 2 million bilingual
children and make sure they have the chance to gain academic
qualifications in their home or heritage languages, many of which
are of strategic importance to the UK, whether in business,
security or diplomacy.
1.28pm
(Con)
My Lords, I congratulate the noble Lord, , on securing this debate and
opening it so brilliantly, and the noble Lord, of Hale, for a gently brilliant
but forceful speech. If I am not down in the Chamber and up in my
room and I see his name on the annunciator in future, I certainly
will turn the sound on and listen to what he has to say.
The skills problem in this country is of long standing. There are
Blue Books written in the 19th century which decry the shortage
of skills here relative to Germany. As people such as Correlli
Barnett and others have pointed out, the roots lie in a sort of
class prejudice that attributes prestige to a subject in inverse
proportion to its practical and commercial value: the prestige is
higher the more academic it is and lower the more practical and
commercial it is.
I saw that in my own life. My grandfather, who was a skilled
lathe operator during the First World War producing torpedoes,
educated himself in mechanical engineering and rose up the firm a
bit. Eventually—obviously, he was inspired by the prediction of
what my noble friend Lord Baker would recommend—he ended up
teaching mechanical engineering in a college of further
education. So it always seemed a wonderful thing to me, and when
I went to university and acquired a degree in natural sciences, I
asked my director of studies if I could move to mechanical
engineering. He said, “No—you're quite clever enough to continue
doing pure science”. He was wrong in two respects: I was never
going to be another Einstein, and we need clever people, whether
at university or in colleges and schools, to acquire the skills
to make the things we use. If I go over a bridge, I want to know
that the engineer who designed and created that bridge was good,
and that the people who welded it were skilled in what they were
doing.
Sadly, there are only two ways to increase the supply of skills
in this country. One is to increase the skill levels of the
domestic population, and the other is to import skills from
abroad. My thesis is that unless and until we break the national
addiction to importing skills from abroad, we will never
seriously tackle the lack of domestic skilled people. Almost the
only person who has done anything useful and practical is my
noble friend Lord Baker; most of the other initiatives have been
ineffectual or half-hearted.
Since opened our borders to the
importing of skills from abroad—this is not a party-political
point, because he was, sadly, followed by the coalition
Government and Boris Johnson—spending on training of people at
work has declined, and, predictably, the time people at work
spend on training has declined. One of the things that brought
home to me how deeply entrenched this belief is in the need to
import skills from abroad—and, indeed, the virtue of doing so—was
when I was on the Select Committee in the other House and we went
up to Sunderland after the referendum. We were greeted by people
from the local district council, the county council, the local
CBI, the Institute of Directors and the chamber of commerce, and
they said their principal fear was that they would no longer be
able to import skilled workers from abroad.
The only major employer that was not present was Nissan. I
remembered visiting Nissan when I was Trade and Industry
Secretary shortly after it set up, and I asked a rather stupid
question. They were too polite to point out who was stupid, but I
asked them whether they had had any problems recruiting trained
automotive workers in Durham when they set up. Of course, there
were none within hundreds of miles of there, so it was a stupid
question. But they said no, they had trained them, and they were
very keen to be trained. Now, the Nissan factory is the most
productive factory in the whole Nissan network across the world.
So I put it to the local CBI, IoD and chamber of commerce that if
Nissan had been able or inclined to follow its belief that the
way to get skills was to import them from Europe, there would be
7,000 people in Sunderland flipping hamburgers or unemployed,
instead of being the most productive workers in the Nissan
network.
We have to break this addiction—but, unfortunately, we have
convinced ourselves that, at least for specific skills shortages,
we must import the workers from abroad. Yet, since we took that
view, in almost all the areas where we initially had a shortage,
the shortage has got worse. That should not come as any surprise,
because the International Labour Organization, way back in 2004,
warned:
“What may begin as a simple temporary ‘spot shortage' of trained
native workers, can be made considerably more permanent by
attempting a quick fix from migrant labor. Any program which
imports migrants into a sector whose employers are complaining of
insufficient trained natives, can be expected to exacerbate
(rather than alleviate) its native shortage. Rather than raising
incentives to entice new workers to seek training to fill the
empty slots, visas are likely to be used to avoid the needed
market response”.
But we did not take any notice of that.
My conclusion, therefore, is that if in future we say there is a
specific shortage and for a while, we will have to import people
from abroad, that must be permitted only if there is an agreement
between the employers, educators and the Government that they
will train more people in that sector, so that we do not have
such a reliance, within a specific period. Employers will have to
recognise and acknowledge that during that period—probably
indefinitely—they will have to pay more for those people.
I mention pay because it is rather important. The very idea of a
shortage of labour in a free market is an oxymoron. Again, this
was pointed out by a colleague of the author I have just quoted,
who said:
“Long term labor shortages do not happen naturally in market
economies. That is not to say that they don't exist. They are
created when employers or government agencies tamper with the
natural functioning of the wage mechanism”.
Allowing indefinite reliance on importing labour from abroad has
enabled us to put off tackling the shortages, which the noble
Lord, , has, thankfully, brought to
our attention, and which, hopefully, with the advice of my noble
friend Lord Baker, we will in future remedy.
1.36pm
(CB)
My Lords, the noble Lord, , has plainly scored a real
bull's-eye in initiating this debate. I also cannot help but
applaud the noble Lord, Lord Baker, for his everlasting
ebullience and fighting spirit. Long may that continue. Finally,
I welcome the hopeful and positive messages in the maiden speech
from the noble Lord, of Hale.
In total, there are just under 1 million vacancies in the UK
economy. As the ONS recently identified, most UK businesses now
face a significant shortage of workers. In most sectors of our
economy, shortage of skills is a critical factor, as it is, for
instance, in construction, manufacturing, health, education and
business services—just some among many.
There are shortfalls in every category of worker with skilled
trades in the lead. I give just two examples: in 2022, there were
43,000 vacancies in skilled metal, electrical and electronic
trades; and 83,000 vacancies in social care. In all, the ONS
estimates that the UK economy is short of over half a million
workers with the appropriate level of skill. This is surely one,
if not the only, reason why the country is experiencing low
growth and relatively low productivity—a point made by the noble
Lord, , a moment ago.
One root cause of the skills shortage is the post-pandemic exodus
from the workforce of around 400,000 adults aged 50 to 64, but
there is other causation too. We lack an appropriate balance
between vocational and academic education. Allow me to offer some
evidence of that imbalance and the reasons for it.
Fewer than 3% of 16 year-olds are becoming apprentices. In 2021,
250,000 students entered university, while fewer than a quarter
of that figure took on apprenticeships. Remarkably, the number
enrolling in FE colleges is only a 30th of the number attending
university. The OECD records that our secondary schools perform
above average by global standards, which we all welcome, but that
the bottom quartile in those schools has a very low sense of
personal well-being.
Poorer children are performing far less well than their richer
classmates. For instance, the richest 33% gain an A or A* at
A-level, compared with only 5% of the poorest decile of students.
The problem appears to be worsening; post Covid, persistent
absence has affected almost one-third of all UK schools. The ONS
has identified that one in seven 16 to 24 year-olds is not in
education, work or training. According to the Prince's Trust, the
main cause for that shocking statistic identified by those
dropping out is their mental health.
Over 3 million people in the wider population now draw
PIPs—personal independence payments. Nearly 8 million people of
working age in the UK now say that they have a significant
disability or health condition. Can we not do more to help these
individuals to find work which suits them and in which they will
be happy and productive? Can we do more, especially in our
schools, to expose young people to the satisfactions and
pleasures of work and to arm them with the soft skills necessary
to navigate the workplace?
The economy is highly dynamic, constantly reinventing itself and
demanding new skills and abilities. Society too is dynamic,
constantly evolving, and embracing social and cultural shifts. It
is not clear, however, that our education, skills, health and
welfare systems are acting in step and that they are sufficiently
dynamic and innovative to keep abreast of and respond to these
ever-changing needs of both individuals and the economy. These
issues are deep, stubborn and challenging and, as a nation, we
need to step back and consider in the round how best to address
them.
1.41pm
of Soho (CB)
My Lords, I too thank the noble Lord, , for this extremely important
debate. I am beginning to think that the only place that there is
no skills shortage is in this Chamber, although the real skill
might well be fitting all that we have to say into the brief time
that we have been allotted.
I was thinking through the things that I am lucky enough to have
done over the last 20 years and wondering on which I should focus
today. Should it be the work that we did when I was setting up
Doteveryone, helping people in this building and the other place
with the skills to understand digital technology more? Should it
be the challenges that I saw as the chair of WeTransfer, a
mid-scale tech company, as we tried to recruit people who can
help us to design the future? Should it be the skills that we see
and that my noble friend Lady Hayman talked about, as a director
of Peers for the Planet, in transitioning to the green economy?
But, as some noble Lords know, I am a relatively eternal optimist
so will focus on two things that are actually working, on which I
would like Members on all the Front Benches to respond in saying
how important they are in their own strategic plans for
skills.
The first is the local skills improvement plans that have already
been mentioned, particularly by my noble friend . As president of the British
Chambers of Commerce, I am thrilled that we run 32 of the 38
LSIPs that have been created around the country. These are
collaborative plans that are very local and encourage businesses,
local education providers of all colours and any other interested
parties to sit down and map out what they need for their area to
succeed. We have so far engaged over 65,000 businesses in these
plans, and I will just talk to your Lordships about two specific
examples.
The first is in Coventry and Warwickshire, where the chambers
have been working with over 3,500 different employers. Over 74%
of the employers that the chambers are working with say they have
never sat down with any of the higher education providers in
their area in the last five years. This unlock has been
fundamental in helping both businesses and the providers plan for
what both sides need over the next two or three years.
It is staggeringly interestingly to me, particularly as former
chair of the committee on Covid and its long-term implications,
that there seems to have been an extreme drop-off, post-Covid, in
how much collaboration happens across different bits of the
economy and the sectors serving the skills parts of the economy
that we are talking about today. However, these local skills
improvement plans are a tangible way to encourage this
collaboration. When the providers have mapped out their needs,
they will then come up with a plan, on both the business side and
the education side—higher, tertiary or any level—for what is
needed to plug those gaps. It could be advanced manufacturing or
very simple skills in hospitality. There is a whole range of
things.
The second example that has come out of these local skills
improvement plans is the partnership that the British Chambers of
Commerce has with Aviva, where we have committed to train 150
town planners. This is just a small start but gets to the core of
so much of what we are talking about. Both the Government and the
opposition parties have launched major reforms into planning. It
is interesting that they are doing this with very little
understanding of how we are going to execute that, as we have no
town planners. This very small start should be an indication of
how we can encourage businesses to match with a national
network—Aviva with the chambers, in this case—to have the
fundamental skills we need to create this change.
Please support the LSIPs. The funding runs out in 2025 but they
need to be there until 2028 and beyond. We need a long-term focus
on something that is actually working and that employers tell us
is working.
I cannot stand here without mentioning the Open University, of
which I am chancellor. The noble Baroness, , has already
mentioned its importance and I know noble Lords have had
briefings from the university in research for today's debate. We
have this incredible national asset sitting in front of us, yet
we have had battles for the last decade to get the requisite
funding for this organisation. It is the organisation that is
helping people to continue to retrain and get the skills they
need. Some 63% of our learners are in work. They are not
part-time learners; they are double-time learners. Please, let us
support this fantastic organisation.
