Skills, Vocational Training, and Further and Higher Education

Baroness Hazarika Excerpts

Thursday 3rd September 2026 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Hazarika (Lab)]

My Lords, I also thank the noble Baroness, Lady Morgan, for raising this very important debate. I am proud to follow the noble Baroness, Lady Caine, and indeed echo much of what she said about the importance of the creative industries.

I declare an interest: I am a board member of the BPI, which represents the recorded music sector. As we all know, the music sector brings in a huge amount of prosperity to the United Kingdom and brings us a lot of joy. It also puts so many amazing British artists on the map. We know that arts and culture has been a great British success story.

The music industry provides a good model for how we could do skills in the future, where you have industry coming together with government at a national and regional level to create brilliant institutions where young people can get world-class training in skills. Just look at the BRIT School in Croydon, or at ELAM, the East London Arts and Music school. These schools are amazing, vibrant and exciting; you go there and you feel the energy. They are like something out of the TV show “Fame”. I wanted to join, but sadly they were not taking mature students when I went along. We know so many amazing artists who went there: Adele, Olivia Dean, Raye, Lola Young. These people sell millions of albums, bring in so much money to the Exchequer and provide so much joy.

I am delighted that the music industry is working with the Government to establish a new centre of excellence in Bradford, West Yorkshire, with the BRIT School North. That brand new college will offer 500 precious places. The thing that is brilliant about these kinds of collaborations is that you are talking not only about front-of-house stars but about hundreds and hundreds of young people getting trained up with those amazing backroom jobs—production, set design, all that kind of thing—which can provide people with so many rich, interesting, varied careers.

I also just want to make the point about qualifications. We have to make sure we do not kill off the pipeline of creative talent. Last year, A-level music fell to just over 4,500 pupils. That is a great worry. The choirmaster Gareth Malone has flagged that we could be facing a “cultural crisis” due to killing off this pipeline. The number of children taking arts at GCSE level in state school has fallen by 41% since 2010. That is not a great statistic. So we must not kill the goose which lays those golden eggs.

Finally, we talk a lot about technical skills, but we need to instil confidence in young people as well. It is not just what you can do on a computer or on a screen but verbal communication, making eye contact and being able to hold conversations with people. This is a great debate and very timely.

Free School Meals

Baroness Hazarika Excerpts

Wednesday 2nd April 2025 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Smith of Malvern (Lab)]

We are already taking action, as I suggested, through widening the ability of people to use the eligibility checker, by ensuring that there is better sharing of data with local authorities. On the point about reducing the friction in the application process, we are working with DWP to consider how we can more closely link applying for universal credit with entitlement to free school meals. There is a variety of activity that the Government are already undertaking. I am sure we will have the opportunity to discuss that in more detail and length when we bring forward the Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Bill to the House.

[Baroness Hazarika (Lab)]

My Lords, I am sure we all agree that we want our children to be well fed at school. Hungry children cannot learn. Picking up on the comments, particularly from the noble Lord, Lord Watson, there is still a lot of stigma around enrolling for this. Could AI not help local authorities and others to identify families who could qualify for free school meals and auto-enrol them?

[Baroness Smith of Malvern (Lab)]

I suspect that there are ways in which AI could help. As we talk to stakeholders and others who are involved in trying to encourage the full take-up of free school meal entitlement, there are also some less technological ways in which, for example, those who work closely with families, let us say in local authorities, on other areas of their benefits—housing benefit, for example—can be facilitated through the sharing of data that I have talked about to make the links for those families to the sharing of free school meals. There is a whole range of other areas of stigma, as my noble friend outlined, where sometimes work, both in schools and at a local level, can help to overcome those barriers and make sure that children and their families are getting what they are entitled to.