Lifelong Learning

Lord Watson of Invergowrie Excerpts

Monday 16th April 2018 Lords Chamber

[Lord Watson of Invergowrie (Lab)]

My Lords, I am also most grateful to the noble Baroness, Lady Garden, for initiating this debate, which has highlighted the need for an overarching strategy for lifelong learning, which was the main recommendation of the recent report by the National Audit Office.

In fairness to the Government, it seems that they have at least acknowledged the issues flowing from these skills gaps. Over the past year we have had the Made Smarter Review; the Industrial Strategy; the Government Office for Science’s report Future of Skills and Lifelong Learning; the PM’s announcement of the post-18 review and subsequent publication of its terms of reference; the Careers Strategy and the national retraining scheme; and at the start of this month the Institute for Apprenticeships expanded to become the Institute for Apprenticeships and Technical Education. However, along with many others, we have warned that the Government’s obsession with 3 million apprenticeship starts by 2020 could lead to quantity triumphing over quality, and the same concern applies to that plethora of announcements and initiatives. I hope that that can be avoided and I invite the Minister to make the Government’s priorities clear.

I want to reference another report—this time by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development. It was published last November and highlighted that as many as 40% of workers in the UK are either overskilled or underqualified for their jobs, while the same percentage are working in industries or jobs different from the sector in which they trained. The OECD goes on to say that employers put too little effort into training workers in the right skills and that they should work more closely with the education system to ensure that school, college and university students build the skills actually required by the economy.

That should come as no surprise, because the Government themselves have accepted that for too long too many employers have been unwilling to make available the necessary time or resources to train and retrain their workforce. That is why the Government took the rare step of intervening in the economy by imposing the apprenticeship levy last year. They know that, without it, employers would have lacked the necessary commitment to take on apprentices at anything like the rate needed to make the Government’s 3 million target remotely achievable.

Apprenticeships have a vital role to play in addressing skills shortages, not least for small firms. One means of improving the current model would be to increase the flexibility of the levy, supporting the development of higher-level technical skills by adopting the modular apprenticeship idea contained in the Made Smarter Review, to which I referred earlier. Can the Minister tell noble Lords the Government’s intentions in that regard?

However, in addition to that, much more needs to be done to facilitate an “earning and learning” framework, because the reality is that, for this and future generations, lifelong and career learning will be an economic necessity. As my noble friend Lord Knight said—and he is very experienced in the future of work—the model of work has changed and will continue to change. Increasing automation and the development of artificial intelligence will introduce many new skilled roles that will require some form of formal higher qualification short of a full degree. For individuals to thrive in this new jobs landscape, the focus must be on continuous learning and development, including through the MOOCs referred to by the noble Baroness, Lady Greenfield.

Yet, as other noble Lords have said, since 2012 there has been a dramatic decline in the uptake of part-time higher education by those already in work. The main reason, as almost every noble Lord has said, has been the tripling of tuition fees and the effect that this has had on the Open University in particular. It led to the severe funding pressures, which in turn led to the vice-chancellor resigning following a vote of no confidence by staff.

In reality, that was a vote of no confidence in the Government, who have allowed tuition fees to spiral out of control to the extent that they now bear little relation to the actual cost of delivering higher education courses, full or part-time. A Labour Government will abolish tuition fees. However, I welcome the proposal, contained in the briefing provided by the Open University to all noble Lords participating in this debate, for the direct funding of part-time higher education so that the cost to students is more affordable. The Open University is right to say that offering people an incentive to learn while they earn saves taxpayers money in the long run because higher skills bring economic benefits, boosting their careers and life chances. Developing a culture of sustainable lifelong learning will involve the development of a national skills strategy, together with a reversal of the cuts in adult education, to enable people to train and upskill throughout their working lives.

The decision to devolve the adult education budget from next year will, as the noble Lord, Lord Bird, said, have serious consequences for the ability of the Workers’ Educational Association to maintain the level of its contribution to lifelong learning. I should declare an interest as a former employee of the WEA. With its vast experience, that organisation has a vital role to play in the landscape outlined by noble Lords in this debate, and it must not be denied the resources to do so.

Further, the Conservatives have cut funding for further education colleges—our main provider of adult and vocational education—and reduced entitlements for adult learners. Unsurprisingly, this has led to diminishing numbers of courses and students. Labour will introduce free lifelong education in FE colleges, enabling everyone to upskill or retrain at any point in their life, which is surely a necessity.

A lifelong learning commission was a commitment that we gave in last year’s general election manifesto and it is now being worked through as part of the development of the national education service. That will form the overarching framework for a systematic, radical plan of action covering the whole age spectrum—one that recognises the changing patterns of work, including the gig economy and the consequences of automation, and the need for proper work-life balances. It will value the input of skills to education from as early as late primary education and into the teenage years, giving people second chances in their 20s and continuing opportunities to retrain and develop new career pathways right through into their 60s.

That is the basis of Labour’s comprehensive lifelong learning road map, spelling out a clear narrative of progression, social justice and mobility. It shows that Labour has a strategy for people at every stage of their age cycle, in contrast to the silos and barriers that Conservative-led Governments have erected since 2010. The sooner Labour is in a position to introduce that road map, the sooner this country will be able to build the sustainable lifelong learning culture on which its economic future depends.