1.46pm
(Con) (Maiden
Speech)
My Lords, I stand here today deeply honoured to be a Member of
your Lordships' House and proud to be sitting alongside my first
boss, my noble friend Lord Kirkhope, who gave me my first tour of
this place in 1996, when he was the Member for Leeds North East
in the other place. Looking around this historic Chamber, I
recall him proudly telling me how it was built using limestone
from Yorkshire. I like to imagine that the seam of rock each
building block is carved from runs all the way to Mickle Fell,
the highest point in the historic county of Yorkshire, close to
where my grandparents, the Elliotts, lived.
I thank noble Lords on all sides of the House, as well as Black
Rod and her staff, the doorkeepers, police officers, advisers,
and all the other wonderful staff, for their warm welcome and
guidance. I also congratulate my noble friend on his excellent maiden speech.
I note that he was born on the other side of the Pennines to me,
so I will resist making any further reference to Yorkshire. I am
grateful for the advice that I received from noble friends in
preparation for today, in particular my mentor and noble friend
, and my noble friends and Lord Kirkhope, who
introduced me to the House earlier this year.
When I mentioned to another noble friend that I was planning to
make my maiden speech on 9 May, they said, in rather more
colourful language than this, “Really? That's Europe Day. Are you
going to talk about Brexit?”. That's a subject I do not intend to
revisit, at least today. I am instead delighted to have the
opportunity to speak about something more foundational, which is
far closer to my heart—the subject of business as a force for
good in delivering skills and training opportunities. I thank the
noble Lord, , for raising this important
subject today.
Our nation's prosperity is firmly anchored in the vigour of our
business community, a truth echoed by the very fabric of this
Chamber. The Woolsack before us, symbolising the historical
wealth from the wool trade, serves as a constant reminder of the
essential role of business in creating the prosperity our nation
enjoys. In terms of our future prosperity, 64% of apprenticeships
in England are provided by businesses—almost double the number
offered by colleges, schools and public bodies combined. I use
this opportunity to pay tribute to my right honourable friend
, who has championed
apprenticeships throughout his parliamentary career in the other
place and leaves behind him the tremendous legacy of the lifelong
learning Act.
We should also remember that civic-minded business leaders
familiar to this place are behind some of the most successful
schools in the UK, not least the JCB Academy, the Ashcroft
Technology Academy, the Harris Federation and the Dixons
Academies Trust. We should never forget that businesses, from the
smallest corner shop to the largest supermarket chain, are
responsible for generating the tax revenue that funds our
education system. Take Sainsbury's, for example, which typically
pays in excess of £2 billion annually to the Exchequer—enough to
fund 50,000 teachers, 100 new secondary schools or nearly half of
the entire adult education budget.
To repeat, the business community is essential to the skills
debate, whether through the provision of training, the
establishment of schools or the payment of taxes that fund our
public services. On top of this, businesses are also a powerful
engine for social justice. Earlier this year, the noble Baroness,
Lady Lane-Fox, eloquently spoke about the vital role of business
in tackling poverty, especially through the provision of
high-quality jobs. This is a cause that I also champion as
president of the Jobs Foundation, as declared in the register of
interests. I am grateful to be supported in this work by my noble
friend and the noble Lord, , who both serve on our
advisory council.
As part of this role, I travel across the country, meeting local
business leaders and entrepreneurs. The stories I hear are a
powerful reminder of the direct impact that businesses have on
people's lives. I recently visited a local London bakery called
the Dusty Knuckle. As well as serving delicious baked goods, it
works with young offenders, helping them grow their skills and
confidence through a combination of on-the-job training and
mentorship in a successful, warm-hearted business. In the words
of one of its trainees, “I feel so much happier. I feel like a
real person in the real world; like I actually exist”.
Another successful entrepreneur shared with me his father's
story. Many decades ago, his father fell in with the wrong crowd
and ended up in prison. After his release, he successfully
completed a training course to drive fuel tankers across the
country. The entrepreneur still vividly recalls the moment his
father opened a telegram from Shell, telling him it knew about
his period in custody but was still willing to give him a
permanent job. It was, he told me, the one and only time he ever
saw his father cry. These are just two examples of businesses
being a force for good, and an illustration of why a successful
society requires successful businesses.
I will conclude with the words of Winston Churchill, who
delivered many of his wartime speeches in this very Chamber:
“Some people regard private enterprise as a predatory tiger to be
shot. Others see it as a cow they can milk. Not enough people see
it as a healthy horse pulling a sturdy wagon”. I look forward to
working with noble Lords across the House to ensure that more
people have access to these opportunities in life, and that we
support businesses to do even more good in the local communities
they serve.1.53pm
of Watford (Con)
My Lords, it gives me the greatest pleasure to follow my noble
friend Lord Elliott's maiden speech, to which I will return a bit
later. First, I thank the noble Lord, , for allowing us to have this
debate. Of all the many speeches, I will refer particularly to
that of my noble friend Lord Baker, who I have been a willing
acolyte and devotee of for many years. I congratulate him on the
work he has done for the UTCs. We have heard an excellent maiden
speech from my noble friend of Hale—which is the wrong side
of the Pennines to me, as well as to my noble friend Lord
Elliott. I look forward to many contributions from him in the
future.
I must briefly return to my noble friend Lord Elliott, because
our lives have a lot in common. I am following him today, but he
followed me to Leeds Grammar School, which we both
attended—unfortunately for me, with a 20-year gap. He chose to be
, which, as he
explained, is where his grandparents come from. It has a link
with Leeds Grammar School. My noble friend referred to it as one
of the highest peaks in Yorkshire. For me, it was a place of
terror and one where I had absolutely no skills whatever; it was
the location of our school outward bound centre, which I am sure
my noble friend thrived at. For me, I promise your Lordships, it
was not the highlight of a school career.
Our paths crossed again in later life in London. He has shown
skills in so many things that he has done, with his work as a
policymaker with very successful groups, such as the TaxPayers'
Alliance and others, for which he deserves absolute credit. I
wish in 2016 he had used his skills in, from my perspective, a
rather better direction than Vote Leave. He did say he was not
going to mention Brexit, and I will not, but I have remained, and
remain to this day, a major fan of the noble Lord, Lord Elliott.
The work he has done has always been to do with business and
jobs, as typified now by the Jobs Foundation that he
mentioned.
I speak in this skills debate as a person who prided myself, in
my business life, on training apprentices and giving people
opportunities in life. Luckily enough, in my political life, my
first job was as an apprentice adviser to in 2011. That was probably
because he could not fit me in to promote me to be a Minister at
the time, but I took it as being very important. With and others, I worked on the
apprenticeship levy. The apprenticeship levy, to me, was an
excellent idea because it felt that, if businesses were paying to
train apprentices, they would in fact hire apprentices. It sounds
very simple, but very good in theory. It was only some years
later, when I reappeared as Business Minister, following other
jobs, that I found most meetings I attended had people
criticising the apprenticeship levy. It did have its faults—and
it does have its faults to this day. But its achievements have
been very significant in increasing the number of
apprenticeships.
I am delighted to see here in the Chamber today. He
has contributed so much to skills. One of his early jobs in that
was probably taking over from me as chairman of the
grand-sounding Apprenticeship Delivery Board. Actually, it was
all of our responsibility to bring apprenticeships to the
forefront of companies that had not considered them
otherwise.
Many good things have come from that. We have seen ups and downs
with apprenticeships, but the overall trajectory seems very good.
We have seen the implementation of a lot of different standards,
and apprenticeships in fields that had never dreamed of before.
Degree apprentices, banking, estate agencies, accountancy—you
name it, a lot of people have been given an opportunity in life
that they would not have had otherwise.
I would like to say, though, on the crucial manufacturing sector,
which is absolutely at the centre of the skills debate and of
most plans to bring about growth in the UK economy, I am very
concerned. Starts have gone down from 120,000 to 45,000 per year,
according to Stephen Phipson of Make UK, an organisation which
has done so much in the training of apprenticeships. We have
tried to look into why that has happened, because most people
would think that apprenticeships in engineering, manufacturing
and things like that are natural types of apprenticeship. There
are a number of reasons. It appears that private training
companies are dropping out of apprenticeships training. Their
costs have gone up dramatically and the figure placed for these
apprenticeships—which I think was £26,000 per year—has not
increased over the time. Of course, the cost of providing those
apprenticeships has gone up, so many have dropped out. We need to
recognise this, and to get these firms back into providing
apprenticeships.
Secondly, there are other providers, such as colleges of further
education; they appear to be dropping out of training these kinds
of apprenticeships as well. We have tried to find out why. There
are a few technical matters: for example, they are not allowed to
use the apprenticeship levy for capital expenditure. Of course,
if you are training engineers, the tools and the equipment are
extremely expensive. It seems to me rational that they should be
allowed to use the kind of money from the levy to facilitate
that, because it is as much part of the apprenticeship as the
labour.
So we need to look into this carefully. I hope that this
Government and future Governments will listen to Make UK and to
people who really want to see apprenticeships succeed, because
they know how important the skills agenda is to the economy.
1.59pm
(CB)
My Lords, as ever, I declare my interest as a state secondary
school teacher in Hackney. I join the chorus of thanks to my
noble friend for this opportunity to
debate the issue, and I congratulate him, as ever, on his hard
work, his opening speech, and the fact that he has acquired the
skill of speaking Welsh, which he kept very quiet. He is an
inspiration to us all.
I congratulate the noble Lords, of Hale, and , on their
excellent maiden speeches. They were able, thought-provoking and
delivered with a high level of skill.
I also thank all the organisations that sent me briefings for
this debate, and admit that I read none of them. Because I do not
think we needed to. Everybody agrees that skills are vital for
the success of the UK economy and for the quality of life of
individuals.
I am honoured to be among so many people with so much experience,
particularly those responsible for the Education for 11-16 Year
Olds Committee report. I described in an email how, having read
only the first page of the summary, I had punched the air three
times. Thinking about it further, the report does not go far
enough. Perhaps that is why the Government rejected pretty much
all of it.
In our schools, we are confusing knowledge with skill, as the
noble Baroness, , pointed out. They
are not the same. The knowledge-rich curriculum is teaching
students the art of learning large amounts of facts rather than
skills. Some are obviously transferable; many are not. We are all
aware that students lack the skills for life today. We decry that
fact that they lack the basic skills for work or adulthood, yet
we persist in doing nothing about it. We consider much of the
vital work as extracurricular, or cram it, once a term, into PSHE
day.
Our curriculum and methodology have changed very little since
Victorian times; filling our heads with facts so that students go
off to work in banks or the colonial service, or march
unquestioningly across no man's land. Why do we insist on
memorising so much when we have the internet to hand? How many
people can truthfully say that they do long multiplication these
days? They have a calculator on their phone. Genuinely, who sits
down in a sports hall and writes by hand for three hours?
I am fully aware that many noble Lords will be forming the words
“hippy-dippy” in their minds, and deciding, “We tried that in the
70s and look what happened”. No, we did not.
