Skills and Post-16 Education Bill [HL]

Baroness Morris of Yardley Excerpts

Committee stage
Thursday 15th July 2021 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Wilcox of Newport (Lab)]

My Lords, I move this amendment in the name of my noble friend Lord Watson of Invergowrie. This amendment sets out the complementary roles of schools, colleges and universities by joining up the wider education and skills system so that it better meets society’s needs and gives people the skills they need. Delivering this means ensuring that we develop the right balance of autonomy, authority and accountabilities that will enable schools, colleges and universities to focus on the complementary roles they can play together and with other partners over the long term. This must involve a genuine partnership, with providers empowered to stimulate and challenge articulated demand, rather than act as passive policy recipients. It means ensuring that this is meaningfully accessible to all and involves an effectively joined-up wider education and skills system. Colleges do not work in isolation to meet the education and training needs of their communities. Schools and universities are important parts of the system, so they should be part of the planning process. Amendment 8—in the names of my noble friends Lord Rooker and Lord Bradley, as well—therefore sets out the complementary roles of schools, colleges and universities in delivering on LSIPs.

Currently, there is a lack of a comprehensive, long-term education and skills plan that brings together all parts of the system towards the same vision. Different parts of the system have different policy priorities and initiatives. The current reform agenda is not sufficiently addressing this. It deals with only one part of the system—colleges—without exploring the need for complementary alignment with universities, schools and other providers. At the same time, this means that the role of education and skills in addressing wider policy priorities and strategies is not always recognised—for example, the role of colleges in welfare, health and net-zero policies.

There is a lack of any system to co-ordinate the 16 to 18 offer at the local and subregional level between schools and colleges. This leads to insufficient provision and limits student choice of programme—for example, when multiple competing providers concentrate on a narrow offer at the expense of less popular or minority provision.

At the university level, there is contested ground over the higher technical level 4 to level 5 provision and who is best placed to offer this, leading to unproductive competition between colleges and universities. If a whole education system approach is not taken to local skills planning, there will be a disjointed system that is not efficient or effective in its use of public money and does not best meet the needs of students and employers.

There should also be an exploration of a national 10-year education and skills strategy sitting across government, to deliver on wider policy agendas and to give stability to all parts of the system, creating a duty on schools and universities to collaborate with colleges and employers in the development of skills plans, so that the training on offer efficiently meets the need of local areas. I therefore beg to move.

[Baroness Morris of Yardley (Lab)]

I rise to support this amendment. This is such an important issue, but I can see that is difficult as well.

When I started teaching, which was many years ago, in Coventry, it was very clear which provider offered which course. The advantage was that it was very straightforward for children and schools to know where to go for catering, engineering, electronics or whatever. The disadvantage was that it squeezed out competition, which can raise standards and creativity. It is somehow getting that balance that we are looking for. I would welcome the Minister explaining how far the Government are prepared to go to make sure that there is some sort of co-ordinated provision within each skills partnership. It makes sense to allow providers to play to their strengths and it is also essential that courses that might not be economically viable but are important for the local or indeed the national economy are supported to stay open and be made available. So it is a tricky issue and I cannot recall so far in the debate on this amendment hearing the Minister outline the Government’s views on this.

To bring universities in, my noble friend Lady Wilcox made a very strong point. In the old days, it was just further education courses that were co-ordinated, but now we have a growth in private providers and universities in these contested levels as well. So in the name of clarity for students and users, and for the needs of the economy, we need some guidance from the Government about a co-ordinated approach, making sure all areas are covered. Basically, what happens is that all providers want to provide the cheap courses, and the machinery-heavy courses do not get offered. Schools are happy to go into vocational work, as long as it is classroom-based and they do not need specialist teachers. That very often leaves the college with the courses that need highly specialised tutors and heavy equipment. I would welcome the Minister somehow making sense of all that in her comments.

[Lord Liddle (Lab)]

I support what my noble friends Lady Wilcox and Lady Morris have said. I strongly support the case for more co-ordination. It is not clear to me, in the Bill, how this is going to work, and I would like to hear an explanation from the Minister of how she thinks co-ordination will be made to work at a local level. The idea that a Secretary of State sitting in London can get into the question of which school should offer which course and how we deal with the problem that my noble friend Lady Morris described is not going to work.

There is the Education and Skills Funding Agency. In the period when I briefly had something to do with it—when I was advising my noble friend Lord Mandelson, when he was Business Secretary in charge of skills—I did not get the impression that that body had the capacity to do this job of co-ordination. It was basically responsible for making sure that public money was handled in an accountable way. What I would love to hear from the noble Baroness is an explanation of how central government intends to approach this question of co-ordination at local level. In my view—and here there is a big lacuna in the Bill—this is most effectively done by councils and mayoral authorities. It should be a devolved matter; it is an opportunity, in my view, to strengthen devolution within England. I do not sense that the noble Baroness shares that view. Perhaps she will explain to us, if she does not share that view, how she thinks this task of co-ordination will be carried out.

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[The Deputy Chairman of Committees (Lord Rogan) (UUP)]

I call the noble Lord, Lord Young of Norwood Green. The noble Lord is not online, so I call the noble Baroness, Lady Morris of Yardley.

[Baroness Morris of Yardley (Lab)]

May I say to whoever’s job it is, it would be useful to have list of people who have withdrawn from speaking; it is really difficult to know when we are about to be called, but that is a different matter. I rise to support the amendments, particularly Amendment 24, and to agree with my noble friends Lord Watson and Lord Liddle.

I understand completely why the Minister and the Government want local voices to have a say in what the nature of the partnership should be. That absolutely makes sense. Our country is very rich in diversity, with urban areas, rural areas, clusters of villages and small towns. I can see that see that the same model for everyone might not work. If the starting point is trying to let local people feel that they have ownership of this, I can see that and I share that starting point. What I think is a recipe for disaster is not to offer any guidance and to explore with everybody exactly what the criteria might be to determine what the local partnerships are.

I am not sure whose job it is to propose what “local” means. Does it have to be negotiated locally? That could take some time. Anybody who has been to a constituency Boundary Commission review will know how tempers can rise when talking about anything that has a boundary. I am not sure who it is who comes up with the idea in the first place of what the local area is. I am not sure what the criteria are that they have been advised they should make their decision against. I am not quite sure of the process by which somebody somewhere says, “Yes, that local partnership is local and covering the right areas.” I am not sure what happens to any geographical area that no one wants and has not managed to get a place in any partnership. There are, very often, left-out areas. There will be some areas that are really popular, and everyone will want them in their area; there will be some that are really tough and challenging, and no one will want them. I am not sure how all that is to be sorted out.

What I would be looking for is to keep that idea of not forcing the same on everybody, but within a much stronger framework of guidance than we have at the moment and a clear idea of process. It puts me in mind of when, some years ago, the Government—I think it was the coalition Government actually—set out regional schools commissioners. They decided to have no regard to any existing boundaries. So, instead of following the local authority boundary or a government office boundary, they made it up as they went along. It was an utter disaster, and there were some poor people having to negotiate with more than one regional commissioner at any one time. All that happened was that bureaucracy flourished. With the number of hours that were spent by one local authority that had schools within two regional schools commissioner boundaries, it just was not a model to follow. The Government, very sensibly, got rid of it and, I think, made sure—I may be wrong about this—that it followed the government office regional boundaries. I may be wrong about that, but it certainly makes sense now, and I know we are not spending as much time trying to chase appropriate regional school commissioners.

