Education and Skills Bill

My Lords, the three Front Benches have promised us a challenging summer and autumn in their admirable contributions. Those Back-Bench speakers who preceded me have also set the rest of us a standard in coming forward with ideas. The noble Lord, Lord Sutherland, had a crafty idea to deal with and expiate the problem of criminality. The noble Lord, Lord Pilkington, has just spoken on the technical college proposal. The right reverend Prelate the Bishop of St Albans introduced the moral and social dimension of education. The noble Baroness, Lady Morgan of Huyton, introduced something which, for a moment, seemed not concerned with the Bill but is relevant to its purposes: how to better the transition from primary to secondary. I regard that as utterly fundamental. In welcoming the Bill and its purposes my concerns will be over how it responds to a fundamental need to invest in the intellectual and skills capital of our people and how it addresses a moral and social issue of great weight: how to engage those who have not been successful in education and who feel to an extent rejected by society. They in turn reject society, with sad consequences for their lives and for the quality of our civilisation. I have four issues to raise, the first of which is the imperative to raise the standards in skills and education. The second is the motivation to do that. Thirdly, related to motivation is creating a perception in the minds of employers and students that what is on offer to them is relevant to them and of high quality. Finally, we must be careful to ensure that in perfect administration we do not create so much red tape that we cause people to back out of our good intentions. I start with the economic imperative. References have been made to the report by the noble Lord, Lord Leitch, and his finding that we need to lift the proportion with a level 4 qualification to 40 per cent by 2020, compared with 29 per cent at the time of his report. It is a big increase. I have said before, and I say again, that talking of at least 40 per cent can be misleading, because the Germans and the Americans are there already. We are talking about where we will be in 2020. In other words, in 2020 we will be as far behind as we are now. On how far behind we are now and the prospect that the Germans will advance, our Select Committee on Economic Affairs, in its report on apprenticeships, told us that, by their early 30s, 78 per cent of Germans are at level 3, compared with our 42 per cent—a gap of more than 30 percentage points at the moment. If you dip down, there is still a big gap at level 2. It is not only the Germans who are 20-odd percentage points above us, the French are too. So they are at a higher level to move up beyond their high levels in excess of ours already. That is a tremendous challenge and there is an imperative need to make a success of what is intended in the Bill. That brings me to the important issues. The first proposal on my agenda is to increase the entitlement to free level 3 qualification up to the age of 25. Bearing in mind how far we are behind, surely it must not be limited to that. People between 25 and 35 are still raising a family and getting the money together for a first home. Our problem is so great that we must be a touch more generous than 25. I am pushing it up not just for their sakes, but for all our sakes. Then there is the statutory provision for free courses for a level 2 and for those at the most basic levels of mathematics and English. Great, but if you can look at the sums in the impact statement, you see that the extra expenditure and, through that, the extra places must be very few. I have looked into that with the help of officials and it is an issue that we ought to go into further as we proceed. The ideas are good, but I am concerned—this is my only concern about the Bill—that we use the opportunity that it gives us to do what the Government and all of us want. I am concerned that we shall not adequately exploit the opportunity. That brings me to the question of motivation, my second point, which the noble Baroness, Lady Morris, raised. Compulsion is one approach. The successful approach is: ““I want to do it””; and, from employers, ““I want to be engaged in this””, rather than being forced and driven by laws, requirements and penalties. We need some new thinking on what will motivate young people, especially those who have been least successful in education, and have left it and shaken the dust of education off their sandals—I am talking about adults now—to come back in to remedy what they have missed in the past. I wrote to the government department concerned, the DIUS, about a month ago suggesting the need to bring together people with a wide range of experience and expertise to consider the issue of why those people do not come back and how to entice them back. It is not the kind of committee I want, but this layman is saying: ““Offer them something they want—it may be studying Spanish to go on holiday, just to get them going and back into learning. It may be learning how to play rock music. Get them engaged in something they enjoy doing and you can develop from there””. You have to get them through the door to get them started. That is the big problem. Perhaps government departments can be helpful in getting people to move up from level 2 to level 3—where the Germans have been so immensely successful—by laying down job specifications. For example, languages are very important in the health service and the police, and such a specification would stimulate some people to do things they would not otherwise want to do. Motivation is the key issue behind everything we hope to achieve. One piece of brilliant new thinking from this Government, in which I played a small part for a time, was the creation of Learn Direct. This system made it easy to learn from home by providing first class learning materials and allowing you to use modern technology to do it when you wanted, how you wanted and wherever you were at any time. It has been a great success. About a quarter of a million people are engaged in programmes at level 2 or, if they are not at level 2, they are ready to lift their attainment in the basics or a vocation. This kind of approach could also be relevant in schools education as a back-up to teachers. I may, if I remember, come back to that if I have sufficient time. The Government have been innovative in qualifications and opportunities. That is great. One such opportunity is the young apprenticeships scheme which now involves 9,000 young people, I think, in extended pilots. They are going well and had a very successful report by Ofsted. However, it is one thing to do it when it has been carefully nurtured, managed and helped for 9,000, but to go national is a very different business. We need a huge investment of mind in how to achieve that and how to motivate and encourage employers to want to offer the opportunities. There have to be schools which can provide the back-up. When schools move to the 14 vocational diplomas it will be the biggest challenge that secondary schools have faced for decades. They will be dealing with 14 diplomas at three levels in addition to what they do already and the three new ““academic”” diplomas. How on earth can we do that? We have to invest in teachers in order to have the capabilities to offer this to a high standard. If it is not to a high standard and if it is not seen to be relevant by employers then it will not succeed. People will have to want to do it and see value in it. There is a big challenge not in the concept but in the implementation of the policy. I am grateful to the noble Lord, Lord Pilkington, for raising the question of technical colleges. I have worked with the noble Lord, Lord Baker, on this and have made tentative enquiries in various parts of the country about offering to 14 or 16 year-olds the opportunity of diplomas that require highly specialised and costly equipment and facilities that have continually to be updated. Those should be offered by specially built, designed and equipped technical colleges of high standing, perhaps sponsored by universities and major employers. The initial response we are getting is encouraging. These are very early days. However, just as there has been creative thinking about the options offered in secondary schools—the young apprenticeships and the diplomas—we have to be prepared to open our minds, while accepting the comprehensive as the basic rock of the system, to develop our minds and reach out to new ideas. I am glad, incidentally, to hear that government are opening the door to all-through schools. There may be an issue here about the age of transition from primary to secondary, but perhaps we will discuss that on another day. There is provision, which I welcome, for the local authority to be responsible for seeing that the lads and the lasses do their stuff, but there is no responsibility in the Bill to provide the resources. I do not see how you can do one without simultaneously doing the other, and one must not assume that if you have done one, Parliament will approve the other. My time is up. In conclusion, the key issue behind all this is that, having created an excellent framework and highly desirable objectives, we must provide the underpinning in terms of teachers who are well qualified to teach and the capability in specialist colleges, where they are needed, to offer highly technical subjects. We must also be sure that the employers want to engage because they can see that this is what they want and that it is not bound up in red tape. It is being made easy for them and it is so relevant. On that basis, the Bill can be a great success.