We need to concentrate on what matters. Mental arithmetic needs
to be hammered in, and grammar, punctuation, and good oracy
skills, need to be the bedrock of any education. But rather than
long division—which you can do on your phone—would it not be
better to have an intuitive knowledge of how to design, populate
and interpret a spreadsheet? Would it not be better to teach
students about their bodies, so that they can look after
themselves and save the NHS billions? Rather than study the plays
of Shakespeare, would it not be better to write, produce, act in
and record a film? I have said in this place before that I
believe that every student should leave school having started at
least one business. Dare I say that this might be fun to learn,
and fun to teach.
These things would give students real-world skills that can be
honed in tertiary education, or used instantly in the workplace.
Add touch-typing and a high level of Microsoft Office skills and
you now have a cohort who can hit the ground running when they
leave education. The joyous thing is that this would actually
save the nation money in filling the skills gap and helping with
student attendance, teacher retention and student attainment.
To quote from one of my favourite films, “Four Weddings and a
Funeral”, on the subject of university,
“I didn't go myself. I couldn't see the point. You see, when you
work in the money markets, what use are the novels of Wordsworth
gonna be, eh?”
I have not even started on my own subject, design technology,
which the noble Lord, Lord Baker, very kindly talked about, or
craft skills. As far as I know, AI has not learned to change the
fuse in a plug yet or, as the noble Baroness, Lady Hayman, said,
repaired something. It cannot do sports, or loads of the other
skills we need. The winds of change are coming. We have a once in
a lifetime chance to start a revolution. Will the Minister join
me in storming the barricades?
2.05pm
(Con)
My Lords, while also thanking the noble Lord, , I remind your Lordships of
my registered interest as chairman of the Chartered Institution
for Further Education. The institution, the only royal chartered
body exclusively for further education, was founded in 2015. Its
chief aim is to improve skills education in the UK by creating
what could be called, in shorthand form, a Russell Group of
further education colleges and providers—the best that we have in
the country. It has certainly succeeded in doing so. Aspiring
members have to satisfy a council of their peers of the high
quality of their governance, leadership and management, teaching
and learning, and their financial strengths, including reserves,
as well as student satisfaction and, above all, the employment
destinations of their students. Typical of our members is Burton
and South Derbyshire College, which was very recently adjudged
“outstanding” by Ofsted in all areas. I pay tribute to its
principal, Mrs Dawn Ward, for her wholly distinguished
leadership.
The chartered institution has developed a number of projects
aimed at spreading good practice in the vocational sector: for
instance, its skills update licentiate programme requires
participating college lecturers, such as in automobile
engineering, to revisit their industries regularly over a full
year to gain the most contemporary know-how that, for instance,
Mercedes, Toyota or Jaguar have available, which then may be
passed on to students so that their skills are wholly up to date.
This year, we also launched an initiative with the Association of
Apprentices to enable those successfully completing to be
recognised with a post-nominal designation.
I want to touch on T-levels for a minute or two. These present a
prime opportunity to elevate professional and technical
education, but there are some real concerns that need addressing.
T-levels have rightly been mapped against technical jobs that are
in high demand; they require a common vocational core in the
first year and then an occupational specialism in the second. For
instance, engineering T-level has three routes: design and
development for engineering, which has four specialist pathways
in the second year; maintenance, installation and repair for
engineering, which leads to five; and engineering, manufacturing
and processing, which has four. Adding them up, there are 13
highly specialised engineering career pathways among which a
school leaver, in principle, may choose. In fact, even assuming
that the student has the knowledge at 16 with which to make that
choice, the chances of finding, even among the best colleges, one
that can provide more than a couple out of the 13 is very remote.
It is clear that the provision is far too complicated and ought
to be rationalised.
In spite of this Government's impressive record on improving
numeracy and literacy teaching, far too many young people in
school are still unable to achieve adequate GCSE results in
English and maths. To progress to T-levels, they have to retake
them at FE colleges, which distort the main vocational mission of
those colleges. Alas, even with significant support, resitting
learners do very badly; only 14% pass in maths and 22% in
English, so T-levels will be wholly unavailable to them. Also
unavailable to them next year, when funding ceases for level 3
vocational trade programmes, will be any kind of advanced
qualification in, say, carpentry, joinery or bricklaying. These
young people will be marginalised, and their chances of
employment much diminished. As the noble Baroness, Lady Garden,
said, we need to revisit the decision to end funding for
vocational level 3 programmes, while T-levels are being developed
and their glitches removed.
All T-level students are required to spend 45 days of their
courses at industry placements. There is evidence from colleges
that employers are suffering from fatigue with T-level work
experience—as well as with apprenticeships, as the noble Lord,
, told us. Placements are
becoming very difficult to find, particularly in rural and
deprived areas. We badly need to look again at funding schemes to
support and incentivise employers to engage in placements,
especially in SMEs.
Finally, I remind your Lordships that March's joint report on
restoration and renewal says that
“businesses in all four nations of the UK will also benefit from
the work … that restoring the Palace will generate. Jobs and
opportunities will be created”,
while skills and trades will be revitalised. Many of these will
be heritage crafts, of course. I am delighted that
representatives of the programme board have approved in principle
a Palace of Westminster apprenticeship scheme that I have been
proposing since restoration and renewal was first debated in this
House. It will, of course, be a huge opportunity to showcase
apprenticeships and to emphasise the importance of skills for the
UK's economy. We must take advantage of it.
2.12pm
(CB)
My Lords, I am grateful to my noble friend for introducing this topic.
We have the economic challenge of building relevant skills for
the future and the social challenge of one in 10 youngsters being
unemployed. I shall focus on the need to join these two thoughts
up by finding ways of upskilling these people for worthwhile
jobs—both for their own quality of life and for the sake of the
economy.
The most recent government skills survey found that skills
shortage vacancies have grown from 6% to 10% in the last five
years. Prominent examples include a shortage of 200,000 employees
with green skills, three-quarters of businesses with digital
skills vacancies, and more than half of our manufacturers
struggling to find skilled workers. On the other hand, only 11%
of UK workers have advanced digital skills. Last year, the number
of young unemployed increased by 10%.
Through my work as a director of Business in the Community, I see
at first hand the challenges that young people face in forgotten
places across the UK. Let us take, for example, Claremont ward in
Blackpool, where there are 480 unemployed individuals in just 12
streets. There is a concentration of families in slum housing
where there is a subculture of many youngsters not leaving their
bedrooms post-Covid.
Last week, I visited Eastwood primary school in Keighley to
understand the challenge in enabling children just to learn to
read—a fundamental skill, if they are to go on to get a good job.
The school provides a haven of calm for children in an area where
parents dare not let them out on the streets. It provides food
for families, clothes and a safe place for parents to learn
cooking skills. It also ferries children to the dentist because
there is not one locally. There are four year-olds with rotten
teeth and abscesses which keep them off school. Sadly, these
challenges and interventions are common to schools in Claremont,
North Earlham, Foleshill and other places where we work.
Looking outside the school system, Pillgwenlly, in Newport, is an
ethnically diverse community—more than 32 languages are spoken at
the local primary school. On the streets, county lines are
commonplace and there is a red light district opposite the police
station. Community organisations such as the Newport Yemeni
Community Association and Kidcare4U run catch-up clubs for more
than 120 children on Saturday mornings. However, funding is due
to end in August.
Let me turn to some practical steps that might help. These fall
into three categories: first, finding realistic routes to help
the young unemployed into work; secondly, helping those in
secondary school to understand work and future job opportunities
better; and thirdly, supporting heroic teachers in challenging
primary schools, so that children can leave feeling confident in
themselves and able to read.
Extensive work carried out by the Rank Foundation in Claremont
suggests that we need an intermediate labour market to provide
opportunities to get the youngsters currently sitting in their
bedrooms into work. This involves working eight to 12 hours a
week in real work situations, paid at a living wage, which
provide dignity and purpose. It would help further if the
Department for Work and Pensions considered talking to these
people online, rather than insisting they come into the
office.
The apprenticeship levy has not been fully spent. I encourage the
Government to double down on apprenticeships, making them as
flexible as possible but also advising companies that they can
pass the levy on to their supply chain, a fact of which many
companies are unaware.
In Sheffield, we have recently launched a campaign with local
businesses to provide routine and frequent employer encounters
for all the schoolchildren in the area. This is based on robust
analysis by the Careers & Enterprise Company which suggests
these contacts can reduce future likelihood of unemployment by
20%. The advantage of this approach is that businesses can talk
directly about current skills needs such as digital or
manufacturing.
Finally, national government needs to recognise the challenges
and support schools on the front line. I have just one small ask:
to provide genuinely accessible NHS dental services to these
children. Who knows, one of them might be inspired to become a
future dentist.
2.16pm
(Con)
I congratulate the noble Lord, , on securing this excellent
debate. I declare my interest as an officer of the APPG on
financial education for young people.
To equip young people with the best opportunity to succeed in
future training and jobs after leaving school is to give them
essential life skills. These must include financial literacy,
among other work-related skills, and their teaching and fostering
in schools must start early to ensure young people are ready to
enter and thrive in the workplace. Some 79% of teachers surveyed
by Teach First in 2022 believe their pupils are less ready today
for the world of work compared to previous years. Recent research
from Young Enterprise in its Inspiring Futures programme, which
delivers applied learning programmes nationwide to pupils in
areas of disadvantage, found that the young people they seek to
engage consistently assess themselves as significantly below
average in crucial personal attributes such as resilience,
confidence, managing money and work-readiness.
As many pupils leave school and go straight into the
self-employed workplace as sole traders or entrepreneurs and do
not have the money, time or employer commitment to increase their
skills, they must be able to rely on the skills they learn at
school. Furthermore, school leavers that do go on to undertake
further skills training would benefit from the underpinning of a
sound financial education. Pupils who complete the Inspiring
Futures programme have been shown to progress significantly and
exceed their previously average skills assessment. This
improvement shows how applied learning can enable young people to
acquire critical skills for workplace readiness, including
financial literacy, which also enable upward social mobility and
positive emotional well-being.
However, the skills landscape is constantly changing. In 2023,
the World Economic Forum estimated that six in 10 workers will
need re-skilling by 2027, showing the importance of fostering and
securing confidence and adaptability in young people now, at both
primary and secondary curriculum levels. I would be grateful if
the Minister indicated any progress made on this pivotal
curricular point, which I may have mentioned previously in your
Lordships' House. It is that confidence and adaptability,
combined with financial education and numeracy, that makes young
people financially literate.
Financial education alone is not enough; the confidence to apply
it and make informed decisions in the real world is vital to a
young person realising their full economic potential. Moreover,
it is not just the individual who wins. The Centre for Economics
and Business Research found in 2021 that 11% of UK workers had
experienced a fall in productivity over the preceding three years
due to their personal financial situation. It is perhaps no
surprise, therefore, that research by GoHenry complements this
finding: it predicts that an extra £6.98 billion would be added
to the UK economy annually by prioritising financial education in
schools.
This prediction is further strengthened by the Essential Skills
Tracker 23, from the Skills Builder Partnership—together with the
CIPD, the Edge Foundation and KPMG—which reveals that the cost to
the UK economy of low essential skills in 2022 alone was £22
billion. Again, good education alone will not cut it. The same
tracker found that 18% of workers with above-average literacy and
numeracy levels have a very low essential skills score, meaning
that they cannot properly implement and take advantage of that
education. The 13% of the population who experience real social
mobility—enjoying a strong income, job satisfaction and life
satisfaction—combine their education with these all-important
skills and confidence.