Therefore, I cannot see any example of where this decide-it-yourself, let-us-see-what-happens, get-on-with-it model actually works. It might not be something people like but—to be honest—let us get on with the job. Let us not set up a system where we will spend hours fighting about the nature of the structure that delivers it, rather than using our resources, energy and effort on what should be delivered.

[Lord Aberdare (CB)]

My Lords, the noble Baroness, Lady Berridge, has rather pre-empted some of what I intended to say in support of Amendment 24. I very much welcome the announcement of the first group of trailblazers. It is, of course, the intention that all areas of the country should, in due course, be covered by a local skills improvement plan. I very much agree with some of what the noble Baroness, Lady Morris, and the noble Lord, Lord Liddle, have said about how we make sure the whole system works.

Now that the first employer representative bodies have been designated, and the local areas for which they are responsible defined, it will surely still be necessary for the Government to provide and update guidance on the criteria against which further bids will be evaluated, as required by this amendment and as we learn about the experience of that first group. There needs to be a broad package of guidance addressing all the issues that we have discussed so far in our debates. That is not just on how local areas should be organised to ensure there are no not-spots, as mentioned by the noble Baroness, Lady Morris, but also on who should be involved in LSIPs, what their role should be, what resources are available to them, what reporting and monitoring is required and so on.

It remains rather difficult, at least for me, to assess the merits of LSIPs in the abstract. I was very taken by the suggestion from the noble Baroness, Lady Neville-Rolfe, last week that the Government might share one or two model LSIPs with us to help us in our scrutiny of the Bill. Will the Minister clarify as much as she can, in her response, what plans there are for guidance to be provided, not least in time for the next stage of our own debate?

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[Lord Lucas (Con) [V]]

My Lords, I shall speak also to Amendments 33 and 85. All three amendments in this group address the same question of providing access for the local skills improvement organisation to clear and consistent information on skills that are required nationally. I am very grateful to my noble friend for announcing the trailblazers today and am delighted to see that I find myself living in one of them—which is three hours wide, and that is on a good day. It is really quite hard to see how an organisation will hold together a coherent view across the many businesses composed in a spread that wide. It is also hard to see, given the current make-up of the chamber, how it will have access to a deep skills base in areas where Sussex is not currently strong.

There are a lot of skills required in the City of London which are not well represented in Sussex, which is not one of the great centres of the IT industry. There are a lot of areas where it does extremely well, but it is hard to see how you can take an organisation such as the Sussex chamber of commerce, which does very well in trying to knit together the varied economic landscape across this very hard-to-travel region and turn it into something that knows everything about skills in the local area, let alone something that has a real grip on skills nationally, unless we are providing it with a strong source of information on the national picture that it can build into the foundations of what it is trying to achieve locally.

When we last met, my noble friend the Minister referred to the skills and productivity board, which was announced last September and launched in November, with a letter from the Secretary of State saying that within the next 12 months he hoped to have information from the board on what the national skills needs were, how that would change over the next 10 years and how we should be focusing on productivity growth. As of today, as far as I can find, the organisation has no website; it has not reached out to people to discuss these affairs, and the only activity that I can discover is a contract it put out for a scoping study to help it develop a functional skills taxonomy by the end of June. This does not feel like a body that is moving with pace. It certainly does not feel like it is going to get anywhere effective by the end of November.

Perhaps my noble friend can fill us in a bit more than the skills and productivity board has felt willing to do on where it has got to and why a body that is largely composed of professors will be able to fulfil the remit it has been given. It is crucial that the Government get this right, and I am not at all clear that they have.

[Baroness Morris of Yardley (Lab)]

My Lords, I support these amendments. This Bill is full of good intentions and starts with a lot of good will—people want it to succeed and the nation needs it to succeed—but it is becoming increasingly clear that the backbone, the foundations on which we can build other things, is just not there. It is missing.

I understand it is difficult to know what to put in legislation and what to develop as you go along. I understand that that balance is always difficult, but I think the Government are erring on the wrong side. Like almost all the amendments we have been considering today, this is another one asking for clarification of the Government’s role in setting a national skills strategy, and in particular—the noble Lord, Lord Lucas, has rightly brought up on previous occasions—their role in almost future-proofing the skills needs of the nation.

Local people might know what needs to be done to provide a skilled workforce for the present economy, but I am not sure they have got time to speculate on the what the economic and skills needs might be in 10, 20 or 30 years’ time. That needs a broader discussion and I am left wondering again what the role of the Government will be in their relationship with the local skills plan. Surely the Government are not going to say, “Get on with it, regardless of what we have decided at national level”. The national skills strategy should be what our experts say the skills needs in the next couple of decades might be.

The Bill lacks a clear vision of what the structure is, and as long as that is the case, we will not make progress. I would sooner the Government gave us something that we can amend and debate and move forward with, but they are not giving us anything. The guidance is delayed; it is not there in the Bill. There is hardly anything to debate—it is like whistling in the wind and guessing what the Government might intend. On this amendment, I am not sure how all these different locally determined, local skills plans are meant to fit in to the national skills strategy.

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[Lord Addington (LD)]

At least I have got that confirmed; I thank the noble Baroness for that aside.

The point here is about “Students like us, how do they do and what do they go through?” I have heard it from many people, and indeed from members of my own family. Two of my nephews are of mixed race and are wondering “Where do we go where people like us are?” We have to get this information out, because it is a perfectly normal thing. You are leaving the support structure of home and your parents, but there is some way of intervening.

The noble Lord, Lord Willetts, referred to special educational needs. We have a universal package there called the disabled students’ allowance. We have a structure within universities that means you actually have to give things. Members of the Front Bench have sparred with me on this—I think “sparred” is quite accurate—in the past. There is a structure of support and a standard, and you can take action if that standard is not fulfilled. That is difficult, but it is there. You have a support structure going through.

So having more information about what happens here and what goes on will not hurt. It is not that big an ask. People are posting about entrance requirements and groups are coming across—it is happening at the moment. I suggest that having more information gives a better guide to what can come out of the experience and what other people are experiencing on their way through. I think this information is being gathered in many places anyway, usually for internal commercial reasons by the institutions. It would not hurt to have it in there.

I do not know whether the Government are in the mood for accepting amendments at the moment. I always remember when it happened to me many years ago; it stunned me into silence for the rest of the evening. It may be a bit late in this day for doing that, but I just throw that out. It would be something that would be quite good to have. I would hope that the Government at least give us some idea that they are encouraging, if not requiring, people to do it.

[Baroness Morris of Yardley (Lab)]

My Lords, this is a particularly important group of amendments and the debate on it has been very good. I support all the amendments in this group. They have been very well spoken to by the people who put them down. I really want to add support and try not to go over the same points again.

They fall, basically, into two groups: the first on mental health and well-being and the second on how we measure outcomes. I will briefly comment on both. I very much support the amendments put forward by the noble Lord, Lord Lucas, and the way in which he put them forward. I was going to say that I was not sure the amendment was the right way to solve the problem, but he said it beforehand, so I see the amendment as very much drawing the issue to the attention of the Government and wanting a response.

My experience really came from when I was chair of council at one of the London colleges. I had the honour of giving out degree awards at the ceremonies twice a year. There is nothing as heartbreaking as giving out a degree posthumously to the parents of a student who has passed away through suicide. It is absolutely heartbreaking, and it happened more than once. That was just my experience at a relatively small college, and it will be replicated throughout universities.

