---

Skills Base

My Lords, I congratulate the noble Lord, Lord Leitch, on securing the debate, although I suspect that was relatively easy compared with writing the report. I congratulate him, too, on producing a very good report which can take us forward in this crucial area. One thing that I like about the report is that it gathers together the evidence of where we are, and noble Lords have given examples and statistics about how far behind we are falling compared with our competitor nations. The report will stand us in good stead; we will be able to refer to it as almost a bible of those statistics. I want to give three examples where, in my previous work, I have noticed a lack of skills and the impact that that can have. When I was chair of the Children’s Workforce Development Council, there was a simple but powerful statistic that I had not realised existed. We understand the importance of working with children before age five if we are to raise the standards of every child in school. Whereas we can be pleased that 80 per cent of people who work with children in schools have a degree, 80 per cent of those who work in early years provision do not have a degree. That is an absolute swap-around of qualifications. Whereas a very high number of middle-class children go to university, gain degrees and progress beyond that, we have still not cracked the problem of access to higher education for children from all backgrounds. If noble Lords look at the statistics, as the Prime Minister did in his Mansion House report, they can see that we are faring worse in terms of second degrees in some professions than we did 10 or 15 years ago. So the statistics in the report represent people doing jobs without the skills and qualifications that they need and citizens not having the opportunities they ought to have. This is a good report, but it is not as though we have not bothered to do such a report for decades. Good, honest and hard-working people have tried to crack this one before us. If we are really to make a difference now we need a far better understanding of what has prevented us making it before. That is what I want to concentrate on, rather than the report itself. For me, there are three or four key areas. We have a national inability to treasure vocational skills. If we do not treasure those skills while children and young people are at school and get education for those aged 14 to 19 right, we will not have begun at that early stage to get a throughput of skills and an appreciation that that type of skills matter. Our national culture makes it sometimes difficult to get the skills agenda going. We are still suspicious of everybody having qualifications. If we manage to ensure that more people have higher-level qualifications, there is still a suspicion that we must have lowered the pass grade. As long as we have a national cultural problem of not believing in people’s ability to raise standards and perform at a higher level, we will not change the culture as we need to. Noble Lords mentioned employers’ commitment to skills. Too many employers are still cutting investment in skills when the going gets tough, whereas all the evidence shows that such investment at that point makes the difference to an industry’s survival. The noble Lord, Lord Leitch, made employee demand the key part of his report, and I agree. We will have to look seriously at that. People are not queuing down the street demanding higher skill levels. Parents fight to get their children into good schools, but employees without adequate skills are not screaming that someone should upgrade their skills. That has been a problem as well. We do not talk about rewarding higher skill levels with higher wages and a different salary structure; neither do our media pay sufficient attention to skills. How often do you read about a skills event on the front page of a newspaper? We have had a very good week in which we discussed reports on the link between social class and educational attainment in schools, but where is the national debate on skill levels? Where was John Humphrys? Did the ““Today”” programme go round every morning for a week looking at the lack of skills and what can be done? The media have a role in leading the national debate. Our efforts so far have lacked consistency. We do not have a language to discuss skills. How many people in the street know what a level 2 or a level 4 is, let alone what an old level 4 was only one year ago? The noble Lord, Lord Leitch, equated a level to five good GCSEs. He did so because he knew that we understand that language. If we are to persuade employees to demand a certain skill level and employers to provide it, we need a national language for a national debate. We cannot do much about that. However, there is a national language in the rest of the education system. Whatever their skill level and previous educational experiences, people know what GCSEs, A-levels and degrees are. We have to stop changing the language and try to develop the conversation with the nation. This is an excellent report. It gives us our best chance in a long time of taking the debate forward. Several things should happen alongside it. First, it needs the resources. Organisations in the skills sector should not have to fight each other for resources. At the moment, sector skills councils are arguing with learning and skills councils about the resources they need. We must also be prepared to use compulsion if a voluntary approach does not work. We must value economically viable skills but understand that the way into learning for some people is to do things that may not be economically viable. We must keep the structure simple. We must also make this the last report which we have to produce to set us on the road to becoming a nation that is strong in skills, strong in social justice and economically strong.