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Further Education and Training Bill [HL]

I entirely endorse the remarks of the noble Baroness about the importance of the sector skills councils. Sector skills councils have an increasingly important role to play in capturing and articulating employer demand for investment in skills. They are strategic, employer-led bodies responsible for identifying priorities for investing in the skills of the sector workforce, and, to take up the remark of the noble Baroness, Lady Sharp, encouraging further engagement by employers within each sector in taking their training responsibilities seriously. Currently, sector skills agreements provide the framework for sector skills councils to work with employers in their sectors with key delivery agencies such as the learning and skills councils, regional skills partnerships, awarding bodies and the Government to address priority skills issues in their sectors, including the development of specialised diplomas, which we are seeking to introduce nationwide for 14 to 19 year-olds. The agreements are a key mechanism for articulating skills demand and underpin the move to a more demand-led system of education and training, as set out in our skills strategy. The role of sector skills councils in capturing and articulating employers’ views was stressed recently in the report by the noble Lord, Lord Leitch. Engaging with employers in their sector to stimulate increased demand for investment in skills and influencing how public funding is spent is our central ambition for the sector skills councils. We want to emphasise the importance of working closely with sector skills councils, but we do not think it appropriate to place a specific requirement on the LSC to have regard simply to sector bodies. There are other partners that the LSC will want to consult at national, sub-national and local level. In taking forward priorities, the LSC will want to have regard to regional skills partnerships, local authorities, the Connections service and the Higher Education Funding Council for England, among other bodies. Furthermore, sector skills councils are already involved in a range of actions to improve learning supply in their sector without specific reference to them in the Learning and Skills Act 2000. These actions vary from sector to sector but include: developing sector qualifications strategies; leading the diploma development partnerships; designing the new lines of learning for the specialised diplomas for 14 to 19-year-olds; developing foundation degree sectoral frameworks; involvement in all aspects of the design of national skills academies and the delivery of the training which the academies will provide; and leading adult apprenticeship pilots in four sectors—construction, engineering, health and information technologies. Giving sector skills councils a greater role over qualification reform and development, including determining which qualifications should attract public funding, will, we believe, give employers a real opportunity and responsibility for ensuring that qualifications for their sector are economically valuable. The department and the LSC’s consultation on demand-led systems sets out the key role of sector skills councils in the development of those qualification plans. I hope that the noble Baroness, Lady Morris, will accept that we see sector skills councils as vital to our strategy for skills. We pay tribute to the enormous work by employers to develop the work of the councils. However, as far as possible, we want to avoid including particular organisations or groups of organisations in the Bill, therefore avoiding unnecessary detail. With the assurances that I have given, I hope that the noble Baroness will be satisfied.