We think of those children as adults, and they are: they are legally adults and they do adult things. But to begin with they are only a year out of school. By the time they graduate, they are only three years out of school, and children—young people, adults—develop at different rates. Somehow, we put a whole chasm between the pastoral support they get by the end of school, and the lack of pastoral support they get at the start of university. Somehow, we have to build a bridge between the two, particularly with academic high-flyers. There is often an emotional inability to cope with failure. One university lecturer said to me once that they had had an overseas student who committed suicide. They had to greet her parents from China and go through what had happened. They did not know, but their view was that it was the first time the child—the young woman—had ever found it difficult to come top of the class. She has come top of the class right the way through everything; she gets to a Russell group university and she does not come top of the class. She did not have the resilience to know how to deal with that.

We could spend a week discussing this, but the noble Lord, Lord Lucas, got this absolutely right. Universities hitherto have been slow to see this as an issue that they have a role to play in addressing. I should give credit to the Government, because I think I am right that they did something recently that means universities can tell parents if they feel their child is at risk. Certainly, in my day, when I was chair of council, legally a university could not phone up the parents without the young person’s permission, to say they were at risk.

The only way in which I would disagree with the noble Lord, Lord Lucas, is that I am not sure they need to be “watched”—I think that was the phrase he used. Universities need to be worked with to make them realise that this is a core part of their job. Once they can see that, they will extend their considerable prowess and commitment and care for their students into pastoral health, mental health and well-being, as much as they offer academic support. But they are at the beginning of that journey and anything the Minister can offer in this Bill, to give them the powers or the freedom, or just the direction, to do this, I certainly think would be a step worth taking.

I also want to say a little bit about the other amendments to which the noble Lord, Lord Willetts, spoke. This is also exceptionally important, because I absolutely agree with the premise that universities ought to be measured by student outcomes. It would be silly not to take into account student outcomes. We take them into account in schools. Why we would stop doing it when we get to universities, I am not quite sure.

I do not think we have a great record so far in deciding what outcomes universities should be measured by. I will not go into it, but I am a bit critical of some of the teaching excellence framework, the TEF criteria for success. One measure is whether their students are in employment 12 months after they finish their degree. For some subjects, they are not likely to be in employment in a degree-level subject. People in the creative arts very often make do for a year while they are finding their feet. They very often work in a pub or a restaurant while they are doing the creative work. Measure them in five years’ time and they will be flying, and that is a credit to their university, but it will not get the credit if they are not in a degree-level job after 12 months.

One measurement that is not used by the teaching excellence framework but is regularly used by the newspapers that publish the tables is the A-level mark needed to get into a university. If universities want to take risks and bring on young people who got Ds and Es at A-level and say, “We believe in them and want to give them a chance; they come from an area of disadvantage”, they get marked down in the league table. Why on earth would they do that? I thought that was what we wanted to do.

I do not think there is a very good record of getting the outcome measurement right. Universities are partly at fault because they did not want this and did not engage in the discussion. I think they left others to decide what the measurement outcome should be and are paying the price.

I have a couple of specific points. I agree with the noble Lord, Lord Willetts—why would we not want this extra information? Why would we not want to know what universities have achieved, in terms of outcomes, with specific groups of students? It adds to what we know about universities and it means that when we are developing policy, we can do so with more knowledge about how existing policy affects different groups of students and different institutions than we would have without this information. I cannot see one good reason for not requiring that information at this level should be collected. I look forward to the Minister’s response.

Clause 17(7) says:

“The OfS is not required”


to collect this information. I think it should be required, but will the Minister confirm that neither is it banned and that it could collect it if it wanted to? The noble Baroness is nodding, so I take it that it is allowed to collect it. That leads us to the question of whether it should be up to the Office for Students to decide whether this information is collected. It should not be up to the OfS, because it is useful to other people as well. I want to know it, as somebody who is involved in education and interested in policy-making. The Government should want to know it; the universities should want to know it; employers should want to know it. Why should the Office for Students not collect it so that others can have that information? Whether the OfS or the Government do anything with it is a different discussion, but not to collect it means that no one else can do anything with it.

My last point is that the world of schools is far more advanced in collecting data about pupil progress: it is 20 or 30 years more advanced. It has been through a lot of pain and made a lot of mistakes, but it is in a better state now than the universities. I just hope that the Office for Students learns lessons from those decades of trying to get the collection of data improved in schools.

One thing that ties into the amendments of the noble Lord, Lord Willetts, is that, to begin with and for many years, Ofsted and the examiners did not discuss with schools what the outcome measurements would be. All it created was a very poor relationship that has not done well for children, teachers or schools. We are still trying to get over it, so I very much support the amendments proposing that the Office for Students, in developing these measures, should discuss them with universities and all higher education providers. We are setting the framework now for the next stage of using measurements of outcome for university; it is really important that we get it right and I very much hope that the Government’s response to these amendments will give us greater clarity and perhaps highlight areas where further attention is needed.

[Baroness Whitaker (Lab)]

My Lords, I support all the amendments in this group and shall talk about Amendments 63 and 66 in particular. For far too long, pastoral care in these institutions has been inconsistent, sometimes even unprofessional and neglectful, to the great detriment of students’ achievements and well-being. Like other speakers, I personally know of suicides and cases of severe depression among students that I think could have been prevented, and there are plenty more in the statistics. It is only right that the institutions should be evaluated on these grounds.

On Amendment 66, because discrimination is often associated with mental health vulnerability, there are many such cases among those in the Gypsy, Roma and Traveller communities who have struggled through obstacles to gain entry into higher and further education. It is important to publish different student characteristics to get a proper handle on the data, as this amendment proposes.

Skills and Post-16 Education Bill [HL]

Baroness Morris of Yardley Excerpts

Committee stage
Tuesday 6th July 2021 Lords Chamber

[Lord Addington (LD)]

My Lords, this is one of those debates when everybody has said and everybody is going to agree with everybody, so let try to do it in as precised a way as possible. Before, I do, I should remind the Committee of my declared interests and let the Committee know that I have become an adviser to Genius Within, which looks at neurodiversity with Birkbeck, University of London.

The basic thrust of this is: what will be put into the plans, how flexible will it be and how will it adjust to the needs of those people who are supposed to be covered by it? We have heard about many subjects. When someone mentions dyslexia in front of me in one of these debates, I give myself a little cheer because, hopefully, the word is getting out.

The most important thing about my Amendment 22, if you throw everything away, is identification. Most people in the neurodiverse sector or with any special educational need have moderate or lower-level needs that, if not addressed or supported, can lead to failure to get academic qualifications giving access to training. The noble Baroness, Lady Whitaker, and I might argue about GCSEs and certain points, but the essential thrust of what she said carries through to these groups. Someone who has trouble in that learning environment will always have trouble. If we suddenly get—as I did with the officials who the Minister was kind enough to give me access to, for which I am eternally thankful—“Oh but we have a high-needs strategy”, well, that is great, but what happens to the 18% of the population who are identified as having special educational needs but who are not in the high-needs group? They will become your workforce. They are the people who are underachieving and either do not get jobs or get jobs which they do not fulfil or can access other qualifications with.

Please, when we are doing this, can we build in a capacity to identify people who have already failed in the school system? As adults, they will be presenting differently, with established types of behaviour, which may mean that they are resistant to certain activities because who on earth wants to be told again: “You’ve failed, you can’t do something”? Let us take everybody who is scared of heights and stick them up that ladder and shake it. Let us make sure that it is uncomfortable and that something that you do not like to have gone through again. What will happen about identifying the people in these groups, people with ADHD, people who come from lower socioeconomic backgrounds, with parents with the same problems, who do not have the type of parents that I had behind me?

