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Debate on the Address

My Lords, I thank the noble Lord, Lord Darzi, for his lucid exposition of the parts of the gracious Speech referring to health, social matters and education. We have a great task facing us, as has been mentioned. I recall that when I was chairman of the Post Office there were two jobs I felt were well beyond me. One was trying to run British Rail and the other was running the health service. Thank God no one asked me. The Minister has the great advantage of knowing what he is doing. I shall move on. On Tuesday, the noble Lord, Lord Strathclyde, referring to the challenging problem facing the ninth husband of Zsa Zsa Gabor, said that he knew what to do but his problem was how to make it interesting. I reflected on the education Bill facing us, and thought that there is many a teacher who may be wondering how to make continuation of education interesting for some likely lads and lasses until they are 18. For 140 years, we have been searching for a solution to the problem of the serious skills deficit of this country. Like that ninth husband, we have not found a way—and I must choose my words carefully—of matching the challenge, which was first addressed by a parliamentary Select Committee as long ago as 1868. In the century that followed, no fewer than 20 other committees addressed the problem of our shortage of skills. In the 40 years that have followed that century we have still been searching. During my tenure at the School Curriculum and Assessment Authority, I was invited to make a contribution. I was lucky to be able to introduce the GNVQ into key stage 4, which increased the number of children engaging effectively in education. However, it was a very modest contribution, and I recognise the progress that the Government have made in this during their years in office, but we have been playing a game of ““catch up and keep up”” rather than leading the race. I welcome the four measures taken by the Government that come to mind. One is the introduction of the new specialist diplomas. The second is their unambiguous ““yes”” in their response, signed by no fewer than six Ministers, to the Leitch report, which said that by 2020 more than 40 per cent of the population between the age of 19 and retirement age will need to be up to level 4 and beyond. Thirdly, we have the proposals on the extension of the leaving learning age—we must not call it the leaving school age—and, fourthly, we have the new Children and Young Persons Bill. All those measures are a coherent response to the need to lift our effective investment in young and older people—as has been said, we must not forget that 70 per cent of those at level 4 are already at work. I welcome all that, subject to two comments—although, having heard the noble Lord speak about prisons, I shall raise that to three. My first point is that 40 per cent of people reaching level 4 and beyond is not enough. As leaders in the world economy, Japan and the United States have already achieved that. We are talking about where we will be in 2020 and, unambiguously, we must have reached a figure of 45 per cent. Secondly, as much of the lift from the present 29 per cent to 40 per cent—or, as I said it should be, 45 per cent—has to be achieved by people who are already at work, we must be concerned about our capability to engage with those people. I have one question on which I should like to ask the Government to reflect again: will their support for these people be adequate? Of course, we do not want the Government to substitute Exchequer money for the billions of pounds that employers rightly put into training. They cannot afford to do that, but plenty of others—for example, in many small and medium-sized enterprises—are not looking into the long term and are not investing in their people. Obviously, quite a few employers worry about making such investment because, if they uplift their skills, they are in danger of losing some of their best people. There are also people who are just trying to get on to the housing ladder and are skint, and then there are carers and women returning to work who are not in comfortable circumstances. If we want to lift investment in these people, we have to help them more. My third point, raised by my noble friend Lord Ramsbotham, is concern about young people in prison, although I would extend that to all people in prison. What an awful waste it is to pay £40,000 a year to keep a person there with the high risk that he or she will return. It would make good personal and national economic sense to enable these people, on a scale that we have not attempted in the past, to engage successfully in training. I do not know whether there have been any studies into this but perhaps we should also think about the special problems facing the children of long-term prisoners. I want to make two points this afternoon. First, to address the skills agenda and to make more young people want to continue in learning—which I believe is an essential element in a successful policy to extend the learning age to 18, for coercion on any scale simply will not work—we have to rethink the comprehensive model of education for 14 to 18 year-olds. It is not the best model for delivering the Government's agenda for world-class skills on the scale required. We need to be able to offer young people the opportunity at age 14 to go to a college of technology in our cities and big towns specifically to develop skills preparatory to an apprenticeship or to pursue specialised diplomas that require specialist equipment. The noble Lord, Lord Darzi, referred to a record number of 250,000 people being in apprenticeships; the Leitch report refers to our needing 500,000. The task is therefore huge. If we are going to extend the learning age to 18, as proposed, we will inevitably need new buildings. We shall need to enlarge our cadre of teachers skilled in teaching the skills that industry and commerce need. We would be seen to be taking skills very seriously if 14, 15, 16 and 17 year-olds, rather than having to move from one comprehensive school to another or to an FE college to do their specialist work, were able to go to purpose-built colleges of technology, continually equipped with the latest tackle needed to develop their skills. We would show how much we cared. The Government's commitment to rebuilding, or a major refurbishment of, all secondary schools provides us with an opportunity to consider how we can, through technology colleges, provide what we required to avoid continuing to play the catch-up game for another century, which we cannot afford. The only asset that this country has is its skilled and well educated people—its effective members of the community. We have made a commitment to rescuing ourselves from 140 years of catch-up and we should respond to that by being ready to look at whether the comprehensive model is the best fitted to deliver this agenda for 14 to 18 year-olds. My second point echoes points already made. For the policy of continuing in learning to work, it must be in place next September to respond to the needs of 12 year-olds who have fallen behind and who will be the first to come to secondary schools expecting to stay in education, learning and skills development till 18. Otherwise, those people will regress in relation to their peers. It is a major challenge. Unless we succeed in that, the policy of continuing in learning till 18 will not work, because too many young people will not want to stay on after 16. After all, we have a big-enough problem already with 14, 15 and 16 year-olds who choose not to go to school, and who, at 16, employers will welcome as employees or trainees on their premises. The Prime Minister referred in his speech to the Labour Party conference to a moral duty to help those who come from disadvantaged backgrounds. We have a moral duty to respond to the needs of those young people. It is a social imperative that we do not continue to have 200,000 young who are in neither employment, nor education, nor training. This battle needs to be fought and won initially at the primary and pre-primary level. I referred to those coming forward at 12 only because they are 12 already and we have to do something about them now, this September. The battle has to be won at every step of the way, including primary. I rejoice in what the Government are doing about extending this pre-school stage to 15 hours a week. It will cost money, but it will be worth it. The Government are going the right way—but what we have to do, having got the right policies, is to have the right instruments to deliver them.