I was delighted to be part of the panel judging the recent Devon
county final of the Young Enterprise Company Programme, which
empowers young people to set up and run a student company under
the guidance of a volunteer. Students make all the decisions
about their business, including managing the company finances,
and gain or embed the essential workplace skills I have
mentioned. Putting all the fantastic studies I have cited aside,
I saw for myself the terrific impact the Young Enterprise Company
Programme can have on the young participants' abilities to learn,
adapt, and earn and manage money, and the boost it gives to their
confidence and leadership abilities.
I hope that today, I have managed to highlight just how critical
financial literacy and these enabling skills are to our young
people right now; that they deserve early prioritisation in both
primary and secondary school curricula—including through schemes
like the Young Enterprise Company Programme, which I hope the
Minister will endorse—and that they have the power to create a
society with a confident young workforce supporting a more
successful UK economy, not only by managing their own finances,
future employment and quality of life successfully, but also our
collective financial security.
2.23pm
(CB)
My Lords, I congratulate my noble friend on securing this important
debate and on his truly excellent opening speech. I also
congratulate the noble Lords, and of Hale, on their optimistic
maiden speeches. I draw your Lordships' attention to my interests
as set out in the register.
Today we have had a very wide-ranging debate on this huge and
hugely important topic. I will focus on just one issue—artificial
intelligence—and aim to provide some specific suggestions for
skills-building in this area. AI is a revolution. As Jamie Dimon,
the former chairman of Citigroup, said:
“Think the printing press, the steam engine, electricity,
computing and the internet.”
I know that, as my noble friend said, AI cannot change a
plug, but deploying AI responsibly and securely does have the
potential to enhance productivity, improve lives and boost our
economy quite significantly. To take just one healthcare example,
doctors' lives can be enhanced massively by AI by combining the
spoken word of a consultation with relevant images such as
x-rays, adding any of the required prescriptions discussed and
possibly scheduling new appointments. The doctor just needs to
check the note before authorising, saving huge amounts of time
and improving their own lives and those of their patients.
Yet students are not equipped with these skills at school. There
are still very few computer scientists entering our market, and
businesses are not fully grabbing hold of this capability. A BCC
report last September found that less than 50% of SMEs plan to
use AI. We need to both increase the skills across the population
and reduce the fear of deploying.
Government has a clear role here to educate, promote and, of
course, to fund. In schools, more programmes need to be developed
to make digital and AI skills adoptable by school leaver age,
rather than assuming this happens later. The Department for
Education has correctly built AI skills into BTECs and is working
with hyperscalers to create bootcamps which link to jobs boards.
Whether BTECs continue or the advanced British standard assumes
part of that role and picks up the skills of AI, that will not be
for 10 years, which is a long time for the current students to
wait. More needs to be done now with 14 to 18 year-olds to make
them ready for the world of work.
As the noble Lord, Lord Baker, mentioned, it is very difficult to
change the curriculum in those years, given its high-stakes,
examined nature. However, I urge the DfE to work with
headteachers, the British Computer Society, the tech industry,
the LSIPs and other interested employers to find a pragmatic
solution in the short term. Potentially, a sleeve of UTCs could
be added; perhaps there are other solutions.
In further education, real progress has been made since 2018,
following the AI industrial strategy. Over 11,000 students have
been enrolled in AI and data science conversion courses, and over
25 AI centres for doctoral training—which will train over 1,800
PhD students by 2033—have been created. Much of this was driven
by Professor Dame Wendy Hall, with whom I had the privilege of
working as a Minister, and whom I consider a national treasure.
This momentum needs to be continued. Can the Minister confirm
that these programmes will be?
On business education, last week DSIT launched two activities:
the AI skills for business competency framework and a flexible AI
upskilling fund pilot. These are welcome additions and go some
way to removing the skills obstacles and the obstacles of fear
surrounding the use of AI. However, they are nascent; the pilot
is currently small. If proven out, I hope that it can be expanded
rapidly.
That is not enough, and more must be done to promote AI
effectively and to inform and connect, which is something that
the Government could do. They could promote success stories,
highlight major programmes—possibly within government—where the
adoption of digital and AI have massively improved productivity,
highlight companies like Uber which offer additional AI building
skills to all of its 3 million drivers, not for the benefit of
Uber but for the benefit of their people, or promote our own tech
industries, AI unicorns like Quantexa, which help provide the
data and help companies store it, to ensure that IP continues to
reside in the UK.
Playbooks for SMEs need to be created to help them take those
steps. These must be supported by a database of excellent case
studies. As I discovered as Minister, SMEs like to see companies
that look like themselves and have done it like themselves, and
that is the way to encourage them.
Finally, more needs to be done to harness the offerings of AI
companies which are willing to work with Governments as part of
social responsibility. I sit on the board of Oracle, which works
with the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia and has a programme for training
50,000 people to build AI skills, primarily focusing on women,
and works with government and businesses. A lot of our businesses
and other hyperscalers would be prepared to work with the
Government on that.
This all needs to be part of an overall framework and strategy,
as my noble friend said at the beginning. I
sincerely hope that we look to future skills, and AI is part of
them.
2.29pm
(Con)
My Lords, I thank the noble Lord, , for the chance to have this
debate.
I work very closely with the Better Hiring Institute, an
organisation I recommend to noble Lords. A trend that we are
increasingly seeing is for skills-based hiring. That is where,
rather than listing qualifications or CV items, a company gets
down to the core of what skills it needs for a particular job and
then goes looking for a match. As the noble Baroness, Lady
Fairhead, said, skills change rapidly. Companies look for the
skills that they need now. For example, if a new AI product comes
out, they want their people to have command of it—if somebody is
offering a course in it, that is what they want. This is
therefore driving a real interest in micro-credentials: short
courses that will bring someone up to speed in the area that an
employer needs.
Together, these trends offer great opportunities to government,
if government will take an interest and involve itself. First, if
the Government will work with the recruitment industry, which is
certainly prepared to work with them, there is the opportunity to
gather data to get a grip on what skills are required and where,
as well as on how the trends are developing. Secondly, on the
other side, there is the opportunity to help the process of
moving into micro-credentials by helping develop an underlying
system for identifying which of these have quality—again, that is
partly about processing data, but it is an area where you want a
very reliable source, so we get back to the issue of individual
learning accounts and all the scams that went with them. We need
to integrate that sort of structure of learning with proper
pastoral care and careers guidance and work that into the
structure of apprenticeships and other larger qualifications. I
hope that the Open University will take a close interest in
that.
This comes back to what other noble Lords have said about the
need for employers to take a very close interest in driving
training. The noble Lord, of Hale, and the noble Baroness,
Lady Lane-Fox of Soho, made that point in the context of LSIPs.
To pick up on what my noble friend said, we must allow no escape
via immigration. We have to train our own people. We want to pay
our own people more and to have a workforce with ever-rising
skills, capability and pay. We must not allow that to be
undermined by people going abroad to buy the skills in cheaply.
We must focus people on training here. As my noble friend said, the links between good
education organisations and industry, so that education is in
tune with what industry needs, is a very important thing to see
develop.
Turning to schools, noble Lords know that I am the proprietor of
the Good Schools Guide. In the next few years, I suspect that we
will have a real look at what we want a school leaver to know. I
am sure that my noble friend Lord Baker will be at the forefront
of that discussion. The Government have shown, through their
interest in the ABS, the idea that they want school leavers to
have a broader understanding of things than we are providing now.
The direction is clearly there.
Micro-credentials will again have a strong role here. It used to
be the case that the Open University provided courses that people
could do as a supplement to A-levels, but that was driven out by
universities being unconstructive in valuing them. Given that
universities will now take qualifications from all over the world
and from all kinds of backgrounds, they are being very unhelpful
in so narrowly insisting on the qualifications they get out of
the UK school system. I hope that they will become partners in
broadening education—and, indeed, in broadening the education
that they provide themselves. My degree in physics consisted of
nuclear physics; it did not go beyond that, not even to
understand how the weather works. My daughter's education in the
arts does not involve anything to do with economics or business.
Why not? We are not educating people for the world that they will
have to face outside, so we need to look at that.
That comes back to what many noble Lords have been saying about
BTECs. T-levels are too massive and too specialised. If we are
broadening people's education, that is not the road to go down.
We will learn something from them, but BTECs occupy a much more
important place for many of our young people. We absolutely must
guard that.
I will pick up on something that the noble Lord, , said; Shakespeare, yes, but
let us learn it the way it was written—which is to be performed
and to be understood. My wife taught Shakespeare in prisons, and
it went down a storm because they understood the stories and
liked the bloodshed. To learn it as prose criticism is deadly. We
want to get back to a shared culture; no country survives without
a shared culture. Something like performing Shakespeare is a
really important part of that.2.35pm
The (CB)
My Lords, I too congratulate the noble Lords, and of Hale, on their maiden
speeches, and of course my noble friend on his very comprehensive
introduction.
At the outset, I say that I agree entirely with what the noble
Lord, , said about EBacc and
Progress 8. They both need to go. They are holding the arts back
in our schools and beyond. A future Government should make that
pledge before they come to power.
The mover of this Motion, my noble friend , had to point out to me that
“education” is not mentioned in it, even if it seems nevertheless
logical that the noble Baroness, Lady Barran, will answer for
Education. Such is the modern-day conventional assumption that
what we call skills and education go together hand in hand, but
that does not have to be true, depending of course on how one
defines both words. “Skill”, like “innovation”, has become a
watchword, even a buzzword, to the extent that it is perhaps too
easy to stop seeing what the word means and instead pay lip
service to something we have not thought carefully enough about,
and perhaps to promote certain narrower meanings above other
meanings. For instance, my research tells me—I bow of course to
the expert linguists and historians among us—that “skill” comes
from the Old Norse “skilja”, which seems to have had quite a
number of past meanings, including, believe it or not, to break
up, to separate, to discern, to distinguish, to understand, to
find out and to decide. Even further back in time, this word was
used to denote knowledge or even divine wisdom, which begs
questions about the separation of knowledge and practice that we
have heard about today in this debate. There are meanings here
that are wider than a skill being simply the supposedly or
conventionally right way of doing something, or learning
something that becomes automatic because it is practised. The
original etymology seems to contain other things like analysis,
breaking things up and perhaps putting them back together
again—deconstruction in other words—critical thought, and even
perhaps contemplation, which our more modern, narrower
understanding of “skill” does not seem so much to contain.
This older understanding is important because, over a number of
decades, education itself has changed significantly within the
UK. The particular modern usage fits our current, very
specifically framed, educational system. Of course, as we have
already heard, there are many different kinds of skills,
including life skills, craft skills, and green skills. But the
idea of skills that are necessary for specific jobs, including
the job of study itself, nevertheless holds a kind of primacy
within this world of skills. Education itself, particularly
higher education, has become monetised and therefore
transactional in a way that was not true 30 years ago, but is now
very true since the introduction of tuition fees in 1998 and the
accompanying expectations that an increasing number of students
now have. Among those expectations I point out three: first, that
students can get a piece of paper telling them that they have an
extremely good degree that validates their course of study;
secondly, they can get a well-paid job at the end of their
course, which is part of the expected transaction; and thirdly,
they have learned the skills that will equip them for that job.