I appreciate that this is all that you can do here, but what steps will be taken to ensure that everybody gets through and is supported? The idea that you need only a functional grasp of English and maths is a step forward, but we must embrace the fact that there is now technology available that can do most of this for you, at least at a functional level. If you can talk, you can word-process now. Can we ensure that this is taken into account in the plans because the groups who are unskilled, which we are addressing, will be helped?

My Amendment 26 is about looking slightly wider than just at one area. It came from a conversation that I had with someone at the British Dyslexia Association, who said, if someone feels that they would be happier in something that uses hand skills and is slightly out of area, please can they be supported to get there? This is true of virtually all groups but is probably slightly more intense in this situation. If you are living in an area which is just on the boundary, the thing that you may want to train in is probably in the next area. All of us have done this for schools to work. Arguments about constituency boundaries go to an audience where many may have an interest. Can we please take that into account? When the Minister comes to answer, or at a later stage, can he give some idea of how these group plans or areas of concentration will work together? If they do not, we will be excluding large numbers of people from getting the support that they need where that is a local employment opportunity for them. We are still assuming that they will stay in their local areas for jobs for long periods. If we are doing that, then let us at least be realistic about it.

[Baroness Morris of Yardley (Lab)]

My Lords, I support these amendments and the thrust of the debate so far, particularly with what the noble Lord, Lord Lucas, said in moving the amendment, every word of which I agreed with, as I have with most of the other speakers so far, so I will try not to repeat myself.

There is something of a dilemma. It is very difficult to be against a local skills plan, and I am not. It is a really good thing. I believe in this notion of place, which I think we have lost recently in school and skills. It is very important, and I can see that these local skills partnerships adopt that notion of place and that one place is different from others. I am absolutely in favour of that. It is very difficult to argue against employers being involved, and I would not. I have moved, over the course of this debate, from being very much in favour of those two things to having difficulty visualising what it will be like when it is in a good form. The more you talk about it, the most difficulties you see emerging. I hope that this means no more than that there are a lot of details to sort out. I am not trying to be difficult on this, but I wonder whether a number of issues will be resolved by this structure.

I shall raise two concerns reflecting the debate so far, which are around whether an employer-led body is likely to deal with these issues. It is not that they cannot be dealt with, but employers are different organisations, representing different things and have different experiences. It might be that in some circumstances they are not the best to deal with certain issues. My first concern regards Amendment 1 and potential students. Are current employers with current businesses the best people to scope the future economy? I am not saying that they have nothing to offer, because they do, but they have got a lot to protect in the here and now. A successful employer will be successful only if he or she scopes the future, but it is an uneasy thing that we are having to do. I would welcome the Minister’s comments on that. How do we keep their eyes to the future if they are leading this plan?

The second is: is an employer-led skills plan going to be the most effective at looking after the groups of people who are often left out, whether it is the Travellers, the underachievers, the marginalised or those who have not got qualifications? The traditional role of employers is often as gatekeepers: they let the successful through to be their employees, but they do not have an ongoing responsibility for the ones they have rejected. They often fall to other organisations, which have or develop the experience to deal with them.

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[Lord Patel (CB)]

My Lords, I speak to Amendment 35 under my name. The amendment is designed to have a body that will be representative of employers in a specified area. The Secretary of State must consult local education, business and enterprise groups, with the aim of ensuring that local employers are represented on the body. So it is a wide-ranging, all-inclusive probing amendment to ensure that there is a range of employers of different sizes, as well as local education groups. In that respect, I support Amendment 5 from the noble Lord, Lord Storey, which includes educational organisations. They should all be represented on employer representative bodies, which will be tasked with pulling together the local skills improvement plans. There are a number of amendments, already tabled, highlighting the need to expand the types of groups feeding into these plans to ensure that they truly represent the local situation and will be able to address any local skills challenges that there might be.

The concern that I believe all of these amendments share is that the Bill, as it stands, potentially gives too much power to a small group of employers in a local area that are not necessarily representative of the wider business community. The Bill currently also risks limiting the choices of young people as well as adults who want or need to retrain in terms of courses and training opportunities. There may be skills that we need nationally—to achieve, for instance, net-zero—which will not currently be required in the particular locality. As a result, no training opportunities may be available for young people who are keen to move into such careers.

I believe that the Bill should enable a truly collaborative approach to local skills planning, with a range of stakeholders to co-create local skills improvement plans. Taking that approach and making sure that the local policy ambitions link up with the national strategies and vice versa might be the right approach and put us in a good position to ensure that we have the workforce, the scientists and the engineers of the future to make the UK an economic success. With 6 million SMEs, some of them quite small and with very niche skills requirements, it might be appropriate that even their voices are heard.

[Baroness Morris of Yardley (Lab)]

My Lords, I very much support the comments just made by the noble Lords, Lord Storey and Lord Patel, and the thrust of the argument. It is right that we get as much knowledge and experience and skills before making any of these decisions. I suggest to the Minister that this is going to be a recurring theme throughout our consideration of the Bill: what is the nature of the partnership which she says is at the core of the proposed legislation before us?

There are two issues. The noble Lord, Lord Patel, just used a phrase about people knowing where the power lies. That is part of the problem. In words it looks as though the employers, the people leading the partnership, have got to, by law, consult with people. The Minister may sense that there is not absolute confidence in noble Lords who have spoken today that that will happen to the degree necessary. I share that concern. Once you say so many times that it is employer-led, that it is those people who matter, and that they will be making the decisions, you have created a very unbalanced relationship between the employers and the people they are meant to consult. So I would be looking for something in the Bill, whether it is these amendments or others, to boost the standing and the contribution of the other partners.

I have not heard anybody say that the other partners—employers, education institutions, students, trade unions—are not important and have not got a role to play. But what is missing from the Bill, given our previous experience of such legislation, is any assurance that they will be listened to and will have the ability to influence what is going on, and some powers to put a brake on something if they do not like it. If they are just going to be written to, asked for their view and then ignored, it will not work, and the Bill could allow for that. That is my worry with that part of the Bill. The Bill as written could allow for that.

Covid-19: Education Attendance

Baroness Morris of Yardley Excerpts

Thursday 1st July 2021 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Berridge (Con)]

My Lords, one interesting feature of the consultation that we recently conducted on exams was that over 50% of the responses were indeed from students. We have been pleased to hear their voices throughout this and have sought to communicate directly with them. I also draw attention to the very successful Big Ask, run by the Children’s Commissioner, to which over 500,000 children and young people responded.

[Baroness Morris of Yardley (Lab) [V]]

My Lords, the Minister has talked about plans for when schools return for the September term, but in many areas there are two to three weeks of this term left and over 300,000 children a day not attending. What action is being taken to increase the number of children attending school this term?

[Baroness Berridge (Con)]

My Lords, the REACT teams from the Department for Education, working alongside local authorities, have an attendance strategy. They are working closely with schools, particularly for those young people with special educational needs and vulnerable children, to ensure that as many as possible are in schools. In relation to the bubbles, they are one way that schools can limit the number of contacts but, even if a child within a bubble tests positive, that does not necessarily mean that all children in the bubble have to go home; it is still only those who qualify as close contacts in line with the risk assessment by the school.

