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World Class Skills 2020

The hon. Gentleman has his finger on the right button. All of us would like to see an all-age careers service. We may talk about that on another occasion in some depth—it could make a good topic for the Select Committee. I turn now to the challenges to skills. My Select Committee is coming to the end of a major inquiry on the sustainable school. We have been looking at the building schools for the future programme. What hits one between the eyes when inquiring into such an important subject is that it was much stimulated by the Prime Minister and by the Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs when he was at the Department for Education and Skills. There was a tremendous urge at the beginning of the building skills for the future programme and the whole education, education, education mantra about something that Joseph Chamberlain believed in—the transformational ability of education to change lives and communities. That was at the heart of the whole process of building skills for the future. We looked at how education and training are changing. It sometimes worries me that skills have to keep up with the modern changes—how one gets skills and how one goes through the skilling process. Luckily, in most areas we have the advantage over our European colleagues in that we have always believed in outcome-based educational qualifications, whereas our European neighbours have been much more firmly rooted in time served. That always seemed strange to me, but it is still the case. The exception in the UK is in our apprenticeship world, where emphasis was always placed on time served rather than qualification. We must increasingly emphasise outcomes in terms of skills, and give people modern methods to acquire those skills and gain their qualifications as fast as they can. That does not mean watering them down, but we need to use new techniques. The more we looked at the sustainable school—I am not giving away any secrets; we have not completed the report, so I am not in Purdah—the more we knew that the way in which teachers teach and students learn is going through a radical change. Research shows that, with the traditional methods of one teacher and 25 or 30 students, only 20 per cent. of the information is retained. By putting children into a different context, so that they own the learning process in small groups, they retain 70 per cent. of what has been taught in that environment. We are seeing, as shown by evidence from the National Endowment for Science, Technology and the Arts spin-off, the Futures Laboratory, that there are new techniques. Some of us have had the privilege of seeing that on the ground. The education and learning process will go through a revolution in our time, and advanced in age as some of us are—me in particular—we will see a transformation. It has been a long time coming, but it will happen very quickly and it will happen in the skills sector too. I hope that the sector skills councils will take note that the way we frame skills has changed and that they will harness that. In our country, everybody knows that our universities are some of the best in world—the Americans have good universities as well, but in competition with any other parts of the world we are absolutely up there in terms of first-class university higher education. It is not just the traditional ivy-covered universities that are in that category, about which I have a small disagreement with the hon. Member for Cities of London and Westminster (Mr. Field). The fact is that all our universities are pretty damn good and many that were not universities long ago have steamed up the ratings—for example, Warwick and York. My own university—the university of Huddersfield—has a tremendous reputation and one of the best reputations in terms of how students rate courses and levels of employability. We have a fine world-class higher education system, but we cannot take it for granted. It has to be worked on because we live in a competitive world. However, that traditional image is in contrast with our skills base. When people talk about skills they say how good Germany and the Nordic countries are, but we are not even in the frame. For a long time, there has been something sadly lacking in the way that we have approached skills. We must put our hand to improving skills through using the best technologies and teaching methods. I said that I would be brief so I will finish by raising an issue that provides a commercial for my private Member’s Bill. The Bill does not have much hope of becoming law because the Government will not adopt it and it is No. 15 in the ballot. The Bill is not about raising the school leaving age; it is about what I consider an iniquity. We have a commitment to ““Every Child Matters”” and the five outcomes for children. I know that the Liberal Democrats would like the voting age to be lowered to 16, but I disagree with that as children are children until they are 18. Legally, they are still children until they are 18 in most respects in our country. I believe that the ““Every Child Matters”” outcomes should apply to 16 to 18-year-olds and that it is a disgrace that some children—usually not our children—get into employment or work without training. That is unacceptable for any child. It is wrong for children at 16 to go into unemployment, to go into nothing or to go into work with no training at all. We should do everything that we can to make that impossible. I know that that is difficult because it is complex. It is also wrong that when children leave school they do so without having permission and that they just disappear. When schools are asked where those children have gone, they say that they do not know; and if the further education sector is asked where children entering FE have come from, or what joins up the cohort of children who left school at 16 and those arriving at 16-plus education, it does not know. Indeed, I was talking to an MP today who said she is having terrible trouble locally because she tried to get all the education providers in her constituency together to find out whether they can share databases so that they know where those children are. There is a deep reluctance among the education providers in her constituency to collaborate in that. If we care about skills, we should have a system that gives someone coming up to 16 a leaving certificate as part of a leaving process that not only provides permission to leave, but gives good advice on the next stage in that child’s life for skilling and education. At the moment, that is lacking. The hon. Member for South Holland and The Deepings (Mr. Hayes) said that we should have a life-long careers service and I absolutely agree, but let us start that when it really matters, at the age of 16. At the last count, there are 220,00 people between the ages of 16 to 18 whom we call NEETs—not in employment, education or training. That is a difficult challenge to deal with. I know that we sometimes make political capital out of that, but the fact is that a significant percentage of those young people have special educational needs which were not picked up early on, and they were not put in the right environment to tackle those deficiencies. I apologise, Mr. Hancock, if I have gone on for a little longer than I promised. There are an amazing number of things that we can do to skill our nation and we must use new techniques and technology. I feel suicidal on a Sunday after I have read the Sunday papers, particularly the articles of someone who writes for The Sunday Times. Those with an interest in education would want to shoot themselves after reading some of those articles. However, on the Monday I might go to a school, college or a work-based learning environment where I would see highly energised kids, fantastic teaching and learning, and a world that I do not recognise from what I read in the newspapers. I see a world of good education and training, which is changing and improving all the time.