Education and Skills Bill

My Lords, I want to be rather more positive about this Bill than was my noble friend Baroness Morris of Yardley, my former ministerial colleague. I give this Bill a very warm welcome, especially Part 1, on which I want to focus my remarks. The duty that it imposes on young people aged 16 and 17 to participate in education and training and the requirement on LEAs to promote their participation, as well as the duties on employers to make it possible for young people with jobs to participate, are a hugely important educational reform. I believe that the Bill, when enacted, will be an historic step in the expansion of education for those who have opted out of learning far too soon, in many cases damaging their prospects for the rest of their lives. Our position in the OECD tables, which the Minister cited, is totally unacceptable. This reform is long overdue and, therefore, all the more welcome. The moral and economic case for it is overwhelming. Like my noble friend the Minister, I want to say something about history. It is nearly 100 years since, in 1909, a consultative committee on education recommended a system of compulsory part-time education for young people after they left school. The committee saw it as an option to be decided on locally but hoped that it would spread to cover the whole country. A century ago, progressive thinkers of the Edwardian era produced the first official report that can be said to be the initial steps towards the Bill that we are discussing today. As the Minister, the noble Lord, Lord Pilkington of Oxenford, and others have said, the Bill’s legislative antecedent was the Fisher Act of 1918, the first of the three most important education Acts of the 20th century. That Act provided a legislative framework for part-time education for those aged 14 to 18. The day continuation schools that it proposed were not mandatory and, as the Minister said, their development was killed off by the Geddes economies that axed public expenditure in the early 1920s. My noble friend Lord Layard reminded us that the idea was revised in the second great education Bill of the 20th century, which became the 1944 Education Act, sometimes known as the Butler Act. The Act envisaged that LEAs would have a duty to provide county colleges—perhaps the sort of thing that the noble Lord, Lord Pilkington, was referring to—for young people not at school or in other educational institutions. I believe that there were no sanctions for non-attendance for the day, or two half-days, envisaged in the legislation. Once again, the provision was not implemented. In 1959, the Crowther report on the education of 15 to 18 year-olds put the case again. Another 50 years have passed since then, but it finally looks as though we may be getting there. I have touched on the long history of proposals for extending education on a part-time basis for young people who have left school to underline my belief that compulsion is required to make it a reality. Those who argue for a voluntary approach have failed to absorb the lessons of history. In the past, because there was no compulsion, nothing happened. I put it to those who oppose compulsion and argue for a voluntary approach that, when the school leaving age was last raised, in 1973, it was not considered to be sensible to argue for no compulsion. When full-time school education is extended by statute, the view is taken that it should be universally applied. Why should that view not be taken in relation to the part-time extension of post-school education for 16 and 17 year-olds? There can be no half measures in trying to reach the most vulnerable young people who are currently receiving no education or training but who desperately need it if they are to engage in meaningful work in today’s economy. Unlike the noble Baroness, Lady Morris of Bolton, and other noble Lords on the opposition Benches, I therefore congratulate the Government on having the courage of their convictions and on making participation compulsory, even though it is important to do everything that we possibly can to ensure that enforcement is a last resort. I was reassured by what the Minister said about this, although I thought that he was perhaps a little overoptimistic about the numbers of people who are likely to be resistant to the Bill’s requirements. As other noble Lords have said, it is vital to recognise that, for the legislation to work, the education and training provided must be suitable to meet the needs of youngsters for whom continuation in full-time classroom learning is not an acceptable option. These are the pupils who do not like school and want to leave at the first opportunity. Many of them are, I am afraid, wholly unrealistic about their employment opportunities and have not made the link between learning and having a good job. To help them to make this link and to motivate them requires ingenuity and imagination. Innovative forms of learning, largely based in the workplace, are required. The Bill embraces two main options: employment with a part-time course followed in an FE college or the workplace, or an apprenticeship. The distinction between them will often be blurred but in both cases the contribution of employers is central. For that reason, I am delighted that the CBI broadly backs the Bill and supports raising the participation age and reducing what it calls, "““the significant proportion of 16 to 17 year olds who are not in education, employment or training””." However, like my noble friend Lord Layard, I was disappointed that the CBI seemed to be saying that it is acceptable for firms to provide employment for 16 and 17 year-olds without providing proper training, too. In its briefing to Members of this House, it claims that many employers providing ““valuable work opportunities”” for young people will be put off by having to provide training and to police participation. The question must be: just how valuable are these work opportunities if they are not accompanied by properly organised training? Nor does it seem likely that young people themselves will feel, as the CBI said, "““forced back into school or college””," because they are asked to pursue qualifications in a work-based context. That would be truly irrational behaviour on the part of those young people who have already rejected formal education in the classroom. It is, however, vital to accredit in-house training that is provided by employers, which will encourage them to see value in training their young employees towards obtaining vocational qualifications. Such training should allow progression from the diplomas for l4 to 19 year-olds that numbers of young people will, by the time that this Bill is enacted, have been following. The reform of vocational qualifications has been on the agenda for a long time. It is vital that the sector skills councils address these reforms, simplifying and rationalising an overcomplex system and keeping qualifications up to date. This is not a one-off job—continued monitoring will be needed to make sure that they really are fit for purpose as economic change takes place. That brings me to apprenticeships. Their decline over the past 30 years is little short of disastrous. The most shocking statistic that I came across when I was a Minister in the Department for Education and Employment was that in the borough of Lambeth there were only 25 apprenticeship places available—that was in a part of London where many young people had rejected full-time classroom education. We must all lament the fact that work-based learning has more than halved over the past 20 years. I deeply regret the fact that, as a Minister, I was unable to do more to halt the decline. However, I am pleased that the committee that I set up, which was chaired by Sir John Cassels, to examine ways of restoring apprenticeships eventually led to the recent report from DIUS, World-class Apprenticeships. The report set a target of 400,000 apprenticeships by 2020. However, this target will be achieved only if employers in the public and voluntary sectors, as well as the private sector, embrace the new scheme with real drive and enthusiasm and are committed to improvements in quality. The Government also have to play their part in providing the right incentives and in avoiding unnecessary red tape. The recently advertised post for director of the National Apprenticeship Service will be one of the most important jobs in our education system. I hope that it attracts an excellent field. The sector skills councils must also give high priority to the delivery of not just apprenticeships but high-quality apprenticeships. This Bill is not about universities but, as a vice-chancellor of a university that is committed to widening participation, I believe that, when the Bill’s measures have been implemented, universities will benefit from a wider range of young people with the potential to benefit from higher education. Widening participation from sixth forms and FE A-level programmes has almost reached its peak, and it has been an uphill struggle. A successful work-based route through apprenticeships and other programmes can and should lead into higher education for some of the participants. This will be particularly true for foundation degrees that are jointly designed by universities and employers. But many other vocational degrees in higher education may be appropriate next steps for some of the young people who will benefit from this Bill. However, universities must be willing to reach out to them and accept their work-based qualifications as alternatives to academic qualifications for entry to university courses. Some details in the Bill require further consideration at later stages. For example, like some other noble Lords, I would like to see the clauses on adult education becoming a little more radical. However, Second Reading is not the time to quibble about such details. This Bill is a great step forward in the long history of extending education to a greater proportion of the population. It has taken 100 years to reach this point. Progress may have been slow, but progressing we now are. If this House is still sitting in 100 years’ time, it will look back to this date and say, ““This was an historic moment””. I greatly look forward to the Bill’s full implementation by, I hope, 2015.