Covid-19: Children

Baroness Morris of Yardley Excerpts

Thursday 17th June 2021 Lords Chamber

Moved by

[Baroness Morris of Yardley]

That this House takes note of the case for the urgent levelling up of opportunities available to the children of the United Kingdom which have been affected by the COVID-19 pandemic, in particular with regard to (1) education and skills, (2) health, (3) inequality, and (4) the elimination of child poverty.

[Baroness Morris of Yardley (Lab)]

My Lords, I am delighted to introduce this debate on a very important topic. It is a widely drawn debate, and having seen the speakers’ list, I look forward to good contributions from knowledgeable people on a whole range of issues that affect children and young people. I suppose we will disagree with each other as the debate goes on—we should do, because these are contentious issues in some cases—but I do not doubt that everybody who has chosen to speak in the debate is committed to the well-being of children and young people, wants the best for them and wants life for children in the future to be better than it is at the moment.

Children have had a rough deal in the pandemic, though I am not sure whether they have been the most affected group. It is not a competition; I am not sure what is to be gained by pitting one group of our population against the other to see who has fared worse. But as adults, we have a natural obligation to look after children—in fact, it is a legal and moral duty. It has been our inability, as adults, in whatever role we have, to do that as well as we would have liked that leads us to be more concerned and worried about the effect that the pandemic has had on children.

I do not believe that these children are a lost generation. They will grow up to be a generation of adults that does wondrous things: they will be teachers, doctors, business leaders and parents, who shape society with exactly the same opportunity we have had. Do not talk them down. There is a real worry that, in talking about the lost generation, expectations will be fulfilled; no one would want that to happen. But how easy it is for them to become a great generation depends a great deal on what we do now, as we come out of the pandemic.

Even before the pandemic, we were a country that probably had greater inequalities than any other country in the developed world. In poverty, in health and in schools, the inequalities that seem to be structural in our society have bedevilled us for decades. If you are poor, you are less likely to be healthy; and if you are poor and not healthy, you are less likely to do well in school; and if you do not do well in school, you are less likely to be able to take advantage of opportunities as you grow older. When you put that structural inequality in the United Kingdom together with the economy of austerity that we have had in the decade prior to the start of the pandemic, you realise that children went into the pandemic with an unequal chance of thriving.

It was not easy for any child: whether rich or poor, and from whatever part of the country, it was not easy. But when services closed in March, some children were hit worse because they depended more on those services and institutions than others did—children who depended on schools for space to study, books to read or food to eat; young people who felt safer, more valued and more cared for at school than at home; and children whose parents relied, week in and week out, on social services and healthcare professionals for help and support in bringing them up. Thousands of aspirational parents from low incomes and with few facilities at home found that their working partnership with their children’s teacher was disrupted. All those things happened above and beyond children not having their lessons taught.

It would have been difficult to promise, going into the pandemic, that no child would suffer; that we would, during that year, be able to make sure that no child was left behind. Anybody who said that was sowing false expectations. But these are children—these are the people for whom we have a responsibility. What we needed at that point was a Department for Education that performed better than it ever had before, and better than it ever dreamed that it could. That is the quality of the leadership we needed and the quality of the vision we wanted.

I saw that quality elsewhere in government: rough sleepers were taken off the streets and into hotels in a remarkably short period of time; the furlough system got money in people’s pockets in a few months; the help for creative and art institutions came through in a bigger amount than they might have expected; and there was the vaccination programme. People speak well of those initiatives, and our citizens are proud of what the Government were able to do. But when you look at the department that was charged with being the best it could be for our children, you do not see that story. You do not hear people say what a wonderous thing it was and what great services it delivered during the pandemic.

I would make one exception to that: the Oak academy was a real success. It will last for years and leave a legacy for teachers to use in future. But that was universal provision; every child benefited from the Oak academy. The other initiatives were targeted at the most disadvantaged children, and they were not successful, such as the laptops that should have been in children’s homes. I talked to teachers as the summer holiday started; they were still chasing worn-out laptops from local businesses because they were not getting them from the Government. Schools were made to drop the systems they were running themselves and take up the Government’s free school meal vouchers—and they did not work by summer school. On the catch-up programme, only half the number of schools anticipated were involved and fewer than half of the children were from less advantaged backgrounds. In all that time, the DfE managed, in one month from mid-March, to send 150 documents to head teachers telling them what to do.

Teachers tried to compensate for that. I heard too many stories of teachers taking school meals round to children’s doors; of teachers trying to fix worn-out IT kit; and of teachers who spent their time knocking on kids’ doors, to make sure they were safe. While they were doing that, they were not teaching children. All this meant that the children from the least advantaged backgrounds ended up having less time in the classroom. Some 80% of children from private schools got live, online lessons; almost 60% of children in state schools from more affluent backgrounds got the same; and 40% of children from less affluent backgrounds found themselves with online lessons. Of course that will lead to an achievement gap. Whether it is stated by Ofsted, the NFER or EF, it does not matter, I am not going to argue about the degree of left-behindness: no one I have heard from says that those children were not left behind.

The same is true of health. Although one of the consequences of the pandemic has meant that we cannot collect the statistics, I do not think anyone disagrees that reported mental health difficulties and the demand on services have increased. The one figure we do have shows that infant mortality in all four nations has increased as well. The figures for poverty show that one in three children in Birmingham is on free school meals, and one in five schools in our country has now opened a food bank.

However we went into the pandemic, we are emerging from it with a generation of children who have lost learning, have less confidence and feel greater insecurity. That is what the Government’s catch-up programme had to address—that was the task. Unless it can meet those needs, overcome those obstacles and see a future for those children, it is not worth its name.

They made a good start: they appointed one of the best educationalists I know, in Sir Kevan Collins. No one who has worked with Sir Kevan would not want to work with him again. He has decades of experience and has never shied away from a hard fight or a tough task. He must have, over those months, developed a programme that got the approval of both the Department for Education and the Prime Minister—without that, it would never have been presented to the Treasury. All that was wrong was that the finance was not agreed. What message does that give to our nation about how much we care about children and young people? Having a departmental leader who did not deliver during the early stages of the pandemic and a Prime Minister who would not give the money to sign off the catch-up programme hardly fills us with confidence about what the future will be for this generation.

What we are left with now is basically a meagre programme of tutoring and a very small amount of money going into teacher development for teachers and early years. We can argue about the money—whether it is more than Holland, less than America; whether it is this amount per day, or that amount per year—it is not enough. I have not met one teacher or one citizen who said, “That’ll do; that’ll give us a good start and set us on our way”. It is not enough and will not do enough things. Boris Johnson should not have said in his press release, “We will make sure no child is left behind.” Gavin Williamson should not have said in his press release that he is “incredibly proud” of this programme. It is not a programme of which our Government should be proud.

It is no good saying that the money is on its way; that will be too late. Look at the damage done in 12 months; it will just potentially cause more damage as well. That is why Labour, through our shadow spokesperson, Kate Green, has put forward a far more wide-ranging programme that brings together not just education but includes health, recreation and leisure, small-group tutoring for all children, more professional development, as promised by the Government, breakfast clubs and extending free school meals, a good education recovery premium and proper mental health support. But it is not just about the money. What really worries me in this debate is that it is about the lack of ambition and the lack of a vision for our country.

I remember when I was a Minister—anyone who has been in that position will feel the same—that it is often difficult to bring about the big changes you want, because the time is not right: the public are not ready for it; the arguments have not been made; there are too many people who oppose it; there are too many conflicts in taking those policies forward. We have all been there, but at the moment there is a public wish for change in how we provide services for children and young people. The people are inviting their Government to be bold. The argument has been made; we just need a department that will seize the opportunity.

