Skills and Post-16 Education Bill [HL]

Debate between Baroness Wilcox of Newport and Lord Aberdare

Committee stage
Wednesday 21st July 2021 Lords Chamber

[Lord Aberdare (CB)]

My Lords, it is a pleasure to follow the noble Lord, Lord Addington, who has made such a valuable contribution throughout this Committee. The Government’s skills-related goals, as embodied in the Skills for Jobs White Paper and the Bill, are rightly ambitious and will be correspondingly expensive to deliver. The aims of a skills strategy are necessarily long-term, and achieving them will depend on a complex web of specific policies and organisations, as has been clear from the debates we have had in Committee. Ensuring that adequate funding is in place to support all the activities involved across schools, FE colleges, universities, independent training providers, employers, local authorities, combined authorities and, of course, learners themselves, and to ensure a fair balance between them all, will be an immense challenge for government.

Amendment 90B in the names of the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Durham, the noble Lord, Lord Addington, and the noble Baroness, Lady Morris, proposes commissioning a panel of experts to review and make recommendations on long-term funding for skills and post-16 education, building, of course, on the foundations set by the Augar review as well as the Skills for Jobs White Paper. This can be only helpful, if not essential, input for the Government, along with the various consultations they are planning, in addressing this challenge and getting the answers right. I too look forward to the Minister’s response and to hearing how the Government plan to tackle the important need for a joined-up, long-term, fully funded skills and training strategy.

[Baroness Wilcox of Newport (Lab)]

My Lords, we welcome this probing amendment, introduced by the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Durham and supported by the noble Lord, Lord Addington, and my noble friend Lady Morris. It is an opportunity to discuss the Government’s plans to introduce a longer-term funding settlement for further education, because the White Paper recognised that further education funding has been wholly insufficient.

Alongside increased funding, there is a need for, as alluded to by the noble Lord, Lord Addington, simpler, longer-term funding settlements that allow colleges to deliver on long-term strategic priorities. Their funding compares extremely unfavourably with university and school funding. Annual public funding per university student averaged £6,600, compared with £1,050 for adults in further education. Recent research from IPPR has found that if further education funding had kept up with demographic pressures and inflation over the last decade, we would be investing an extra £2.1 billion per year in adult skills and £2.7 billion per year in 16 to 19 further education. The result of this underfunding is that colleges have had to narrow their curriculum and reduce the broader support they offer to students—including careers advice and mental health services—and 16 to 19 funding for catch-up has also been woefully insufficient.

To deliver on the skills agenda, it is imperative that the Bill is backed up by long-term, multiyear, simplified funding. It will require redressing the long-standing underinvestment of the college sector in the upcoming comprehensive spending review with serious long-term funding—otherwise it will simply not be deliverable. But this must not come at the expense of HE funding. We want FE and HE to collaborate rather than compete for resources, because destabilising university funding, cutting courses or capping numbers will deny students the brilliant education and experience that our world-class institutions in the UK have to offer. Denying young people opportunities must not be the legacy of this Government’s approach.

Ensuring parity of esteem between different post-16 routes is enormously important, but it is best achieved by investing in FE and not by taking funds away from HE and levelling down. Having an ability to access further and higher education, with investment that matches that ambition, is the only way that the country can meet its skill needs and provide pathways into good careers today, as well as jobs for the future.