Education and Skills Bill

My Lords, this is the Bill that many of us have wanted for decades. I suppose that, if we were old enough, we would have wanted it since 1918. The Minister and others have mentioned that, but they have not mentioned the fact that the requirement for education to 18 was repeated in the Education Act 1944 by the Conservative and Labour Government. The only proviso was that it would not be implemented until resources permitted. It is extraordinary how many things resources have permitted since then, but not apparently this. The result has been one of the most unequal education systems in the advanced world. It is bipolarised, with many people leaving at the minimum school leaving age, which is low, and many people going on to a good higher education system. Associated with that has been a very unequal distribution of earnings, which we all deplore. We have seen huge advances in A-levels and university education, but for the other half of our children there has been far too little progress since the raising of the school leaving age to 16 in the early 1970s. Now, at last, we have a Bill that is almost entirely devoted to that group of children. It is extraordinarily unusual to have an education debate that is confined to this group of children. I totally welcome it and I congratulate the Government on having proposed the Bill. I have two important questions about the Bill. First, will it actually deliver the quality that one hopes for for the people who will get more education because of it? Will the education be good enough? Secondly, can we achieve the quantity that is implied by the universal requirement in the Bill? On quality, how much education will people have to have, and of what kind? The Bill says that a person must be either in full-time education or apprenticeship or in part-time education or training while in work. What is the definition of part-time education or training? The Bill says that a person must be working towards a qualification accredited by the QCA and be getting 280 hours a year of guided learning. That is wonderful, but there is a proviso. If he is not getting 280 hours of guided learning, he must be working for a qualification for a number of hours that are assigned by the QCA. This is a most awful weakness. Surely we should specify that people should get some education, not be signed up for something for which they will have to do some education if they want the qualification. I understand the thinking, but let us suppose that the employer thinks that a person could get the qualification with less than the 280 hours of guided learning. Obviously, such a person should be doing a higher qualification or aiming to achieve more than a bare pass. We do not want people to be signed up just for a qualification; we want them to get education. Equally, another employer might sign up a person knowing that he or she was not likely to get that education. We must have a specification of how much education a person should get, not just what they are signed up for. I hope that the Minister can look again at this weak link in the description of extra education. Another aspect of quality is where this education is provided. Where will the guided learning happen? The Labour Party used to talk about off-the-job education and training. I do not think that these words appear in the Bill, although I may not have read every word. However, in general, that is not said. The Bill should refer to education away from the individual’s workstation, although it quite possibly could be on the employer’s premises. People can learn a lot at their workstations, but the basic purpose of the Bill is to stop people spending all their time at their workstations. They need to be able to think about what they are doing, as well be able to do the job in front of them. We are concerned about getting an educated workforce with the ability to analyse what it is doing as well as just being able to perform rote operations. That is lacking in parts of the British workforce, which is why we have an Education and Skills Bill and not just a skills Bill. We want an educated workforce whose members learn and think about their jobs. I urge the Minister to think about a requirement for most guided learning to be away from the workstation. If that does not happen, we can easily see in what direction this will lead. On quantity, could we get everyone up to the age of 18 into education by 2015? As things are, I very much doubt whether we could do that. It would not be for the reasons of penalties that have been discussed; it would be to do with what is required from employers in order to make this possible. No one thinks that we will have everyone in full-time education. A great part of this expansion will have to be in part-time education and apprenticeships. A striking feature of the Bill is that, in order to satisfy the law, young people will have to be not just in part-time education but in employment for more than 20 hours a week or on an apprenticeship. This will require a huge response from employers. My sums suggest that there will have to be something like a doubling in the number of young people on apprenticeships or in jobs with training, which would require at least 250,000 extra places of that kind. Can that happen? Some existing employers who now do not provide training will provide training, but others will say, ““If we have to provide training, we are not going to be bothered with young people””. We need to find an additional incentive to get them interested. I see that the noble Lord, Lord Wakeham, is no longer here, but the report on the apprenticeship system by the Economic Affairs Committee, which he chaired and on which I serve, addressed the question of how we could get enough employers to provide enough apprenticeship places to satisfy the Government’s undertaking that any young person with adequate minimum qualifications should be guaranteed access to an apprenticeship in the same timescale as that in which we are raising the age of participation in education. That is an important question. It is clear that increasing the number of people on apprenticeships will be the single biggest factor in making it possible to engage everybody in the extended educational experience, so we considered how it could be done. We came to the conclusion that, unless we pay employers something for taking on apprentices, it is unlikely that it will be possible. That costs money, but we need also to think about the implications of moving to a system of compulsory education. Currently we are trying to increase participation in education and to encourage more young people to demand it by bribing them with education maintenance allowance and through child tax credits. However, if education is compulsory, those become less important. What will be absolutely crucial is a sufficient supply of places of a kind that people will want to take up if they are all going to be engaged in education up to 18. We should be spending significant sums of money now on generating an adequate supply of places to ensure that young people aged between 16 and 18 can have their meaningful educational experience. I am not sure that I can make a specific suggestion but I believe that, without any mechanism for generating a supply of opportunities, in a way the Bill lacks conviction. It is no good saying that young people have to remain in education without showing what will be in place to ensure that there is something for them to do. The education maintenance allowance was a simple way of encouraging young people to remain in education, but now we should use at least some of that money or other funds to ensure that there is something for them to go to. That is a thought worth pursuing. Of course it could be too complicated to tie the provision of places to whether someone is entitled to EMA. As has been said, most of the people whom we are talking about come from deprived backgrounds, in which case we could make a lump-sum payment to every employer who takes on an apprentice or an employee aged under 18 with training needs. Sensible sums of money would go a long way towards motivating employers. Unless we have something like that, in enforcing the Bill we will be marching young people unwillingly into full-time education because there will not be the part-time opportunities to make them, as the noble Lord, Lord Dearing, said, get up and go. The Bill is very welcome, but I hope that the Minister can make it more ambitious in terms of quality. We should be talking about what is actually going to happen—the actual provision of education, not the qualification that someone signs up for. We should ensure that most of the education takes place away from the workstation and we must have a realistic strategy for making available enough of the kind of places that young people will want to take up. It is wonderful that the Government have grasped the nettle of undereducation, but let us really root it up.