We have changed as a nation. We are a different nation coming out of this pandemic than we were going in, and I think that all of us better understand the barriers to learning. All of us now know that children are poor and that makes a difference to what they can achieve and how they live their lives. I hope that I never again hear the idea that the problem for poor children is that they go to poor schools and have the worst teachers, because very often the reason those schools are not at the top of the list is because of the barriers they have to work with, with children, to overcome. I think that is understood in a more widespread way in our country than it used to be.

As a nation we have come to terms with the importance of digital technology and know that we have to make the leap. As a nation, we are no longer prepared to put academic excellence ahead of a child’s mental health. We have learned to value a broader range of activities—the sports, the arts and creativity for children. We have been reminded of what our values of compassion, citizenship, care, giving and receiving have been. I think we appreciate now that the best thing we can give our children is the resilience and the commitment both to themselves and to others that has been so much needed during the pandemic. People want something different. It is an invitation to the Government to be bold.

I am reminded of the last opportunity when that probably existed, which was at the end of the Second World War. People wanted change. There was an invitation to the Government to be bold. They wanted a different world, and I think back to what changes there were for children in those Acts: school nurses, dental checks, school meals, eye checks, school milk, orange juice. In education, whatever you think about it—and I did not like it—the tripartite system was a massive change, as was free secondary education for all. We had the introduction of child benefit, the development of council housing, the beginning of municipal, local authority leisure facilities. Looking round, we were the beneficiaries of that; we are the levelled-up generation. It is us, sitting here, at our age, who are the levelled-up generation, and we ought to remember what that has done for us and make sure that that is what we do now for the next generation.

It needs an umbrella such as the welfare state. Whether you call it a children’s plan or whatever you call it, it needs to be a range of activities that are brought together. I do not mind who leads it, I just want somebody competent to be in charge, to take us forward. I do not think the DfE, health or the Department for Work and Pensions can do it alone: it has to be people who work together. If we had a children’s plan now, and if the Prime Minister undertook that every policy his Government look at will be viewed for its impact on children and making this a more equal society, we might actually get somewhere. I do not claim to have all the answers to this, but I am as confident as I can be that unless we take this radical, bold route, we will not deliver for our people and we will not be able to successfully respond to the call for a different sort of society. Here are my starters for 10, and I am sure we will hear others throughout the debate.

I wonder whether the new office for health promotion could have, at its core, looking after children. I really am persuaded—as an educationalist, I must say—that if children were healthier, a lot of other things in education would be easier as well. So, can we charge the office for health promotion with putting children’s health at its centre? Can all children’s services be based on school sites, so that they are more easily delivered? Is it too difficult to have a regulation that means children should not live in flats without gardens, but should live in houses with spare space around them? Can we not provide money to local authorities so that they do not have to close swimming pools and other leisure facilities? Schools must change as well. Have we not learned that children need computers? Can we not give every child that starts school a laptop computer in the way that I was given an exercise book and a textbook to take home? It is the equivalent for this generation, under what could be a children’s plan.

To be honest, the curriculum has not changed for 30 years, and one more push for a year 1 phonics test will not get us out of this pandemic. We need a curriculum that is broader, that values creativity, values sport, and, more than that, understands how they all fit together so that children can flourish. It is not that children need to do those things; it is that children are complicated beings—they need those things to come together so that they can be at their best. I think that people have turned back or spoken aloud. I do not think anyone in this country ever lost their values or their vision of what kind of country we could be; I think, in a strange way, that the pandemic has given them permission to talk about it and say how important it is. I think that adults want a school system that works with parents and the wider community to instil citizenship and values in our schools.

The trouble is that the Minister could stand up and say that all those things are done already—and she would be right, as there is little tick box for each of them that she can tick off, but it does not deliver. It is not big enough, bold enough or delivered in a way that excites people and manages to do what it should do for children and young people. I am not confident at the moment that the Government understand the extent of the challenge or have the will and the wisdom to take us forward, but I am entirely confident that that is what is needed. I very much look forward to the contributions in the debate today, because I suspect that if we can put them all together, we will have been of great assistance to the Minister and her department in taking forward a plan for children and young people for the future.

--- Later in debate ---

[Baroness Morris of Yardley (Lab)]

On a personal level, I thank everyone for their birthday wishes. I am sure I can speak on behalf of my noble friend Lord Coaker in saying that neither of us could think of a better way of spending our birthdays than with the 42 people who have been part of this debate.

On a more serious note, I thank the speakers for their contributions to this really good debate. I have learned a great deal. Every Member who spoke has shown a concern and passion, not just for children but with some really good ideas of what we can do to improve things. There has been cross-party agreement, first, about the importance of this area; secondly, that it is not right as it is; and, thirdly, that it is worthy of prioritising to try to get it right.

I want to make two or three points in closing. First, I acknowledge the speech by the noble Lord, Lord Shinkwin, because I did not mention children with disabilities. I realise that this is what happens: it tends to be a bolt-on and if you make a mainstream speech, you tend not to include those groups. We should never get to a position where the voice of a group that finds it difficult to have its voice heard is further excluded because the voice of another group that finds it difficult to get its heard rises to the top. It is not a competition between the voices of the poor and the voices of people with disability. The noble Lord’s speech was a timely reminder for my thinking to be more integrated than it sometimes is.

Of all the speakers, perhaps my noble friends Lord Puttnam and Lady McIntosh said the most about us acknowledging the people who have delivered the services. Again, as we finish the debate I put on record my thanks to not just the teachers and school leaders, and everyone who works in schools, but all those who have worked with children’s services over the last two years. Their contribution has been immense and their energy levels must be almost sapped. They must be hugely frustrated in some ways about what they have not been able to achieve, but we are immensely proud of what they have been able to.

I will refer to the Minister’s speech. I thank her, as ever, for her detailed consideration, careful listening and very thorough responses to what we say. I have never questioned her commitment to her portfolio; she is a shining example of really caring about the job that she does. But I want to take two points, because they lead into the most important thing in regard to this debate.

First, on the evidence base, tutoring is evidence-based. Ironically, it was the Education Endowment Foundation, set up by Kevan Collins, which proved that. We had the man leading the project telling us all that tutoring was evidence-based, but nowhere in that evidence does it say that by itself it is enough. That is the crucial thing: by itself, it is a grain of sand within what needs to be done.

I get frustrated when Ministers say to me, “But we are looking at the evidence, and it points to tutoring”. I cannot argue with that, but it is not enough. It is the same with the resources: I end up thinking that all those billions of pounds, which I cannot even imagine, are not enough because they have not delivered the results. The best analogy that I can think of is: if Ministers were to go to a school that was bottom of the performance tables and it said, “But we have tried our best. We have done everything. We have done this, that and the other”, the Minister would say, “You are at the bottom. This is not good enough”. This is exactly the same.

Whatever money has been spent, you have to look at the output, not the input. I am not arguing with the billions spent, but I am looking at what this has achieved and saying that it has not delivered the goods. That has to be the agenda for going forward. With respect, if I was a Minister, I would be defending the actions of the Government, but we need a sign from them that they are also thinking that it is not enough. If they can say to us, “We know that it is not enough”, I would give them a bit more credit for what they have done—I really would. It is not enough and we need some further thinking.