That is true even of those who follow the academic route, because
of the change in culture of higher education.
Therefore, when the Government talk the rhetoric of “low-value”
courses and send out the message that the arts and humanities are
less important by cutting the top-up grants to those university
courses, they are also saying that the skills learned for those
courses or during that time of study are less important because
the skills, like that important piece of paper which gives you
your grade or the examination that determines that grade, must be
something that according to the modern understanding of a skill
is quantifiable because it has an objective, predetermined
use.
I will make just one further point. The irony is that the real
world thinks differently. Companies consistently want
well-rounded people, not necessarily those with very specific,
narrowly defined skill sets, important though those might be. I
also know from my own experience closer to home that not all
colleges, such as drama colleges, are interested in the skills
that enable you to get a good degree. They look for things beyond
specific skill sets such as passion, enthusiasm and originality
of thought, which perhaps in the “skilja” definition might also
be thought of as skills.
2.41pm
(Con)
My Lords, it is a pleasure to take part in this fascinating and
informative debate. I congratulate my friend the noble Lord,
, on securing it, and both
maiden speakers on their excellent and insightful contributions.
I look forward to hearing more from both of them in due course. I
also declare my interests in technology as an adviser to Boston
and to BPP University.
I will talk about three things this afternoon: talent,
technology, and Kenneth Baker. We have such an opportunity to be
skilled for success in the fourth industrial revolution. I will
take the noble Lord, , first. I am so
privileged to be able to call him my friend. He has done more
than anybody in this country to drive forward opportunities for
those who all too often have been dismissed or underrated by the
state and society through pushing technical education. He
deserves the respect and thanks of this House and every single
individual across this country for everything that he has done
and continues to do so vociferously and effectively.
Skills for success in the fourth industrial revolution—what will
it take? First, we must understand that inclusion and innovation
are the golden threads. In reality, inclusion enables innovation.
We need to consider AI, blockchain, the internet of things and
all the elements of these new technologies as tools in our human
hands. They are extraordinarily powerful but are still tools. We
would not in any sense give an individual a powerful tool without
first giving them the skills to make a success of using it. If we
are to get optimal outcomes, not least from artificial
intelligence and all the other new technologies, it needs to be
human-led—human in the loop, human over the loop.
What do we need to think about in terms of society, our democracy
and our economy? First, socially: imagine what we could achieve
with this skills approach if we had truly personalised skills
training and education in real time, considering not just the
skills that we need to succeed in AI but AI's impact on skills.
Secondly, the issues goes to our very democracy. Skills need to
abound. In a year when over 40% of the world will go to the
polls, how can we ensure that all our electors have the skills to
make sense of what is out there, not least the proliferation of
deepfakes? Media literacy, digital literacy and, yes, financial
literacy are all required if people are to be able to play their
full part as citizens in our democracy. Moving beyond that, there
needs to be much more consideration of risk literacy and
resilience literacy. In addition, can we put an end to calling so
much of this “soft skills”? These are not soft skills but
essential skills, and without them the world is incredibly
hard.
I move to the economy—why not have a stat in our debate? PwC says
that, by 2030, AI will increase GDP by £15.7 trillion a year but,
without the skills, how can we ensure that we are all enabled to
take advantage of those economic and social opportunities?
What do we need to change? I offer at least three things. First
is the curriculum—yes, in schools first but, beyond that, in
higher education and across all training programmes. We need
nothing short of a full transformation of the curriculum. Would
my noble friend the Minister agree? I know that, when she comes
to wind up, she will offer examples of elements throughout the
curriculum. It is clear that these are pockets, certainly
positive ones, but she must agree that we are far from the
complete garment.
Is the Minister aware of the accreditation in ethical AI that is
being led by the current Lord Mayor, who is doing such an
excellent job and understands this area so clearly? Does she
agree that we need accreditation for all our data scientists,
developers and deployers of AI? You would not have an accountant,
lawyer or any other professional unaccredited and unqualified.
Would that not be a positive boon and an opportunity for the UK,
not least in ethical AI?
Does the Minister agree that we need to ensure that, whatever the
training and the skills programme, it must be both inclusive by
design and accessible by all? Can she assure the House that this
is the case for all skills and training programmes? If not, why
not, and when can we say that this will be the case? We need to
move beyond STEM and even STEAM: every voice in every decision
should be skilled to articulate and contribute and to have the
skills that it takes to make a success individually, connectedly
and collectively.
When it comes to STEAM, I believe that there is only one place
where we should consider this: if AI was to the human intellect
what steam was to human strength, then you get the picture. Steam
literally changed time. It is now our time to completely
transform the skills ecosystem in the United Kingdom if we are
going to enable, empower and unleash all that human talent and
enable human-led, human-in-the-loop and human-over-the-loop AI
and all the other technologies. If we get it right, it will not
just increase all our skills but fundamentally change for the
better the relationship between citizen and state.
There has been talk of the lack of a skills strategy. We need to
go further. We need a vision for skills. No one even gets off the
sofa for a strategy, but a vision for skills, to enable, empower
and unleash all that human talent, is our mission for today and
should be our mission for all days. #OurAIfutures.
2.48pm
(CB)
My Lords, I am grateful to my noble friend, , for introducing this
important debate. I also congratulate the noble Lords, of Hale and , for their
excellent maiden speeches.
I will make two points, declaring my interests as an academic and
a practising engineer, as set out in the register. The first is
on the acute shortage of skilled engineers and technicians, who
are so important for the success of the economy, and the second
is on climate change and the pressing need for green skills to be
embedded in our education system.
A recent report led by the Institution of Engineering and
Technology estimated that there is a shortfall of around 200,000
workers in the STEM sector. It called on the Government to help
tackle the UK's engineering skills shortage by embedding
engineering into the current school curriculum. This is
consistent with the findings of the recent inquiry of this
House's Education for 11-16 Year Olds Committee, which the noble
Lord, , and the noble Baroness,
, mentioned. Like
them, I was privileged to have been a member of that
committee.
A key finding of our report published in December is that there
has been a significant decline in recent years in the number of
pupils taking up technical subjects during key stage 4—14 to 16
year-olds. This is coupled with a wider decline in the
opportunities available throughout the education of 11 to 16
year-olds to develop practical skills. Our committee heard from
many witnesses that the current GCSE curriculum is too full and
overly focused on academic pathways. Our report recommended a
more balanced national curriculum to enable all pupils to study
at least one technical or vocational subject should they wish. We
recommended that the EBacc performance measure should be
abandoned, as was so forcefully advocated in this debate by the
noble Lord, . Creative, technical
and vocational skills must not be sacrificed in favour of an
overly full curriculum of academic subjects, as so well
articulated by the noble Lord, .
The UK must do much more to encourage children to develop STEM
skills, including practical skills, and to make full use of them.
This is not just about universities and higher education.
Although we have outstanding engineering courses in our
universities right across the country, more than half our young
people are not suited to universities. The importance of further
education colleges has been overlooked for far too long and the
opportunities for attractive degree apprenticeships are growing.
Both these routes were spoken about by the noble Lord, of Watford. They could have
a major impact in reviving the fortunes of vocational and
technical education, critical for the engineering industries. It
is highly significant that in Germany 20% of 25 year-olds have a
higher technical qualification, whereas in the UK the present
figure is only 4%. That is because in Germany there is a much
wider range of opportunities in technical education for young
people.
My second point relates to climate change and green skills, about
which the noble Baronesses, Lady Hayman and Lady Bennett of Manor
Castle, have spoken. There is an urgent need to fast-track vital
green engineering skills into our economy by 2030 at the latest.
Led by the Royal Academy of Engineering, Engineers 2030 is an
education and policy programme rethinking engineering and
technology skills for our future world. It challenges how the
engineering workforce needs to be different and how we should
teach and professionally develop young people. We need to do
things differently. The reality is that right now we lack
sufficient numbers of engineers and technicians to deliver even
the commitments already enshrined in legislation. The demand for
substantial growth in green jobs comes at a time when engineering
skills have largely stagnated over the past 10 years. In higher
education, the proportion of students studying engineering has
remained at around 5% for the past 15 years in this country; this
compares with 22% in Germany.
A large proportion of young children have a strong preference to
contribute to solving environmental problems and achieving net
zero. It must therefore be a top priority that we equip them with
the green skills and technical tools to do this, particularly
promoting greater engagement of girls and young women. Gender
diversity in engineering remains largely static. According to
EngineeringUK, women made up just 17% of the engineering
workforce in 2021. The real barrier to girls entering the
engineering profession is perception. Many girls miss out because
they perceive that engineering is only about machinery or hard
hats and construction—apparently subjects only for boys—and they
do not want to be thought of as the odd one out. This mistaken
perception is also widely held by parents and by many teachers.
In reality, engineering is very much wider than machinery or hard
hats and construction. Engineering is simply applied science,
which employs—I can reassure the noble Lord, Lord Lilley—very
clever people. It covers a huge range of subjects, many of them
involving green skills that will build the net zero world of
tomorrow, ranging from biotech to environmental solutions and
from innovative new materials to novel energy systems such as
hydrogen, all of which are potentially hugely attractive to both
boys and girls.
In summary, both our economy and our path to net zero depend
critically on engineering. There is a substantial untapped
resource of future engineers and technicians—especially girls—in
our schools. We need to address this urgently and plug the skills
gap. I look forward to the Minister's response.
2.55pm
The (Con)
My Lords, I thank the noble Lord, , for raising this important
debate and I congratulate both my noble friends of Hale and on their
maiden speeches; I look forward to hearing more of their valuable
contributions.
Reading the newspaper headlines this week illustrates the
seriousness of the situation in which we currently find
ourselves, with regard to the quality of life for many in the
country and the real need for skills for the success of the UK
economy. We are told that there are a record 2.8 million people
off work with long-term illness; that thousands of youngsters
appear to have given up on school since the pandemic, with the
highest number of so-called “ghost children” being recorded; and,
to top it off, that almost a quarter of children aged 10 and 11
in British primary schools are clinically obese and that, for
pupils in the poorest areas, the figure rises above 30%. However,
with the right life skills for both young and old, this can be
turned around.
We need only to look at further headlines to see think tanks
calling for a wholesale curriculum and assessment review of the
education system to add new topics such as financial education
and mental health. The advanced British standard may indeed be an
improvement on the current framework, but it is years away. The
existing status quo is centred on teaching for exams that
students will sit, but that is not necessarily what will help
them in real life.
A few weeks ago, I had the privilege to visit a school academy in
one of the most deprived boroughs of London. The academy is the
envy of its peers in both the public and private sector, boasting
an Oxbridge acceptance rate of 15% and a Russell group acceptance
rate of 64%. I asked the principal how she achieved these
results. Her response was that “Everyone, both teachers and
pupils alike, wants to be here”. The same message came across in
a business session recently, when discussing culture and values.
The adage “If you love what you do, it is not a job” could not be
more true. If we can create an environment where people feel good
about multiple aspects of their life and in control of their
situation, that will give them the confidence and ability to find
a job that they love, grow the economy and attain a high quality
of life.
