Education and Skills Bill

My Lords, as the noble Lord, Lord Pilkington, remarked in his introduction, this is landmark legislation. As the noble Lord, Lord Layard, and the noble Baroness, Lady Blackstone, have reminded us, it goes back not only to 1918, as the Minister mentioned, but to the aspirations that the Acts of 1944 and 1959 renewed. Indeed, it has taken us almost a century to fulfil the ambitions of that 1918 Act. The noble Baroness, Lady Morris of Yardley, remarked that what was notable in this Second Reading was the number of people who had spoken without actually discussing issues that the Bill addresses. That was right, but it can nevertheless be explained: the Minister rightly introduced this as part of a package of much wider education reforms being introduced by this Government, and aimed at improving the UK’s overall educational performance. That is necessary if we are to compete in the global marketplace, an issue picked up and discussed at length in the report by the noble Lord, Lord Leitch. Much has been made of our 24th position, out of 29, in the OECD league tables but if those tables are looked at it will be seen that our failure is, above all, in the intermediate and lower ends of the spectrum. The noble Lord, Lord Dearing, picked up that point. We have far too few young people acquiring the intermediate technician grade of NVQ level 2 and 3 skills, and far too many with no qualifications at all. As the noble Lord, Lord Leitch, said, if we are to acquire the requisite 40 per cent of the adult population with level 4 qualifications, they need to start by at least acquiring levels 2 and 3. That is the gap that the Bill aims to fill by either keeping young people in full-time education or training until they are at least 18 or making sure that they are in a job where they are receiving training that leads to some sort of qualification. In doing so, it encourages those with lower level qualifications to stay on and seek better qualifications and puts particular emphasis on the 22 per cent of the cohort—120,000 a year—who are currently leaving school at age 16 and do not proceed to any further qualifications, and especially on the 10 per cent, 60,000 a year, who come into the NEET, not in education employment or training, category, most of whom have effectively dropped out of school when they were 14 or 15, have no qualifications to speak of, drift in and out of employment and are highly vulnerable to drink, drugs and criminality. How is the Bill aimed to cope with those aspirations? It does so by making it a duty on all young people to stay in education or engage in work with training opportunities, in the hope that, although some will resist, the majority, recognising that there is no choice, will comply with the law and settle for staying in school, going on to college, getting an apprenticeship or finding a job which offers the requisite amount of training. It is to be made compulsory but, as with the ban on smoking, the hope is that most people will just fall in with compulsion without fuss. Secondly, the Bill—well, not the Bill, but part of a whole package of reforms about which we have talked at some length—is about reforming the curriculum. It is widely acknowledged that for many young people—roughly 50 per cent of young people in schools—the GCSE/A-level secondary school curriculum has been too academic and a turn off. The aim of the new diplomas is to introduce a new curriculum that is practical and relevant, with opportunities to study subjects allied to the world of work. Side by side with that is the reform of apprenticeships—again, not strictly part of this Bill but part of a Bill that we will be seeing next year, alluded to by the noble Baroness, Lady Morris of Bolton—with an increasing number and range of apprenticeships, so that there are plenty of apprenticeships for young people who wish to leave school and do their learning and earning side-by-side. Indeed, post-2013, there will be an entitlement to apprenticeship for all who want it. Lastly, the aim is to revamp careers guidance to provide better and more comprehensive information, advice and guidance for the general run of students in schools and colleges, especially for those 12 to 13 year- olds who have both complex choices to make between GCSEs, A-levels, diplomas and apprenticeships and to extend the mentoring, advice and placement services already provided by Connexions for the NEET group, responsibility for which is now to be handed over to local authorities. It has been made clear in the debate that we on these Benches are not alone in sharing the Government's aspirations but having some doubts as to whether this package will work. Our reservations come in several forms. First, we are a little worried that the cart has been put before the horse. The key issue mentioned by a large number of people is that of motivating young people and the reform of the secondary school curriculum. As the noble Lord, Lord Parekh, and the noble Baroness, Lady Morris, mentioned, we want these young people to commit themselves to, in the words of the noble Baroness, lifelong learning. We need to keep our fingers crossed that the diplomas will do that job. They remain something of an unknown quantity. We also have to keep our fingers crossed that they will prove popular with young people. I have been very surprised to learn that the hair and beauty diploma, due to be rolled out for a local consortium at Guildford College in September 2009, has no practical hairdressing for the first two years. Last week's Times Educational Supplement highlighted the lack of relevant practical work experience required by many diplomas. We have to hold our judgment on these things; there will inevitably be teething troubles with the diplomas during the next five years. It is crucial that in 2013, when the Bill comes into operation, which is, as my noble friend Lady Walmsley mentioned, when the diplomas are due to be up and running, the two things can coincide well together. We would have preferred to see the new diplomas successfully introduced before making the commitment to raising the learning participation age, but I understand the argument of those who say that unless you commit yourself, you do not get there. Personally, I share the view of the noble Lords, Lord Pilkington, Lord Lucas and Lord Dearing: if we are going to make diplomas work, there is a lot to be said for having specialist institutions. Trying to move young people around from one institution to another to take little bit of the diploma here and there does not work. They need specialist equipment and we need to give them the high regard that there is in the technical high schools in Germany. I hope that some of the experiments that the noble Lord, Lord Dearing, spoke about, will go forward. Secondly, there has been the issue of compulsion; we have had a great deal of discussion about that. I think that we are all agreed that we do not want those who truant from school acquiring criminal records but, given the way that those young people flout the law at 15, why should we expect them to comply with it at 16 and 17? What will happen if they do so? We pressed the Bill team on the matter when we met them the other