Lifelong Learning

Lord Knight of Weymouth Excerpts

Monday 16th April 2018 Lords Chamber

[Lord Knight of Weymouth (Lab)]

My Lords, I must first refer your Lordships to my education interests as declared in the register. I am also grateful to the noble Baroness, Lady Garden, for securing this debate and for the way in which she introduced it.

Our education system is still stuck in thinking from 70 years ago. This is reflected in our lifelong learning culture that is a long way from where it needs to be to meet the needs of individuals, society and our economy. Our whole post-war model is based on people drawing on state-provided education services as children and young people. They should then be well equipped to enter the workforce and, through their taxes, repay that cost and contribute to the future cost of their health and pensions when they retire.

The model assumes retirement to be short. It also assumes that adult skills are something that a small minority may need help with—probably the same people who did not do so well at school. It assumes a relatively static industrial economy, where those who get to university are then equipped to prosper and to contribute to a final salary pension scheme and a mortgage out of the enhanced earnings commanded by graduates in lucrative professions. That model is now woefully out of date, and our public finances, the crisis in the care system and the disengagement of swathes of the population from our politics are a result.

Our school system is increasingly obsessed by pure academic knowledge and is preparing children to be really good at recalling that knowledge and thereby preparing them to be outcompeted by machines.

A successful school career results in a university place. Our higher education system exists to generate more researchers and as a gateway to the professions. However, as set out brilliantly in Richard and Daniel Susskind’s book, The Future of the Professions, we now see professions such as medicine, law, accountancy, architecture, management consulting, banking and even teaching disrupted by ever advancing technology. It is credible that young people will be sold a degree with £50,000 of debt and entry into a profession that is running out of road.

However, thanks to the wonderful gains being made in healthcare, young people are likely to live longer. This means they need either to amass more wealth in their working lives for their retirement or to work well into their 80s. They need to be able to change careers several times, as technology deskills and reskills their profession. As a consequence, a culture of lifelong learning is vital. If the population is to be productive, if we are to be less dependent on migrant skills and if we are to avoid a contagion of disaffection spreading from the rust belt, we need an education system designed around a culture of lifelong learning. Yet, as we have heard from the noble Baroness, Lady Garden, that great iconic cultural institution of lifelong learning, the Open University, is struggling to recruit part-time learners, which is why the past five years have seen a 17% fall in the number of undergraduates from disadvantaged backgrounds across our university system.

I was delighted to read paragraph 236 in today’s Select Committee report on artificial intelligence. The committee states:

“The UK must be ready for the disruption that AI will have on the way in which we work. We support the Government’s interest in developing adult retraining schemes, as we believe that AI will disrupt a wide range of jobs over the coming decades, and both blue- and white-collar jobs which exist today will be put at risk … Industry should assist in the financing of the National Retraining Scheme by matching Government funding. This partnership would help improve the number of people who can access the scheme and better identify the skills required. Such an approach must reflect the lessons learned from the execution of the Apprenticeship Levy”.


I am delighted that the apprenticeship levy was introduced as the beginnings of a return to the training levies of the past, but apprenticeships are proving inflexible, as their frameworks are as interested in the time taken to study as they are in the skills and knowledge learned. Incidentally, I am also alarmed that work experience that is baked into qualifications is used to exclude foreign nationals because they require work visas, and not just study visas, to complete their degree. Will the Minister meet me to discuss this own goal that we are achieving in this country on education exports?

It is also worth noting that larger employers are now starting to take more seriously the need for learning in their workforces. However, I worry that, for as long as senior executives are incentivised on share price, as our management culture dictates, workplace training will be focused on the short term and less on generally improving the stock of skills in the labour market as a whole.

So what should we do to develop a fit-for-purpose lifelong learning culture? We need four things. We need a school system that values applied learning and builds resilience and a love of self-directed learning. We need a university system that has a lifelong relationship with students, perhaps even on a subscription model. We need a rebooted universal adult skills system that is a mixed economy of public and private providers with a new funding model. We need to convert the apprenticeship levy into a lifelong learning levy that employers, the Exchequer and the employee all pay into and that individuals can draw on through their life for university and for skills training.

This is urgent. I hope that not only the noble Viscount but other Ministers in the Department for Education and elsewhere are listening. We need radical reform, not just tinkering with a redundant system.