The skills that make a difference can be narrowed down to four
key pillars: food education, physical education, financial
education and social education. Food education is paramount
because you are what you eat; your gut is your second brain and
what you put into it matters. Physical education follows, as it
boosts energy, confidence and sleep quality, as well as reducing
anxiety and stress. Financial education will then enable you to
live the life that you want within your means. The right basic
knowledge and small regular savings can create a potentially
life-changing sum over the long term. Lastly, I will concentrate
on social education, which is becoming increasingly vital as
smartphones take over our lives.
During my visit to the same academy, the principal flagged that
one of the few issues that they did experience was poor social
interaction, and I noticed that some of the pupils, when they
talked to me, did not look me in the eye and had trouble engaging
directly. I think about my own career and consider myself
extremely fortunate to have worked in the same room,
paradoxically, with individuals who left school at 16 with no
qualifications, all the way to rocket scientists with PhDs in
astrophysics. The glue that bound us together was confidence and
self-belief in what we were doing, which was derived purely from
real, in-person, human interaction.
However, in the current day, by the age of 11 some 91% of
children in the UK own a smartphone. The restaurant chain Prezzo
has found that its customers between the ages of 12 and 27 suffer
from “menu anxiety” and are too socially nervous to engage in a
conversation with a waiter, preferring to order by QR code. The
most truly shocking statistic is from a recent survey which found
that a quarter of 18 to 34 year-olds have never answered their
phone. This surely must be addressed as a top priority.
It will not surprise the Minster to hear me ask the Government
how they will increase awareness on food education, physical
education and financial education—but I would like to ask
something else. Please can she update the House on the expected
timeframe for a compulsory ban on smartphones in schools, to
address the clear and present danger of in-person social
interaction, which is arguably the most important life skill,
becoming a thing of the past?
3.00pm
(CB)
My Lords, I add my congratulations to my noble friend on securing this very
important debate. He has undoubtedly touched a particular vein
here in the House, with tremendous engagement from all
participants. I also congratulate the noble Lords, of Hale and , on their
excellent maiden speeches.
The much-vaunted UK knowledge economy masks an inherent imbalance
with, and under-celebration of, our skills economy. “Education,
education, education” has enabled our universities to
blossom—perhaps at the expense of our colleges. For several
decades, we have hollowed out and failed to invest adequately in
our skills infrastructure. This has been further compounded by
the aspiration for a degree, with all the supposed hierarchical
status it promises.
It is regrettable that it has taken significant skills gaps and
chronic skills shortages to deliver the wake-up call to UK plc of
the pivotal importance of skills. We must go well beyond the
virtue signalling of apprenticeships. Government policy has
placed great importance on front-skilling the school pupils while
neglecting their older siblings' and parents' needs for
upskilling and reskilling. We are failing to value and
appropriately fund the technical skills, the digital skills, the
future skills, the green skills—as mentioned by the noble
Baroness, Lady Hayman—and even skills foresighting. At the centre
of everything, we need bold leadership and sustained political
attention, kept honest by a strong voice from industry and a
joint commitment to long-term investment.
I will speak on apprenticeships, on the colleges on which we rely
for so much of skills training and, finally, if time permits, on
the experience in my own maritime industry. Apprenticeships are a
vital part of investing in individuals to deliver better skills
outcomes for the wider economy. My understanding is that over
250,000 apprenticeships are commenced per year. This is not
enough and, as we have heard, it does not adequately address the
vital SME need. Figures from the OBR indicate that receipts by
government for the apprenticeship levy will reach close to £4
billion in 2024-25, while the apprenticeship budget stands at
£2.7 billion. Is the balance going to a good end in training or
education?
We know there has been a significant increase in the number of
young NEETs. Something must be done for this group. Yet
apprenticeships remain the only part of the education sector
where 16 to 18 year-olds are not fully funded by the state. Can
this be addressed in any way? There needs to be a joined-up
approach to apprenticeship across government, with direct
ministerial oversight.
Now I turn to colleges, on which we depend so heavily for
training away from work. For the colleges, this is a particularly
challenging time. We rely on them to tackle the chronic and acute
skills shortages, particularly among struggling SMEs and those
sectors blighted by Brexit and the pandemic. If I may paraphrase
the words of a friend, Dr Paul Little, principal of the renowned
Glasgow College, I fear we are sleepwalking into a vocationally
light future with an underpowered skills system and an
underinvested skills infrastructure.
On the maritime experience, we are in fact very fortunate with
the training options in maritime. We have heard a lot of quite
depressing statistics one way and another today, and areas of
great concern, but I think this is a success story, and credit
goes to the Government for that. A number of universities are
offering excellent degree courses and some professional
organisations are offering specific professional qualifications
in significant shore-based specialisations such as law, insurance
and ship-broking.
There is time to concentrate only on seafarer training. We are
indeed fortunate that seafarer training has operated essentially
on a global basis through the supranational regulator, the
International Maritime Organization, which is based across and up
the river, and the UK's national Maritime and Coastguard Agency.
Our UK maritime sector is blessed in having a close tripartite
relationship between the ship owners, the educators and workforce
representatives, convened for almost a century by the UK Merchant
Navy Training Board. This is borne out of inherent concern for
seafarers' safety, both coastal and deep sea, placing a higher
value on competency and proficiency than on merely gaining a
qualification.
I should add that the SMarT funding arrangement has been a great
success for the training of seafarers, with 50% of the cost paid
by government. This scheme supports seafarers' training while
ensuring a flow of very well-qualified seafarers—when they come
ashore—into the maritime professional services, where Britain is
the global industry leader. We are also fortunate in having a
Maritime Skills Commission and blessed to have four seafarer
education and training colleges, located in Glasgow, Warsash in
Southampton, South Tyneside and Lowestoft. The skills and
training acquired in these colleges are still recognised as the
gold standard for maritime skills worldwide, and long may this
last.
The noble Baroness, Lady Garden, noted the strong contribution of
the City of London Corporation, City & Guilds and the livery
companies to education and training. It is interesting that the
noble Baroness, Lady Fairhead, is a fellow liveryman of the
Goldsmiths' Company, which makes an outstanding contribution to
education and training. When I was elected to the City of London
Corporation, I served on a number of school boards. I quickly
realised that one area of great importance is aspiration. The
City's colleges and schools have succeeded in imbuing and
developing aspiration in staff and students. I do not believe
that any of us has mentioned aspiration, but it is vital for
teachers and their students alike. I could wish to associate
myself with very many speakers, but I do so with what the noble
Baroness, Lady Coussins, said about the value of foreign language
teaching.
3.06pm
(LD)
My Lords, certain themes come across in trying to sum up what has
been said in this debate. A clear one is the fact that we do not
seem to have a handle on training for skills—a skill you can
actually do in later life—or we have a dozen badly attached
handles on it. We have an education system that is plugged into
passing X number of little dots.
It is also an education system which says that getting your
A-levels and going to university is what you should be aiming
for, regardless of things such as how much money you will earn
and what you actually want to do. You are taught by a group of
people who have done this, which I am afraid is one of our
problems: we have this conveyor going through. When it comes to
skills and training et cetera, we know that you did things such
as what used to be NVQ level 4 or HND level 5 when you messed up
your A-levels. That was true when I was at a college doing my
A-levels. Regardless of whatever you wanted to achieve in life,
that is what you were supposed to do. It has become incredibly
apparent that we have not thrown that off.
I do not know what hold the noble Lord, Lord Baker, has over the
Whips' Office, but allowing him to have the first dig at any
debate means that an Education Minister really has to have a word
with their friends. There has to be something here, but the noble
Lord is essentially right. We have not taken skills seriously
enough. They are secondary options. It probably goes back to
grammar schools and secondary moderns, and beyond that, but that
is what we have.
I have a couple of special interests that I should declare. I am
dyslexic and president of the British Dyslexia Association. I
also work for a disability assistance company, Microlink. One
thing I have discovered, and indeed raised at many points, is
that if you tell one group: “You've got to pass English, you've
got to pass Maths”—which means remembering formulae, when all
dyslexics have bad short-term memory; I think I have met one
person who denied that in about 40 years—you have actually
created a problem. Other groups have problems with it as well.
Other people just do not learn because they do not think it
applies to them, but you have still got to get English and
Maths.
The noble Lord, , spoke about how your phone
has a calculator in it. The calculator has been around an awfully
long time; it just happens to be in a convenient place now. There
is something else on his phone he did not mention: the voice
operation button. Every single computer that you buy today allows
you to talk and turns that into text, then will read stuff back
to you; it is built in. Twenty years ago, you had to plug the
stuff into it, but now it is there. We have an automatic way in
to allow you to access information. We are still not fully taking
that on board.
Ten years ago, I had a long battle to allow people to take
apprenticeship qualifications without passing a written English
test—true, it was a tapped English test, but it still had to be a
written English test. The examples of that were ridiculous in the
end; it was basically that they had not thought of it. A lot of
the briefing for this debate spoke about good standards in basic
skills; if you are going to expand the base of people who will
take these qualifications, you must allow other ways in. Many
people struggle with English; it is a difficult language. If you
want the academic reason why, the English got conquered by the
French and created this non-phonetic structure that we pride
ourselves on taking other words into—learn that without a
phonetic route.
Going through, you must have a degree of flexibility. The
Minister is probably the most informed person on this subject
that I have seen sitting in that place in this House. I hope she
will be able to give me some assurance that we will make sure
that that barrier is not there in the future.
The second thing I should say here goes back to the point that we
know what the education pathway is. We also know that the most
important people for influencing what you will try to do are your
parents; teachers come second. We know that if they had been a
banker, for instance, you are likely to become a banker—or an
actor or politician; in all those cases, you will think of doing
that. If they are unemployed, that is what you think happens to
you.
We have one big challenge: careers pathway advice in the future.
We have spoken about this, and I believe the Government have been
talking about it and doing things. It is a big challenge; do not
underestimate it. The full benefits of any change now will
probably not be seen for many years, possibly decades, but we
have to start at some point. If we are to expand this to take in
all the new technologies and developments, we must start now. Can
the Minister give us some guidance about how this expanded
knowledge of what is available is out there?
I will give a little example of where we need to do it. I am part
of our DCMS team and we get presentations by the creative
industries—film, et cetera. Do noble Lords know what happens to
the back-room boys of the film industry? They are usually
graduates, often in English, who decide that they want to go into
the creative arts. Then they have to retrain, work on the job and
spend time running around. They do not take HND or NVQ
qualifications at level 4 or 5 in the subjects they need; they
may be difficult to find. Indeed, there are local pathways for
skills at this level, which is roughly the training, if I have it
right—I have a nod there from the noble Baroness, Lady Lane-Fox,
who is retaking her place, so I will take that as a win. But that
is a local pathway, not a national one, and this is a national
industry. Surely, we should be expanding our national careers
structure to take in level 4 and 5, and say where you can go,
because there is a huge unmet need. That need is historic; the
first time I heard of a lack of technician-level training in this
House was well over 30 years ago.
We have got to start to address—the noble Lord, , was the first to say it—the
idea that we are not taking these things seriously. Unless you do
that, you will continue down this path of ignoring where the
demand is where you can generate a better than living wage, and
go on to do other things.
I could have expanded on these points—a lot of the other
information was about social skills—but there are just a few
seconds left to me. Everybody says, “tell the teacher to do it”.
