Apprenticeships, Skills, Children and Learning Bill

I thank the hon. Gentleman for his intervention. If we were starting from point zero, we might take a different view, just as we might with respect to the funding of academic students, too. However, we are where we are. I support the moves that the Government have made so far. I would like them to move further, but that has to be done on the basis of balancing the needs of younger learners and the available funding. We have talked quite a lot about statistics today, but this debate is all about the life-changing effects on individuals. When I think about women and skills, I think of the woman from the Mereside estate in my constituency whom I met at the recent opening of a children's centre. She had taken her children through Sure Start, in which she had been a volunteer. She then returned to a further education college in her late 30s to train as a primary school teacher. She had got through, but the structures need to be made much easier, to encourage many more people to do so. That is also true for marginalised groups, such as workers displaced by recessions and those returning to the labour market. I am glad to see the commitments, which the Secretary of State has underlined this afternoon, in clause 47 on young offenders' learning. None of us can leave aside the recession. What are we training people for? The key task for the agencies created out of the Bill will be to refocus learning opportunities around soft skills and give people credit, in both senses of the word, for training that does not always have to lead directly to employment. That has consequences for Train to Gain. It means that more flexibility will need to be built into Train to Gain, to ensure that many more people not now employed can access training and ongoing education, and that, for the time being, the Government, not the employer, will increasingly be the co-ordinator and sponsor for ongoing education and training. We have to be careful, in the drive for skills and reskilling during the economic downturn, that the case for lifelong learning is not lost. Even with the imperatives of skills funding, informal learning can still loom large. The sort of skills that older people require if they are moving from a low-grade job or returning to work are often clustered. They are not linear; they are gateway skills to do with developing self-confidence, time-keeping and office skills. Such skills will not always be gained from job-based qualifications. The Government, as well as employers, have to recognise that the development of skills accounts, the Government's laudable initiative to revive the original intention of individual learning accounts, must include funding incentives for non-instrumental learning, as the City and Guilds national learning bank proposals say. As our Committee said:"““Skills Accounts that merely became an…accounting exercise, listing achievements or entitlements…would be sterile and quite inadequate to address the issues…Leitch highlighted in his Report.””" We have to think about the contribution of adult learning above and beyond the world of paid work. Being able to use the talents and commitment of people from the third age, especially in the third sector, will be an essential ingredient of voluntary and community work, and, where possible, that should be funded. As we recover from the economic downturn, it is also going to be necessary to reskill people with green credentials, and not just through capital expenditure programmes. As Chris Humphries has recently emphasised, skilling will have a big impact on hundreds of thousands of people. The TUC's new pamphlet on unlocking green enterprise highlights the fact that this is not just about degree levels but about the installation and maintenance of renewable energy technologies, which will require much more modest qualifications. We should also look at what is going on in the USA. Barack Obama has produced an ambitious programme, and there have recently been proposals about how those policies will affect people there. For example, a report called ““Job Opportunities for the Green Economy”” makes the point that wind farm projects will create jobs for sheet metal workers, machinists and truck drivers, while increasing the energy efficiency of buildings will rely on roofers, insulators and electricians. This is all about practical politics, and about bringing together not only skills but aspirations. The title of our Select Committee report on Leitch was ““Re-skilling for recovery””. I believe that, with enough blue-sky and green-sky—if I can put it like that—thinking, we can deliver skills and educational fulfilment for people of all types and ages. The Bill, with its focus on skills and training, can be a key vehicle for delivering that.