For my last point, I will mention some other noble Lords’ speeches to illustrate it because they really struck my mind. I listened to the noble Lord, Lord Patel, who spoke about health, and to my noble friend Lady Sherlock, who spoke about benefits. I then listened to my noble friend Lady Drake. They all spoke early on, shortly after I did, about kinship carers. I try to speak in most education debates in the House of Lords, and I say to myself that I do it because I care about and am interested in children. Before those noble Lords spoke, I did not know about what they said: I did not know as much detail on the mental health of children as the noble Lord, Lord Patel, told us about, I had no understanding of the complexity of child poverty that my noble friend Lady Sherlock told us about, and I had not really thoroughly understood how kinship carers can get left out. That is a problem because they care about children too.

Those three people speak in the House time after time because they all care about children. I rarely speak in the same debates as them because we discuss not children but the separate siloes. I speak in the education debates, the noble Lord, Lord Patel, speaks in the health debates and my noble friend Lady Sherlock speaks in the debates on pensions and benefits. That is just an illustration.

As mentioned by the noble Lord, Lord Bichard, who of course has a first-class background in this area, and the noble Lord, Lord Moynihan, the big win here is changing the machinery of government to deliver for children. Given the way that the Department for Education, the lead department for education, is structured at the moment, it will not work. We need something bigger than that—whether it is a Cabinet Minister for children or not I do not know, but there are enough good minds for us to do the thinking, as has been shown in this debate. That is where I want to take us next.

Let us not argue about what has been achieved but instead take from this the joint and shared ambition that I have heard to do more and do better. The machinery of government that we have at the moment does not quite deliver that, but, in this House alone, there is enough good will, energy, experience and expertise to at least take us to the next stage. I thank all Members for their very valuable contributions. I have learned a great deal and I will go away and think about this. Meanwhile, I beg to move.

Motion agreed.

Skills and Post-16 Education Bill [HL]

Baroness Morris of Yardley Excerpts

2nd reading
Tuesday 15th June 2021 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Morris of Yardley (Lab)]

My Lords, I first join others in congratulating the noble Baroness, Lady Black, on her maiden speech. Not only was it an excellent speech but she gave us a glimpse of her background, which is so fascinating that, had I been in charge, I could have let her go on for ages and listened to more of it. I know it will be a very good background for the contributions she will make to our debates in future, and I wish her well.

I also join others in generally welcoming this Bill. A lot of people have said that we have not done enough about skills before; that is why we welcome the Bill. We need to be really careful about this. We have tried to do a lot about skills, but we have never got it right—there is a big difference. Over the last 30 years, 70 pieces of legislation or government interventions have tried to make our skills provision and training better than they are. Anyone here who was a Minister would possibly say, as I do when I look back on my time in office, that they are not satisfied with what was able to be done on the skills agenda. Doing something for the first time is good but it is different from trying to get it right this time. That is how I will approach my contributions to this issue as we go through.

Two things have been done wrong in the past, and they were referred to by my noble friend Lord Puttnam. One is a lack of persistence: Governments have started along this track, then dropped it. Secondly, it has never been a priority for money; they have given some money but never enough, and lessons can be learned there as well.

I want to say briefly—this has been touched on by my noble friend Lord Puttnam and the noble Lord, Lord Johnson—that the division between creative and technical is a false one. If ever in our history there was a time when we could separate creative subjects and the humanities from technical subjects and the sciences, it is not now. We need to drop that language and those thoughts, because success will lie with the people who can bring those things together. That goes to the argument about the lifelong loan entitlement, which I broadly welcome. I have two questions on that. The first is that I am not sure for which subjects the grant will be available. I hope it will not exclude creative subjects, because that would not be good for the agenda before us.

I welcome modular learning with some caution: it is not as easy to organise or do as linear learning. Something we have done wrong in the past with vocational studies is to make it modular but not give students and learners the opportunity to link one module with the other. The joins are where it goes wrong, so my advice to the Minister is: watch the joins and mind the gap. We have to make sure that people can move from one module to the other.

I want to spend my time on the local skills improvement plans, which I gather are going to be called LSIPs, so that is how I will refer to them. The Government have said that employers and businesses are at the centre of the creation of local skills improvement plans. I cannot disagree with that; I cannot say that they should not be at the centre or not be listened to. They are important, but I am worried about how much emphasis the Government are placing upon the leadership of employers and businesses at the centre, at the heart, or in the driving seat of these LSIPs, depending on which words you choose to use. Although they are important to this plan, so are others.

Learners are at the centre of what we want to do, as are providers and our locality and its needs. The local economy in that area is also at the centre, and whoever can guess what the skills of the future will be also needs to be at the centre of these LSIPs. It is a more complicated Bill than just being about putting employers and businesses in the driving seat. At the moment, I am not sure that the Bill really recognises that complexity or gives some indication of which route the Government will wish to take. That is what the Committee and Report stages will be about. I hope that we will have the opportunity to flesh it out then.

We are asking employers to become partners in the education process, and that is a big ask; it is not their core job. It is not what they worry about in the middle of the night or get up in the morning thinking about. We are asking them to become educationalists while they have other worries, especially now; they have other things to prioritise. I am not sure what happens and what powers the Government will have when it goes wrong: when the businesses do not lead us in the right direction or take a back rather than a front seat.

The challenge here is to get the partnership right between the providers and employers. I worry that the Bill is written almost as a customer/provider relationship. There is an invitation to employers to lead the show and a legal obligation on the providers to provide the learning courses. The Government will be taking a power to sack colleges or hit them over the head if they do not deliver on the local plans. It is not imaginative or creative, or the sound basis for a meaningful partnership, so I want to look at that as we go through the Bill.

I know that having too many people in the driving seat can lead us nowhere; I understand that, and that leadership is important. But we want partnership with a purpose in which everyone has a role and a responsibility, and everybody needs to be held accountable in that. How we write that into the detail of the Bill will be vital in making sure that the wish across this House for the Bill to be a success comes to fruition.

Queen’s Speech

Baroness Morris of Yardley Excerpts

Wednesday 12th May 2021 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Morris of Yardley (Lab)]

My Lords, I congratulate my noble friend Lady Blake and the noble Lord, Lord Lebedev, on their maiden speeches. They bring very different experiences and skills to this Chamber but, combined, they will enrich us by contributing to our debates. I thank them and wish them well.

I have some comments about education and the skills agenda, and a few questions about schools. I declare my registered interest as chair of the Birmingham Education Partnership. I very much welcome the catch-up programme that the Government have announced so far, but I am left feeling that we have not heard it all yet. The Government do not have a good record of acting in good time as far as schools are concerned during this pandemic. Can the Minister tell us when we will be hearing further information about the catch-up programme?

I have a second query on schools. The Minister referred to a speech which the Secretary of State made recently, on the expansion of multiacademy trusts. I will not comment on that, but the noble Baroness, Lady Morgan, will remember that in 2016, the feeling that the Secretary of State would require everybody to be a member of a multiacademy trust caused great disturbance in the school system—and that is what I am hearing from those in schools to whom I talk. They are unsure whether the Secretary of State was saying that schools will have to be part of multiacademy trusts. I am not arguing whether it is right or wrong, but they need to know, because otherwise their attention will be focused on that and not on getting the children back to studying.

My main questions are on the skills part of the gracious Speech. I welcome the emphasis that the Government have put on skills, and the fact that further education is at the top of the list of Bills that are part of the Speech. It does not happen often, so let us try to make the best of this opportunity. In that respect, I have questions on three areas where we can make improvements. First, who can study? Who can access the money under the lifetime guarantee? Apparently, only those without a level 3 qualification. There are millions of people in this country with a level 3 qualification who need or want to retrain, and they are not in the group that will be able to qualify.