day and they told us that each individual would be assigned a personal mentor through the Connexions service, as they already have been, who would work with them one-to-one to ensure that they were helped and supported in finding a solution that fitted their circumstances. The evidence is clear. If you have the resources, working intensively with that group can work. I shall read two pieces of evidence given by the Prince’s Trust in the early phases of discussion in Committee in the other place, when they had the evidence sessions. Martina Milburn, from the Prince's Trust said that, "““some of these people are not going to be turned around in a few months—it takes years. The Prince's Trust team programme has a 12-week personal development programme, which takes only unemployed young people and the NEET group … with the right intervention and the right programmes—the Trust certainly is not the only one doing it—you can make a significant difference. Of the 40,000 people in our groups last year, 78 per cent. went into education, training or employment, which I think is phenomenal, given the backgrounds that most of them were from. It is not easy; it is not cheap; and it requires a lot of people doing a lot of the right things””." It is clear from that that it is vital to recognise that not all learning will lead to accredited qualifications. The evidence from Barnardo's and the Prince’s Trust is that, given the chaotic lives of some of those young people, it is a matter, first, of learning how to learn, before they are really ready to go on courses that lead to qualifications. There needs to be some flexibility in the system, a point picked up on by several noble Lords. It is also necessary to recognise the high level of special educational needs among those groups. That in turn raises the question of whether the necessary specialist help is available, and for how long it will be needed. Again, the evidence from the Prince’s Trust made clear the difficulties that apply here. It talks about a pilot programme on which it had a team of 15 people working. It said that, "““at least a third of the young people on something like the team programme have a recognised mental health issue and at least one, if not two, on each programme—each will take only 15 young people—have such an acute mental health issue that they need key intervention ... They have gone off the programme, had treatment and come back six or nine months later to a similar programme. That is all before they could think about sitting down and starting a pre-apprenticeship programme. You are looking at that kind of need with some of the young people who we work with””. .—[Official Report, Commons, Education and Skills Public Bill Committee, 22/01/08; col. 17-18.]" We have to recognise this. It raises the question of whether local authorities, which will have this responsibility, will be able to meet these needs, especially if they are required to go on providing support for those young people until they are 25. Given the failures of the children’s and adolescent health services and the incredible shortage of educational psychologists which appeared when we were debating the Children and Young Person’s Act, one really has very great doubts as to whether local authorities have the capability of providing the mentoring and key support services that are going to be required if we are to turn these young people around. It can be done. The Prince’s Trust shows that it can be done, but it needs an enormous amount of resources. I must move on. I should like to mention two further issues. The first is work-based learning and apprenticeships. In many respects apprenticeships are the ideal training route for these young people, as was emphasised in the excellent report by the House of Lords Select Committee on Economic Affairs. Although companies such as Rolls-Royce still keep this route open, they have become the exception rather than the rule. The Leitch report adopted by the Government aims to reverse these trends and put industry in the driving seat with a target of 500,000 apprenticeship places by 2020. However, I echo the words of the noble Lord, Lord Layard, that it is not by any means clear where these apprenticeship places are necessarily going to come from. There are a large number of firms that are somewhat unhappy about the training requirements of these Bills. Again, I refer to the report produced by Professor Alison Wolf, which indicates that there is a danger that compulsion will drive away the very training opportunities available to those who, fed up with school at 16, leave to take on a job which does not having any training. Nevertheless, they learn a lot in these jobs and it is these jobs which will disappear completely and go to the over-18s and very often to foreign workers prepared to take the relatively low wages. It is very important that the national apprenticeship programme should be up and running as quickly as possible and that there are enough of them. At the moment there is a great dearth of apprenticeships and many colleges have great difficulty in finding places. Finally, I should like to say something about careers guidance. We have all recognised that, with the complex choices that have to be made, careers guidance is absolutely vital. We talked about the Connexions service and the mentoring of the NEET programme but careers guidance to our young people in schools, who are making choices at the age of 12 and 13 between apprenticeships, diplomas and GCSEs or A-level, is absolutely vital. Yet, because of the degree to which the Connexion service has shifted from providing careers guidance to the mentoring service, we have reached a situation in which the careers guidance service has effectively collapsed. We have, more or less, to establish it from scratch. I was very surprised to see that only £38 million has been assigned in the impact statement for the development of careers guidance services. That is, roughly speaking, £10,000 per secondary school, which is remarkably little if we want to create a proper careers guidance service for these young people with the impartial advice required by Clause 66. We are going to have to develop this. The Government have rejected advice from various groups that we should have an all-age careers advice and guidance service. Information about careers is increasingly available on the internet and the sort of service that has been provided by Learn Direct can be expanded. One would expect to see, particularly for these young people, the development of a fairly creative web-based service. As well as the information, you need very clear advice and guidance and it is not available at the moment. We are going to have to create it and train these people and it is not at all clear where all the resources are going to come from. I must finish now. I am sorry to have gone on for quite so long. It is clear that this is a very important Bill. Its aims and aspirations are admirable and, as has become very clear in this debate, in one way or another we all share its hopes and ambitions. However, it is clear that the devil is in the detail and I foresee many long days and evenings when we shall be debating our way through these labyrinths.