Teachers have an awful lot to do. Are we encouraging children in
our schools—for instance, in sports clubs and arts
organisations—to get a taste in school, then go out to where they
will meet adults they will have to talk to and interact with? You
can acquire many social skills there in a non-professionalised
way, with people they may look up to, not people they are forced
to say “Sir” or “Miss” to in a classroom. That would be a better
way forward.
We can try to make school a smorgasbord of trying things—trying a
few essentials to go on and do other things to acquire more
skills, inside and outside the structure. Unless we get out of
the idea that we are just getting rubber-stamped to a certain
level on subjects, then told, “Off you go, life is perfect”, we
will continue to fail. It is quite clear that most of us do not
learn that way, or we do not learn successfully. Unless we can
embrace that at a more fundamental level than we do now, we will
merely continue to make the mistakes of today.
3.16pm
(Lab)
My Lords, it is always a pleasure to follow the noble Lord,
. He always speaks with such
engagement on this topic.
I thank the noble Lord, , for bringing this important
subject to our Chamber today. I know that he has a strong
interest in the subject, as do many Peers who have engaged in
this debate that demonstrates the cross-party support for the
importance of skills in our society. I was particularly pleased
that the noble Lord alluded to the learning undertaken by our
Welsh forefathers. Modern Wales has much to be commended on in
its innovative work. At Skills Competition Wales, over 280
talented young people from across the country were recognised for
their outstanding vocational skills at an awards ceremony at
Trinity Saint David University in March this year.
I congratulate both our maiden speech contributors. I am sure
that we will welcome their future contribution to the House.
In Breaking down the Barriers to Opportunity, set out clearly Labour's fifth
mission in government: to break down the barriers to opportunity
for every child, at every stage, and shatter the class ceiling.
We will track our progress on this mission through three stages
of education: boosting child development, with half a million
more children hitting the early learning goals by 2030; achieving
a sustained rise in young people's school outcomes; and building
young people's life skills with an expansion of high-quality
education, employment and training routes, so that more people
than ever are on pathways with good prospects by 2030.
The Office for National Statistics, based in Newport, estimates
that there were 851,000 young people not in employment, education
or training between October and December 2023. That number has
risen by 20,000 compared to the same period in 2022, and accounts
for 12% of all 16 to 24 year-olds.
Education is at the heart of Labour's mission to expand
opportunity. From our earliest years through to learning or
retraining as adults, gaining knowledge, skills and
qualifications, and exploring our interests and abilities,
enables us to build the lives that we want, and the society that
we share. Today, the best education that our country has to offer
is not available to every young person. The opportunity to learn
and train as an adult is limited and available to too few. At
this point, I want to acknowledge the work of the Open
University; it is a marvellous organisation, initiated of course
by Harold Wilson.
Our mission to spread opportunity means enabling everyone to
access the opportunities that excellent education brings. Despite
much talk, the Government have not developed the apprenticeships
and skills pathways that will allow adults to reskill and upskill
throughout their life. The result is that we have too few people
who have the skills we need for growth. So what will Labour do to
redress this huge deficit? Retraining and upskilling will need to
be locally based and tailored to the needs of each community:
plumbers to fit new heat pumps; engineers to lead the application
of AI; and solar power fitters to harness renewables. We will set
up new technical excellence colleges in all parts of the country,
so that people have the specialist skills that local businesses
need, and transform the apprenticeship levy to give employers the
flexibility they need to train their workforce in new and
relevant skills.
During National Apprenticeship Week in early February, Labour
took the opportunity to announce further changes and policy
initiatives. We set out our plans to boost skills training and
drive economic growth, as data revealed that a decade of decline
in apprenticeships and training is holding Britain back.
Apprenticeship starts have declined, and the Government have
failed to equip individuals and the economy with the skills to
meet national challenges, including the transition to net zero
and rising demand for digital skills. To reverse this downward
trend, we will train over 1,000 new careers advisors to provide
professional advice and guidance at schools and colleges,
alongside high-quality work experience for young people.
Labour will give businesses the flexibility that they are asking
for to train their workforce and deliver growth. We will start by
turning the apprenticeships levy into a growth and skills levy.
The Government's current levy has seen millions of pounds that
should be used for skills training going unspent, even as
businesses report growing skills shortages. Giving businesses
flexibility will ensure that this money can be better spent on a
greater range of training courses, including basic English, basic
maths and digital skills, so that businesses can fill gaps and
people can gain new skills.
As part of a wider package of reform, we will establish Skills
England, a new national body, driving forward a national ambition
to meet the skills needs of the next decade. This will be driven
by pushing power and decisions on skills spending out from
Westminster to local communities, so those communities can better
match up skills training with their local business needs and grow
local and regional economies. My noble friend made many apposite points
regarding the need for skills in, for example, the creative
sector. Young people and adults are ambitious for their families'
futures; they want to learn new skills and get new jobs, or
progress at work, but they are being let down. We will reverse
this trend. We will give businesses the flexibility that they
need to train people up, from digital technologies to the green
skills needed to tackle climate change.
An important aspect of the skills agenda is digital skills, again
noted by my noble friend . We lack a properly
developed strategy. We need a digitally literate population. If
we fail, we will be left with a lack of opportunity, particularly
in employment. We rely on the internet, as many noble Lords have
said, for applying for jobs, accessing education and training,
banking—except for my noble friend Lord Griffiths—paying bills
and accessing other services. People find employment online and
many social media sites are available where professionals can
network. Last year's consumer digital index, which is run by
Lloyds Bank and commissioned by the DfE, reported that there are
about 13 million people in the UK with very low digital
capability, which means they
“are likely to struggle interacting with online services”.
Furthermore, we need to provide adults with the opportunity to
improve their literacy skills. The National Literacy Trust
estimates that more than 16.4% of the adult population are
functionally illiterate. How can people improve their digital
skills if they do not already have good literacy skills?
Adult skills spending has been cut under this Government. Last
December, the Institute for Fiscal Studies pointed out that
“total adult skills spending in 2024–25 will still be 23% below
2009–10 levels. Spending on classroom-based adult education has
fallen especially sharply”.
This is driven by falling learner numbers and real-terms cuts in
funding rates. In 2024-25, it will be more than 40% below 2009-10
levels. This is very damaging to our economy, and the situation
needs to be reversed.
Digital skills are crucial for the future of our economy,
businesses and workforce. That is why a core pillar of Labour's
industrial strategy is to harness data for the public good and to
transform digital skills. Young people need to understand
developing technologies to be able to use them. Our curriculum
review will embed digital literacy and skills throughout
children's learning.
Can the Minister say how the Government are working with
businesses to understand the digital skills needs of the future?
How can all skills needs be best met now, and what can the
Government do to future-proof our skills needs as a country? I
add my support to the noble Lord, , who questioned the defunding
of BTEC courses. I look forward to the Minister's response on
these extremely important matters.
Despite the rhetoric, the Government have overseen a decade of
decline in skills and training opportunities which is holding
Britain back. From digital to green skills, childcare to social
care, a Labour Government will harness the talents and abilities
of the British people so we can strengthen our economy and break
down barriers to opportunity. We will provide more training
opportunities so people can gain new skills, access better jobs
and grow our economy. That is the difference we will make.
3.26pm
The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State, Department for
Education () (Con)
My Lords, I am grateful to all noble Lords across the Chamber for
their contributions. I thank the noble Lord, , for securing this very
important and well-supported debate. It was an honour to be
present to hear the maiden speeches of my noble friends of Hale and . Listening to
a maiden speech reminds us all just what a privilege it is to
serve in your Lordships' House.
If I may, I will step back and remind noble Lords what the
Government are looking to achieve with our overall programme of
skills reform. The noble Lord, , started by talking about the
need for a strategy. I hope he recognises many, if not all, of
the seven points in his speech in the Government's approach.
The Skills for Jobs White Paper, published in January 2021, is
the blueprint for our reforms. It sets out the case for change
and the vital need to drive up skills in our country. We know
that a third of productivity growth can be attributed to
increases in skills levels. I join other noble Lords in thanking
my noble friend Lord Baker for his work over many years to bring
a focus to the skills agenda. But we still face significant gaps
in skills at higher technical levels, with level 4/5 being the
highest qualification for 10% of adults, compared to 20% in
Germany and 34% in Canada.
My noble friend was absolutely right to
highlight the importance of improving productivity in the public
sector as well, and my noble friend Lord Holmes was right to
stress the importance of inclusivity and innovation in developing
skills programmes.
The gaps in our skills are creating significant challenges in the
labour market. As we heard from a number of noble Lords,
employers report that they cannot find people with the skills
they need, particularly the technical skills that drive
innovation and enable adoption of new technologies. I acknowledge
the points raised by the noble Baroness, Lady Coussins, regarding
foreign languages, but I may need to address some of them in
writing.
As it stands, a quarter of job vacancies in the UK are due to
skills shortages. Some estimates show that, by 2030, we will face
a global skills shortage of 85 million. There are major
challenges for the future, as we know from research published by
the department's Unit for Future Skills, which estimates that
between 10% and 30% of jobs could be automated through AI. The
significance of AI was brought out powerfully by my noble friend
Lady Fairhead. That is why we have introduced a series of
reforms, with the aim of developing a world-leading skills system
that is employer-focused and fit for the future. This is backed
by an investment of £3.8 billion over the course of this
Parliament to strengthen higher and further education. The noble
Baroness, Lady Wolf, spoke about the need for stability in the
skills system. Probably the strongest thing we hear from
employers is that they want stability so they can plan and
invest.
The noble Baroness, Lady Wilcox, asked about opportunities for
lifelong learning. I remind her of the important lifelong
learning entitlement, which will transform opportunities to
upskill, reskill and develop skills throughout one's
lifetime.
I will divide my remaining remarks into three broad categories,
focusing on an employer-led skills system, our support for
priority growth sectors, and the reform of qualifications. I hope
that addresses the spirit of the remarks made by the noble Lord,
, about looking at this issue in
the round and not in a fragmented way.
As the noble Lord, , said more eloquently than I
can, employers need to be at the heart of our skills system. The
Government have worked hard to bring education and business
together so that skills and training provision directly support
economic growth and productivity. The Government are proud of
their new high-quality apprenticeship programme. Nearly 700
apprenticeship standards are now available, covering around 70%
of occupations in this country. The noble Lord, , asked about the drop in the
number of apprenticeships. I think he knows what I am going to
say: we focused very much on quality, so we took out
apprenticeships that did not deliver for apprentices. I say to
the noble Baroness, Lady Wilcox, that I am not sure what changing
the name of the apprenticeship levy achieves, but I think that
Labour's proposals are estimated to halve the number of
apprenticeships, which would have a very serious impact on our
economy.
I thank my noble friend for acknowledging the value
of the apprenticeship levy. I will address some of his concerns,
and those of the noble Baroness, Lady Garden, about reform of the
levy. We already pay 100% of the apprenticeship training costs
for 16 to 21 year-olds in respect of SMEs. We have also doubled
the levy transfer limit from 25% to 50% so that levy payers can
maximise the benefit of their levy funds.
The noble Baroness, Lady Wolf, gave us her expert insight into
the importance of level 3 apprenticeships. As she is aware, they
are the most popular apprenticeships, accounting for 43.3% of
starts in the current academic year. We now have 229
apprenticeships standards at level 3 and an active
apprenticeships campaign promoting both level 2 and level 3
apprenticeships.
