Digital Skills (Select Committee Report)
Debate between Lord Knight of Weymouth and Lord Maxton
Lord Maxton (Lab)
Before my noble friend leaves that point, there are those who predict that the age of 105 is way out and that the first person who will live to 150 has already been born and is probably in their mid-30s.
Lord Knight of Weymouth
My noble friend may well be right, but the point I am making is that we need to think about this in the context of 60-year or 70-year working lives—possibly longer—and of continually having to reskill as we are continually deskilled by technology. That has profound implications for our education system. I think it will mean that qualifications as proxies for skill will become increasingly inadequate, and that increasingly we will need employers to credential skill because we cannot wait for our cumbersome qualification system to keep up. Apprenticeships are part of the solution, but they, too, can be cumbersome. We need much more agility in our skills system. We need more modular skills badging so that we click through digital badges and see the portfolios that are behind that of the skills that people have and what they are able to deliver with them.
I also believe that we will shortly move on from the traditional CV, with employers being able to click through into those portfolios and, essentially, sift through data mining. If employers start to move away from sifting using qualifications, the fundamental basis on which our education system is built starts to erode quite rapidly. That means that we need to think carefully about each stage of education and the consequences in this century as the digital revolution starts to explode.
On higher education, it is starting to feel insane for a young person to frontload their very long working life with a huge amount of debt by going to university in their early 20s when they need to have a lifelong relationship with university that could last 60 or 70 years. For further education, working out the closer relationship with employers that the report talks about and reflecting employer-accredited qualifications rather than waiting around for awarding bodies is key. For both those sectors—if it does not cause my noble friend Lady Morgan too many nightmares—we should revisit the principle of individual learning accounts and see whether there is a system of financing skills that is individualised, and that is an entitlement that we may all have and can draw on through a long working life.
For schools, we need to profoundly challenge a system that is so content-heavy and geared around our ability to regurgitate and memorise content, and move to a system that gives us the resilience to work freelance, because that is the nature of this economy, to start and to close businesses and charities, and to deal with having to reskill as we are deskilled constantly through life. We need a school system that is less about the standardisation of an industrial age and more about designing learning around individuals. We now have the technology and the tools. We can use the technology we are talking about to deliver a more individualised education.
I see a radical agenda that is non-negotiable. The report’s title gives us a hint that its authors perhaps think the same. I will close by quoting from a blog published in March last year on Medium, a blogging platform. It says:
“As the waves of digital disruption wash across our shores, we need to ensure that our government, our institutions and our teachers are not applying old norms and ways of thinking to new technologies, new business models and new economic realities ... We need to ensure that we focus our resources not on protecting the past from the future, but protecting the future from the past. This isn’t simply about learning to code. It’s about learning new skills. New ways of thinking. New ways of learning”.
I am very happy to say that the author of the blog is in government. It is the noble Baroness, Lady Shields. I hope that the education department is talking to her and listening to her wise words.