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Education and Skills Bill

Like many who have spoken, I begin by saying that I agree very much with most of the principles and the intent of the Bill. There are far too many young people in the NEET group—not in education, employment or training—and there are far too many pre-16 students truanting from mainstream education. A figure of 10 per cent. was suggested earlier. In comparison with just 20 years ago, jobs for unskilled, unqualified people of any age, let alone 16 to 19-year-olds or those in their 20s, barely exist. When Margaret Thatcher was presiding over the destruction of the British manufacturing industry, it was suggested, not least by her, that countries such as Britain and those elsewhere in Europe could survive. Basic mass manufacturing could be done in the developing world, which had cheaper wages and so on and could therefore compete far more effectively at that level, and we could survive through internal service industries and high-skills industries that would sell to the rest of the world. However, we cannot be complacent about those jobs either. Last year, the Select Committee on Education and Skills, as it then was, visited China; we went to Hong Kong, Shanghai and Beijing. We saw the phenomenal change and growth in that country—the massive expansion of university provision and the educational changes going through. As part of our investigation, we read about what was happening in countries such as India, which is competing with the west at every level, from universities to massive graphic design companies to massive call centres. No one in Britain or other western European countries can today assume that the sort of jobs that people could once get with no qualifications or low qualifications exist any more. They certainly will not exist in a few years' time. The intent of the Bill is welcome, therefore. I speak as someone who spent 22 years working in education and six years on the Education and Skills Committee looking at education throughout this country and in many others. While I was a teacher, I spent three to four years as an assistant head of year 10 and year 11, and 12 years as a head of sixth form. During those 16 years, I spent an awful lot of time every year working to persuade pupils to stay on in post-16 education. I tried to encourage them to take A-levels and to go on to university, or to stay on and take a qualification known as the certificate of pre-vocational education, which was designed for those who had not achieved their five A to Cs and who wanted to up their basic skills. There was a year-long course in which they sampled different vocational outlets to see whether that would give them an idea of where they wanted to go once they had upped themselves to a level 2 qualification. That course was scrapped and replaced by GNVQs. My school had one of the first sixth forms to introduce that in the whole country; it was one of the first 30 institutions, most of which were colleges, to introduce the courses. I worked hard to persuade pupils of a range of abilities—from intermediate GNVQ to advanced—to stay on. I also worked to encourage pupils to stay on and take part in a college-school partnership that existed for a number of years between one of the schools at which I worked—I was the head of the sixth form there—and the local further education college, so I have a long and wide experience of working with the client group referred to in the Bill about whom we are in part talking today. I support a huge amount of the intention behind the Bill, but like so many others I query the compulsion element, as have a vast range of organisations of every kind, including the Institute of Directors, various teachers unions, the TUC, the British Youth Council, Barnardo's, the Local Government Association, and the National Bureau for Students with Disabilities, as well as the children's commissioner—the list just goes on and on. The Government should consider the weight of that evidence and what has been said today, and think again about the compulsion element. The Government need to consider carefully why the problem that they are trying to deal with through compulsion exists. In part, the problem is to do with the situation in post-16 education traditionally, in particular the poor funding for post-16 students in further education compared with that for students in school-based sixth forms, and the poor funding for FE from 19 onwards compared with that for people in higher education, as well as the lack of flexibility in FE provision. For example, a huge problem is that people either complete an apprenticeship or they get nothing out of it—they cannot build up work in a credits-based system. The situation is very much the same with college courses. Lots of college principals and teachers with whom I have talked over the years bemoan the fact that we do not have a system such as that which some years ago the Education and Skills Committee saw working incredibly well in California, the fifth largest economy in the world in its own right. Some 60 per cent. of the population in the relevant age group in California have university degrees, but the average age at which people complete them is 35, because a lot of students build up part-time accreditation over 15 to 18 years. Those students take a course, take a year off to work or take part-time courses, building up credits over a long period of time. We do not have that in this country, which affects the whole of FE and has an effect on those in the age group who might want to work and might also want to improve their skills, but who cannot take the mix-and-match approach that works so well in other countries. We also have a lack of apprenticeship places, which the Government have been attempting to redress, albeit certainly not on the scale that the Education and Skills Committee saw some years ago in Denmark, where there is an incredibly wide network of apprenticeship places. Denmark also has an employer's levy, which all employers pay. All the employers there chip into the apprenticeship system, and since they have already paid the money they might as well get a free apprentice out of it, instead of regarding taking on an apprentice as a problem, which is how many employers in Britain unfortunately regard it. There are a lot of problems in the post-16 system that need addressing. The major problem is not with the system itself but with what happens pre-16, as a number of Members have already mentioned. For example, in his response to the Green Paper that led to the Bill, Dr. John Dunford from the Association of School and College Leaders said:"““The young people impacted by this bill primarily will be those who have turned their back on education and training.””" He said that we have to re-engage those young people, which will be a ““huge challenge””. Will compulsion really be the way to achieve that, when most of that group have already switched off, dropped out or even truanted before 16, let alone after? In his response to the Green Paper that led to the