Secondly, what is study? The Government in London have decided which courses will be funded, not the locality. I bet that some towns, villages and cities have local industries which will be excluded from that list. I am not sure why we would do that: why we would say what cannot be studied as well as what can be studied. My additional question is: why study? I am in favour of employers being a key part of our skills agenda, but the government document says that the agenda will be built around the needs of employers. I am not sure that that is right. I am not sure that employers are any better than anybody else at guessing what the skills needs of the future will be, or in working out what industries will be the industrial backbone of our country.

Skills do other things, and there are other jobs that further education colleges have. They help build communities by giving people skills that will be used locally. They help build civic strength by building up skills and experiences, and they help motivate people who will not go on a work training course but will go back to do pottery, art, singing or playing an instrument and will then move to a work training course. None of those is in that list.

There might be places in our country where who can study, what is studied and why you study are absolutely met by the requirements that the Government have set out—but that is not true for all communities everywhere. I worry that some of our left-behind communities will not have their needs met because the Government have decided that it is they who will be answering these questions.

My concerns, which I will want to raise during the passage of the Bill, are: why is there no mention of mayors? Why are we not building on the devolution agenda? Why are we not empowering these left-behind cities, towns and communities to say, “What skills do you want, who do you want to get the money for retraining, what is your priority?” The skill of politics here is getting both those things in place; the needs of the nation to drive us forward and the needs of localities, local people and local communities who have not always fitted into a national agenda and national structure, which is why they have been left behind. During the passage of the Bill, we want to explore with the Government why we cannot do more with a devolution agenda, alongside the skills agenda set out in the gracious Speech.

Educational Settings: Reopening

Baroness Morris of Yardley Excerpts

Wednesday 27th January 2021 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Berridge (Con)]

My Lords, it has been a tribute to schools and parents that during this third lockdown—the second lockdown where children have been educated at home—the remote provision of education has been of a greater standard. Yes, we pay tribute to all those parents who are delivering the curriculum at home, particularly, as I have outlined, those who still have to go to work and do not have access to a school place.

[Baroness Morris of Yardley (Lab) [V]]

My Lords, we all agree that these are difficult issues, but I am not sure that Ministers realise that the Government are a weak link in solving the problems and that many teachers now see them as an added problem, not a guiding light. I realise that it is difficult to set a date for when schools will reopen, but it is entirely possible to set out the conditions for assessment and the order in which pupil groups will return to school. Why can Ministers not show the same speed in decision-making that they demand of teachers and school leaders?

[Baroness Berridge (Con)]

My Lords, living through a pandemic obviously means that road maps and timetables are very difficult and complex to draw up, but we have made it clear that schools and parents will have two weeks’ notice of when a return date is going to be given. I draw the noble Baroness’s attention to the Prime Minister’s Statement later today.

Exams and Accountability in 2021

Baroness Morris of Yardley Excerpts

Tuesday 8th December 2020 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Berridge (Con)]

My Lords, in relation to the situation in the devolved Administrations, the Secretary of State is in close contact with his equivalent representatives. In Scotland, yes, there has been some alteration, but the exams at 18 have been kept. The reason why exams in England have been kept at 16 is that the majority of students in England transition at 16 and therefore need that assessment. Northern Ireland has also decided to keep exams. There are differences between the constituent nations of the United Kingdom. We are living in extraordinary times, so we have introduced an extraordinary set of contingencies and changes to relieve the pressure—on teachers, yes, but primarily on students facing the exams. They will have certain aids with them and they will know some of the topic areas.

In relation to the comments from my noble friend, Lord Baker, one has to recognise that he has been the pioneer of the university technical colleges, where students enter the system in an atypical age range of between 14 and 18. We do not accept his view that exams are not necessary at 16 because most students, unlike those in UTCs, do transition at 16.

[Baroness Morris of Yardley (Lab)]

My Lords, I welcome the proposals, which will give young people greater certainty about their chances of progressing into whatever they want to do after school. However, I want to ask a question from the point of view of universities and colleges, because exams are also a clue and an indication to them of what students know and can do. Over the years, they become familiar with the curriculum, so you get continuity in teaching. What work has been done with colleges and universities so that they can offer continuity of teaching and curriculum, and fill in any gaps that exist due to children not having learned as much or had as much time to practise various skills?

[Baroness Berridge (Con)]

I thank the noble Baroness for her comments. As I have outlined, one key to this —and the reason why the exceptional circumstances and generosity in grading this year will mirror, not replicate, last year—is that the higher education institutions dealt with that situation and those grade profiles last year, so we are drawing on that. Information from the exam boards about what aids will be given and which topic areas are outlined will be made available to the universities. We recognise that this is an unprecedented situation for the universities as well, and that they will be dealing with a cohort that has had a different experience of the education system from that in normal times.

Free School Meals

Baroness Morris of Yardley Excerpts

Tuesday 27th October 2020 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Berridge (Con)]

My Lords, in relation to children in England, I have outlined the local government welfare assistance scheme. When schools came back properly, the box of fruit and vegetables scheme was also back running. The Government have extended free school meals; about 17% of children in England qualify for them. During the pandemic we extended eligibility to the children of parents who had no recourse to public funds, and in 2014 we introduced universal infant free school meals and free school meals for those in FE. The Government have not stood by but have supported, through other taxpayers’ taxes, vulnerable children during the pandemic.

[Baroness Morris of Yardley (Lab)]

My Lords, while I do not for a minute doubt the Minister’s personal understanding of this difficulty, I think she is wrong to say that it is not a postcode lottery. Today is half-term, and whether children will get a free school meal will depend on where they live. There are only two ways of making sure that that does not happen at Christmas: either to make it a statutory duty, which is the case with free school meals, or to offer ring-fenced funding. Unless the Government do one or the other of those things, this will continue to be a postcode lottery. Can the Minister assure us that the solution that the Government come forward with for the Christmas holidays will adopt one of those two solutions?

[Baroness Berridge (Con)]

My Lords, the noble Baroness, who I thank for her comments, raises a wider issue. When power is devolved, whether to councils, combined authorities or different nations, we have to live with the fact that we will see different responses in different parts of the country. In relation to Scotland, it did not pay for free school meals during the recent October half-term. However, I will take away the noble Baroness’s comments.

Education: A-level Results

Baroness Morris of Yardley Excerpts

Wednesday 23rd September 2020 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Berridge (Con)]

My Lords, on the important issue of the placing of students—particularly for A-levels, which are more often progression exams—the noble Lord will be aware that the Government, working closely with higher education institutions, lifted the cap on certain courses to raise capacity. The most recent figures are that 89% of students who received a grade increase have got their original offer, their insurance offer or an offer at an institution with the same tariff as their original offer.

[Baroness Morris of Yardley (Lab)]

My Lords, the most frustrating element of the algorithm was that it assumed that schools could not improve on previous years’ best performance. That seems contrary to what any Education Minister should believe about the power of schools to improve and change children’s lives. Did that element of the algorithm come from an external expert? If so, why was it accepted?

[Baroness Berridge (Con)]

My Lords, as the noble Baroness will be aware, Ofqual consulted on the methodology and what aspects to include in the algorithm. The issue of what we termed “outliers”—highly performing students in institutions which have previously not performed well—was raised and was in the balance; students who might be affected in that way could be put right through the appeals processes. However, when the balance became such that the level of anomalies outweighed this, the more just situation became to use teacher assessment grades rather than the algorithm to assess grades.