My noble friend noted the importance of
manufacturing apprenticeships. The Government are investing £50
million in a two-year pilot to support providers to deliver more
high-value apprenticeships, particularly in areas such as
engineering, advanced manufacturing, green technologies and life
sciences.
My noble friend talked about the importance of
micro-credentials. He will be aware that we have introduced
skills bootcamps, which provide flexible training for adults aged
19 and over, which are directly linked to roles in priority
sectors. These, again, were courses that were designed and
delivered in partnership with employers to respond to their
needs. There are now more than 1,000 skills bootcamps available
across England.
Turning to the local skills improvement plans, I thank the noble
Baroness, Lady Lane-Fox, for her leadership in this area. I was
glad to hear how important and innovative that direct link is—if
I followed her remarks correctly—between business, higher
education and further education, just getting people in the room
together to work out what an area needs.
The noble Lord, , asked about oversight of the
LSIPs. The employer representative bodies are now leading on
implementation and review of the plans, and each of those bodies
will publish a public annual progress report in June 2024 and
June 2025, setting out their progress.
We also think the introduction of institutes of technology is
extremely important. They are collaborations between colleges,
universities and business, designed to deliver the best technical
education and help businesses to get the workforce they need. We
will have 21 of these new institutes in place from September.
The noble Lord, , said that—I hope I wrote this
down correctly—20% of adults in Germany have higher technical
qualifications, and that this is an important gap in our skills
landscape. That is why we have introduced HTQs to meet exactly
that need at levels 4 and 5. They have a quality mark that is
awarded only to those qualifications that deliver the skills
employers need. That also speaks to the point about recognition
of qualifications that the noble Earl, , referred to. To date, 172
qualifications have been approved as HTQs across seven routes.
The Government have also sought to prioritise five sectors that
are critical to driving our growth in the 21st century: green
industries, digital technologies, life sciences, creative
industries, and advanced manufacturing.
The noble Baronesses, Lady Hayman and Lady Bennett of Manor
Castle, and the noble Lord, , all talked about the importance
of green industries. The net-zero growth plan sets out how the
Department for Education is empowering people to get skills for
green jobs, but this challenge is a very significant one, whether
it be in relation to workers in offshore wind or, as the noble
Baroness, Lady Hayman, used as an example, in relation to heat
pumps. We are funding a range of apprenticeship standards in
green occupations, including level 4 electrical power networks
engineering and new low-carbon heating technician
apprenticeships. We also have T-levels to support this area in
construction engineering and land management.
The noble Baroness, Lady Hayman, asked about the nature action
plan. On timing, the technical answer is “soon” but not “in due
course”—that is the good news. We have made a public commitment
that it will be published in the first half of this year, and
that public commitment still stands. I think that is “soon”.
Digital technologies are a foundation for our economy, but 18% of
the UK labour force do not have the essential digital skills that
they need for work. The noble Lord, of Burry Port, asked about
cross-departmental working. As an example, we are working closely
with DSIT to convene the Digital and Computing Skills Education
Taskforce, aiming to increase the number of individuals taking
digital and computing qualifications and attracting people into
digital jobs. We have invested over £100 million in the National
Centre for Computing Education, to improve teaching of and
participation in computer science GCSE and A-level.
I recognise very much, in my noble friend Lady Fairhead's
comments about AI, the pace of change and the difficulty in
government to stay ahead of the curve. I hope the House agrees
that my right honourable friend the Prime Minister has given
great leadership in the area of ethical AI and safety in AI. My
colleagues in the department are also making great progress, and
I look forward to being able to update the House on some of those
activities in due course.
The third area of focus is on life sciences. The UK life sciences
industry is one of the largest in the world, with the potential
to create up to 133,000 new roles in 2030. Through the Office for
Life Sciences, my department is working with employers and
industry bodies to identify and address skills challenges.
The noble Lord, of Burry Port, talked about
the importance of the creative industries. This is one of the
fastest growing sectors of the UK economy, and we have clearly
set out the Government's ambition—shared with industry—to support
a million new jobs through education and skills objectives, in
our creative industries sector vision. We have developed 57
creative and design occupational standards and we have more
flexible training models to support apprenticeships in the
creative industries, where short-term contracts or other
non-standard employment models are the norm.
Finally, our fifth area of strategic focus is on advanced
manufacturing. Manufacturing provides 2.6 million jobs in the
economy—7% of total employment—but there are currently 70,000
vacancies. Our plan sets out our ambition to establish an
advanced manufacturing skills forum with the National
Manufacturing Skills Taskforce. Again, this is supported by
skills bootcamps and T-levels, to create a pipeline of skilled
workers.
I turn to our qualification reform, which was a subject of
interest for my noble friends and and the noble Baroness, Lady
Garden. As the House knows from our debates on this subject
during the passage of the skills Bill, we aim to fund only
qualifications that are of the highest quality and lead to good
progression outcomes. T-levels are delivering fantastic results
for those 16 to 19 year-olds across the country. I encourage my
noble friend to perhaps meet some of
those students with me, because they are delighted by their
courses. Over 30,000 young people have now enrolled on a T-level
since their launch four years ago, with roughly 16,000 enrolling
in the last year.
My noble friend asked some very specific
questions about the precise number of qualifications that will
have funding removed and the number of students taking them. I
will cover some of those points now, but I will also write to him
and put a copy of my letter in the Library, because this is a
slightly complex area. We have not yet finished all our
decision-making on the funding of qualifications, but we have
published the number of courses and enrolments, rather than
students, where either funding is being removed or we are
considering it, and I will put the links to that information in
my letter.
As the House knows, we are removing public funding from
qualifications in phases. The first phase was for 5,500
qualifications, which had either no or very low enrolments. The
second phase is for the removal of funding from qualifications
that overlap with T-levels. The final phase relates to our
approval process through which alternative academic
qualifications must go to be funded from September 2025.
On the second phase—the removal of funding from qualifications
that overlap with T-levels—waves 1 and 2 covered about 130
qualifications and about 39,000 enrolments. Within that, there
were 10 qualifications that had more than 1,000 enrolments. Wave
3 covered 85 qualifications with 17,000 enrolments, and there
were five qualifications with more than 1,000 enrolments. Wave 4
is expected to cover around 70 qualifications and 32,000
enrolments, of which nine qualifications had more than 1,000
enrolments. I raise the point about the relatively small number
of qualifications with large numbers of enrolments because my
noble friend talked about T-levels being
too complicated, but the existing system is extremely
complicated. We want to bring simplicity and clarity to the
quality of the qualifications that young people are
undertaking.
The final reason why I would like to write to my noble friend,
rather than try to explain this in any more detail at the
Dispatch Box, is that T-levels are very large courses covering a
variety of occupational specialisms and lasting two years. The
qualifications being defunded are of different sizes; some can be
very small, and one person could take several enrolments. The
enrolment data for older-style qualifications cannot be directly
compared with T-levels, which are much larger. I assure my noble
friend and the House that students will continue to have a range
of options available to them at level 3, in addition to A-levels
and T-levels, including new technical occupational qualifications
and alternative academic qualifications, helping to ensure that
all students have a range of options. Each one of those will have
employer standards and occupational standards at its heart.
(Con)
I am very grateful to the Minister for the full answer she has
already given. Can she give her assurance that the measure of
enrolments, which I understand is not the same as the number of
students, going back to the baseline that I referred to, will be
in her letter to me?
(Con)
It will.
I turn to the wider points raised about the curriculum by my
noble friends Lady Sater and Lord Effingham, the noble Lord,
, and the noble Earl, . To critics of the
curriculum, I say as a starting point that we work very closely
with the Education Endowment Foundation, which gives a robust,
highly respected and independent evidence base about all the
reforms that we have undertaken, so there is nothing ideological
in what we are doing in our schools. It is based on the best
available evidence, including randomised control trials and other
similarly robust approaches.
I absolutely agree with the noble Earl, , that it is a bit artificial
to separate knowledge and skills; it is the combination of the
two that is powerful. I agree with my noble friend Lady Sater
about the importance of confidence and agility, but we believe
those are based in a knowledge-rich curriculum that fosters
competence and mastery in a subject. I may have to include my
response about storming the barricades with the noble Lord,
, in my letter. All I can say
at this point is that it sounds an interesting option.
In relation to my noble friend Lord Effingham's question
regarding prohibition of phones, if additional evidence emerges
that they are a problem—we know that most schools already
prohibit phones in some way—we will seek to make our guidance
statutory. The noble Baroness, Lady Valentine, emphasised the
importance of careers. I remind the House that in the financial
year 2024-25 we are investing more than £90 million in
high-quality careers provision for all.
I am running out of time. My last point is to acknowledge the
point made by my noble friend that the Government cannot make
a success of these skills reforms on their own. Employers must
also do more to support the development of workforce skills. We
have seen employer investment in training fall by 7.8% in real
terms between 2017 and 2022. As my noble friend said, we must
move away from reliance on migration to fill skills gaps and
towards investment in the skills of our domestic workforce.
(Con)
At the beginning of her speech, the Minister said—I have not
heard a Minister say it before—that the forecast of the skills
gap in 2030 is hundreds of millions, if not billions. It is
absolutely extraordinary, and our education system as presently
constituted cannot possibly meet it. I gave her forewarning of
this in my speech: will she consider the proposal that has been
put to her to insert into ordinary schools in the UK a technical
sleeve, known as a UTC sleeve? We have 10 schools that want to do
it and applications have been made to her, but there has been no
reaction at all from the Department for Education. When will she
be in a position to give approval to this? Will it be before the
next election?
(Con)
The skills gap numbers that I cited were in relation to global
skills gaps. The point I was making was that this is not a
uniquely UK problem in relation to skills; it is a global
problem. As the noble Lord knows, his correspondence with the
department is the responsibility of another Minister. I
understand that it is under consideration.
3.53pm
(CB)
My Lords, I have found this a thoroughly absorbing, enlightening
and encouraging debate. I am extremely grateful to all noble
Lords who have spoken, from so many different perspectives. I
particularly look forward to hearing more in the future from the
noble Lords, of Hale and , following
their splendid maiden speeches. I am also grateful to the
Minister. I very much echo the tribute by the noble Lord, , to her knowledge and
commitment to this area, and thank her for her characteristically
comprehensive response to such a broad debate. I am certainly not
going to try to summarise in any sense, but I very much look
forward to reading it in Hansard. It has very much confirmed to
me the importance of skills as an issue, the breadth of areas it
covers and the scale of the challenges we need to address. It is
much too broad for a single debate, so I hope we will have other
opportunities to discuss it.
My noble friend spotted the fact that I had
omitted “education” from the Motion. That was because I wanted to
focus in particular on the skills aspect. Other noble Lords,
including the noble Lord, , commented that skills are
not taken seriously enough. It seems that for too long education
has been a powerful horse pulling a rather ramshackle skills
carriage, when what we need is for them to work in harness with
other horses: employers, other departments, parents—all the
groups we have talked about—and they should be pulling a
first-class, golden carriage accommodating both education and
skills. So I was very glad to hear the noble Lord, Lord Holmes,
talk about a vision for skills, which perhaps is the design for
that golden carriage that we need. This is an issue that I will
certainly wish to push further, but I reiterate my thanks to all
noble Lords for a really inspiring morning.
Motion agreed.
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