Bill, the children's commissioner said:"““Our support for a raised participation age is conditional on changes to the educational culture within schools. Meaningful participation must begin long before 18, and long before Key Stage 4. We look for greater evidence of progress towards giving students a more significant voice in their own education and the running of their own schools.””" The problem arises before the NEET group appears, not just at age 16. Why do so many fail to engage pre-16? A lot of what I say will be coloured by my experience working in schools for 22 years, the experience of my three children, who have been through the state system, and my experience of serving on the Education and Skills Committee for six years, looking at different education systems across the country and throughout the world. One of the problems is that we have had three landmark changes in education, all of which have worked against the interests of the sort of education that we want to see in schools. The shift that took place between the '50s and the '70s was from selective schools to comprehensives, in so far as we have ever had such schools—we have never had a system of well-funded and respected local community schools or comprehensives in this country, as can be seen Finland, which tops the programme for international student assessment studies, or PISA studies, for success. Then there was the O-level system, which was designed to be attempted by only 40 per cent. of the population and failed by a chunk of them, with perhaps only 30 per cent. passing, after which the certificate of secondary education was added, to cover the other 60 per cent. Finally, the two were merged in the GCSE, the introduction of which I was involved in, as a head of department back in the 1980s. Then there was the raising of the school leaving age, or ROSLA, the last occasion being in 1972-73. My year group at school was the last that could leave at 15 with no qualifications whatever and go into unskilled work, as some of my friends did. One of the problems with all those landmarks was that we tried to impose an academic, grammar school-style curriculum on everyone. Being a mini grammar school was seen as the only thing worth doing, because academia was all that counted in this country. That was worsened by the massive, over-detailed, over-prescriptive and over-academic national curriculum, and further worsened by the intense atmosphere of frequent high-stakes testing, league tables and the professional pay review process, all of which I experienced in my professional career before being elected to this place. Let us remind ourselves that, as has been said, truancy has increased in the past 10 years, as the Government introduced those measures. Perhaps we should look at what effect those measures had on increasing the rate of truancy. The two big PISA studies show that our rate of success in literacy and numeracy has fallen, from one study to the next, as the children who went through the literacy and numeracy strategy in junior schools came through to the secondary level and into the PISA age range. I taught children who were already turned off the school process at the age of 11—between 1979 and 1997, under the previous Government, as well as between 1997 and 2001, under this Government. By the age of 14, that situation was much worse; by 16 it was a nightmare. Some of those children had been a problem in school at the age of 14, 15 or 16, but when I went to visit them on work experience in the summer of year 10, I met entirely different people, working in an adult environment and doing something that they were enthused by. We have to harness those two sides of school to the benefit of everyone, in order to pre-empt the creation of the NEET group. We must allow schools pre-16 the funding, the class sizes and the curriculum flexibility to engage all our children, not just the academic. We must not turn off such a significant proportion of our children. However, we are told that innovation and freedom from the national curriculum can be exercised only by schools that are outside the state system—the tiny minority of academies, for example, or the trust schools in their original version, before the watered-down version introduced after a Government Back-Bench rebellion altered the previous education Bill. Schools have to be outside the system. What folly is it that says that we need innovation in our schools, but that we cannot trust educational professionals to deliver it? We are told that the vast majority must be regulated to within an inch of their lives, in order to teach in our schools; and yet if a school is taken over or set up by an outside body such as a religious body, or by millionaire used-car salesmen, fashion designers, carpet kings, creationists or wealthy city slickers, all of a sudden the school can have curriculum innovation. I just do not understand the logic of that and have said so repeatedly in the Chamber in the past six years. The current situation is nonsense—it is the educational policy of the madhouse. I have worked under five heads, four of whom except for the first one—he was a traditionalist ex-senior Army officer—wanted to innovate, but were increasingly frustrated as the years passed by the diktats from the Minister from Whitehall. We should allow that freedom to all our schools, not just the chosen few set up by random outside bodies or wealthy individuals. I hope and trust that those in my party who are now talking about free schools, possibly in the same vein, will not go down the route that the Government and the Conservative party have followed. I am reassured in part by the conversation that I had with my Front-Bench colleague, my hon. Friend the Member for Yeovil (Mr. Laws), and will watch the policy developments carefully over the next year. Finally, it seems that the same situation applies to post-16, too. I am glad that the Minister for Schools and Learners is back in his place, because although I would not want to misquote him, he said in an earlier intervention—I wrote this down, because I was so shocked by it—that one of the values of compulsion post-16 would be the ““galvanising effect”” on those working with young people. It is almost as if the only way that those who work in FE post-16 can deliver a good education to their charges is to force an unwilling client group, which will then scare those FE tutors into doing their job properly. I have visited lots of colleges, including Chesterfield college, North Nottinghamshire college, Chester college and colleges across London—I also visited many when I was a teacher—and I have never met an FE principal who did not want to innovate and experiment. They would tell me, however, that the major obstacles that they faced were Government policy, Government funding processes and the dead hand of central Government. We must free up our schools and colleges and not try to impose ever more intensive and detailed central Government control. We must trust the education professionals, not the random amateurs from outside who set up schools.