Education and Skills Bill

The Government are being pulled two ways on this issue. I spent time in previous debates replying on issues related to concerns about excessive regulation by requiring 280 guided learning hours or courses that have been determined as equivalents to 280 hours—as provided in Clause 8(2). We have also been criticised for requiring courses accompanying employment to be accredited. We have taken that step because we wish these courses to be genuine and we want the 280 hours to be for real. However, my noble friend wants us to go further and to specify that the guided learning undertaken by young people in full-time work should always be away from their workstation. We are trying to hold a credible middle ground between those two positions. It is not because of an oversight that we have not specified in the Bill that guided learning must be undertaken away from the workstation. My noble friend knows better than anyone what the intentions are behind our legislation, since there is no one more assiduous in engaging with us on the plans as we draw them up. I think that my noble friend has met every Minister in the DCSF concerned with these issues apart from me; and I know that a meeting will be forthcoming after the reply I shall give him. He knows it is our policy that there should be flexibility in this regard. It is not our policy that learning should always—I stress, always—be away from the young person’s workstation. Of course, many young people will be released by their employer to undertake training somewhere else, such as a college, so all of their learning will necessarily be away from their workstation. Other young people will receive part-time training provided by their employer, perhaps at a private training provider, mentioned by the noble Baroness, Lady Perry, but perhaps in their workplace also. It is appropriate that there should be that flexibility for training to be provided in those ways. One of the principles behind the changes that we are making to the 14 to 19 curriculum and qualifications is that learning should be personalised and delivered in a way that engages the young person and suits their individual needs and interests. That theme has been raised repeatedly in our debates. Some young people learn best when they can see the immediate practical relevance and application of what they are learning, so it would not be right to specify in the Bill that for all young people learning must be away from their workstation, as my noble friend would wish. However, we absolutely agree with him that the learning that young people undertake must be of high quality, that it must be actual, guided learning, and that young people must be learning new things, not simply doing their day-to-day jobs. That is why we were not sympathetic to earlier amendments under which informal, unaccredited, in-house training should count towards the 280 guided-learning hours requirement of Clause 8, or that simply being employed without training should count. I hesitate to raise my next point, but I will do so and thereby guarantee a meeting with my noble friend afterwards. I am advised that recent research is equivocal on the benefits of training away from the workplace in all cases. A long research paper by researchers who are familiar to my noble friend—Andrew Jenkins, Charley Greenwood and Anna Vignoles—was published in September 2007 by the Centre for the Economics of Education, which has a relationship with the LSE: The Returns to Qualifications in England: Updating the Evidence Base on Level 2 and Level 3 Vocational Qualifications. The research concluded that for men, the wage returns to level 2 vocational qualifications are in fact strongest when those qualifications are acquired in work, as opposed to in college or other settings, which suggested that in those cases learning on the job can be the most effective way of learning. That was described on page 40 of the research paper, which I have here and will give to my noble friend afterwards, because I know that he will wish to engage with us more fully. That gives further support to our contention that there should be flexibility in how learning is provided and we should not impose a rigid straitjacket by saying that in all cases the part-time education or training should be away from the workplace. I stress again that it is not sufficient for on-the-job training and education simply to comprise skill-accreditation NVQs. Clause 6(1) explicitly states that young people must be doing ““a course or courses””, which means a series of classes or lessons on a particular subject. It is not a question of simply being signed up for a qualification that can be achieved without any additional learning. A course must be involved. I hope that I have gone some way to reassure my noble friend of the seriousness with which we take the requirement that accredited courses should comprise the learning component of part-time education and training, although I fear that we cannot go the whole way with him and require that all such courses be provided away from the workstation.