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Further Education and Training Bill [HL]

My Lords, before referring to further education, perhaps I may make one observation about the Bill. The Bill is also a devolution measure. I remind noble Lords that, as a result of its passage, further education in Wales will in future be the responsibility of the Welsh Assembly—which I completely support—as further education in Scotland is the responsibility of the Scottish Parliament. I remind noble Lords that the devolution settlement in our country is neither stable nor final. I think that your Lordships will appreciate my belief that Scottish Members of Parliament should not, when the Bill goes to the House of Commons, be allowed to vote on it since it has no effect at all on them. We are debating today English further education and not UK further education. That is the end of the commercial. I think that every Secretary of State during their career in office has referred to further education as the Cinderella—I see a former Secretary of State nodding agreement—waiting to be taken to the ball. I made a modest start by releasing the colleges from the control of local authorities, because when local authorities were pushed for cash they always raided the capital or current budgets of the FE colleges. The colleges were freed from that. Some have stepped up to the mark and have been remarkably successful; others have not done so well. That was the beginning of trusting the colleges. Despite the Minister’s eloquence, the Bill is a bit of a damp squib. I am not persuaded that the general thesis of regional councils is necessarily better. The replacement of 47 by nine is a good example of state supply-side planning. The old countries in the communist bloc thought that they were rather good at that. But all my instincts tell me that it is wrong and that training is essentially a local matter. In the south-east region, the capital is Guildford. People in Canterbury will never go to Guildford, nor will the people from Dover or from Brighton and Lewes. It has nothing to do with Guildford. If there is a deficiency and shortage of plumbing skills in Canterbury, it will be no consolation that there is an over-provision of plumbing skills in Guildford. So I am by no means convinced that the regional solution is the right solution in this matter. But the Government are going to do it. Let us see how it works out. The Leitch report is interesting and important, but I do not think that it is fundamental enough. It looked at the whole of the FE area post-16. Leitch is trying to make up for the failures of the English schooling system. In effect, he is saying that we do not have enough young people post-16 with appropriate skills; we do not have enough young people with communication skills and we do not have sufficient young people who are literate and numerate enough. Therefore, measures have to be taken. We have to be more fundamental and go back and look into the schooling system. Two years ago, the Government stumbled on the correct policy and, following the Tomlinson report, decided to develop a 14 to 19 curriculum. I thought that that would be the real breakthrough, so this morning I went to Google and typed ““14 to 19 curriculum””—I find that quicker than tabling Parliamentary Questions—and found three or four websites. They were full of good will; earnest people are working on good websites trying to develop the 14 to 19 curriculum. I do not want to berate them because there is real effort, and I could see that they are trying, but no curriculum has emerged. The problem is simply that on the main website of the qualifications body there are three columns: schools 11 to 16, sixth-form colleges and FE colleges. When you go into each one, you go into separate institutions with separate aims, purposes and objectives. If a young person of 16 tries to find out what the 14 to 19 curriculum is, he finds a morass. It is very difficult to see your way through. The QCA is correctly trying to get conformity on qualifications, so there is a continuum from diplomas up to degrees, but institutions that can deliver the 14 to 19 curriculum are missing. Therefore, I advocate as a serious policy that the Government should establish as new secondary schools only schools for 14 to 19 year-olds. Call them what you will—skills schools or apprenticeship schools—but they are a new type of school. Tony Blair has already said that he is committed to 200 new academies as part of his legacy. I welcome that, but I wish that he would be more radical. It is no good him relaunching what I did 20 years ago. If he wants a good legacy, leaving 50 or 60 14 to 19 schools would be a legacy worth having. Why do I support 14 to 19 schools covering leaving school and going on to further education? I do it because far too many young people leave school at 16. They do not necessarily end their education, because many of them will go into a job and have a day release at a local further education college for one day a week. Some will do more than that, but they leave the institution in which they have been brought up.It is a break. If the institution to which they went at 14 continued to 19, it would discourage leaving at 16. Therefore, instead of leaving at 16 and having four days in business and one day in college, in such a school you could have four days in school and one or two days in business. Continuing that process in an educational framework—a school or a college—is better than doing it in business. I think that there is only one 14 to 19 school in the offing, but I hope to try to persuade the Minister and the Prime Minister to do that. I support what the noble Lord, Lord Low, said. I am president of a charity that maintains one of the most successful schools for the blind in the country. We are under pressure, just as the RNIB is, but thatis another debate. In the school for which I am responsible for raising money, we take pupils from two to 25. There is a complete continuum: nursery, primary, secondary and a wonderful post-16 FE college that is bursting at the seams. The pupils seem more assured as they stay within the same institutional framework. Colleges for the blind have shown the way to do that. I do not see why other colleges should not follow. We need inspiration in this. Last night, I saw the Royal Shakespeare Company’s production of ““Much Ado About Nothing””—quite a good title for the Bill, but leave that aside. It was a brilliant production set in Cuba in the 1950s, and I noticed lots of young people in the audience, which is unusual in a London theatre. There were not just older teenagers, but lots of 13 and 14 year-olds, too, so I talked to them in the interval and asked, ““Why are you here? Are you just starting Shakespeare?””. They answered, ““We haven’t started Shakespeare yet, but we read about the play and a friend said we should come and see it””. They absolutely loved it; they stood up and cheered, and they clapped and shouted at the end. The point of this anecdote is that they were inspired by a remarkable producer who really turned them on, which is what you have to do with children. Children get fed up with education, because there is not that inspiration behind it. One phrase that I used quite a lot when I had responsibility for these matters was a quotation from another Shakespeare play, ““the fire i’ th’ flint Shows not till it be struck””. Every child in our country has a little bit of flint in them. Even the most awkward or rebellious—the one you really feel you should have nothing to do with—has a bit of flint, and the success of education is to find that bit of flint and strike it. That is done better in a continuing institution from 14 to 19, and I hope that the Government will seriously address that possibility, as it would transform the learning skills in our country. Finally, the Leitch report says some sensible things about involving employers more—not just in the supply side of FE colleges—but another voice should be heard, that of the students. Many 16 and 17 year-olds know exactly what they want to be trained in. Where is their voice? How can they be asked? I will give the House a solution, by using a term that is unpalatable in educational terms: education vouchers. Do your Lordships remember that mad idea from Keith Joseph, the mad monk, which never got anywhere? Well, on 23 November I found a speech by Alan Milburn—who seems to be the thinking edge of new Labour, or what is left of it—in which he said that he would like to see education credits, which is the same as vouchers. He was arguing that parents of children who go to failing schools should be given education credits, so that they can buy them out and send them somewhere else. That was not the mad monk or the right wing of the Conservative party talking; it was Alan Milburn, a close friend of the Minister, who, if he did not have ministerial responsibility today, would no doubt be making the same sort of speech. I would like students to be given a greater voice in all this. That is very important. Give them a voucher so that they can go shopping for the sort of course that they want. That would mean that we did not need nine regional councils or anything like that, particularly when there is per capita funding. Further education is an immensely important area, but this Bill does not do very much for it. This is a continuing debate, but I ask the Minister to consider most seriously my main proposal on schools for 14 to 19 year-olds.