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Skills for Growth

With permission, Mr. Speaker, I wish to—[Interruption.] ...I wish to repeat a statement made by my noble Friend the Secretary of State for Business, Innovation and Skills on our policies for skills and their role in our future economic growth. An active Government approach to equipping the country for globalisation means ensuring that we have the skills that underwrite the industries and jobs of the future. That means skills for the high-tech, low-carbon, more high-value-added sectors that drive the growth that underwrites everything else that we want to achieve as a society. These skills are becoming more sophisticated and even more vital. I also start from the position that skills in our society must always be an individual's ladder up. That is why the skills system needs to mesh with our university system. We need schools and colleges to make a strong vocational offer, which will lead to a clear vocational route from apprenticeship to technician to foundation degree and beyond. Equipping unemployed people with the skills that they need to get jobs in key sectors will be essential to a strong recovery. Let us remember that by equipping more of the domestic population with the right skills to compete for jobs, we help employers to become less reliant on migrant labour. Addressing these skills challenges has been the focus of our skills strategy in recent years, and it remains the foundation on which our new policies build. We recognise that skills have historically been an area of British competitive weakness. Since 1997, we have made real progress in tackling the economic and social scandal of adult illiteracy and innumeracy. We will not abandon our promise of basic skills for all. We have eradicated much of the poor quality that blighted our further education system. We have transformed work place training through Train to Gain, which has trained more than 1 million employees and helped them to get on in work. We have revived apprenticeships, which were allowed to wither away in the '80s and '90s. The Apprenticeships, Skills, Children and Learning Bill, which is before the House today, will ensure that this progress is sustained. This skills strategy builds on the progress made. It reflects some important decisions and marks a radical shift in the balance of our skills priorities. It reflects the world we find ourselves in: a world where higher level skills have never been more important to our growth, and where the skills challenge has to be tackled within more constrained resources. So we have made some difficult choices. The crisis help that we targeted to help to counter the effects of the recession will progressively be refocused on the skills that we need for a sustained recovery. We have taken three key decisions. First, we will change the focus of our skills system so that a new premium is put on higher skills, especially the technician skills that are the foundation of high-tech, low-carbon industry. Secondly, we will empower learners through more choice and better information to drive up the quality of the system through skills accounts. Thirdly, we will dramatically reduce the number of publicly supported bodies delivering skills policy, working with the UK Commission for Employment and Skills to reduce them by more than 30. These choices will target public investment on the most relevant skills for the future, at the highest possible levels of quality and marketability. The first of these decisions reflects the need for a new focus on the skills that we need in the laboratory, the high-tech factory and the computer facility. We will create a new, modern class of technicians—something that has long been identified as a gap in our labour market. To build this technician class, we will further expand the apprenticeship system by creating 35,000 new advanced places for those aged 19 to 30 over the next two years. The aim of creating this technician class will also be aided by the new generation of university technical colleges whose creation we are supporting. To turn these apprenticeships into potential ladders to university, from 2011 all apprenticeship frameworks at levels 3 and 4 will be required to have UCAS tariff points, just as A-levels do, so that holders can apply for, and make their way into, university. We will also commit to the recommendation from the panel on fair access to the professions that we create an apprenticeship scholarship fund that will provide one-off bursaries of up to £1,000 for 1,000 apprentices entering higher education every year. We will take a more strategic approach to the skills that we fund. That means prioritising strategic skills in key industries such as advanced manufacturing, low-carbon, digital technologies and biosciences, and in important growth sectors such as health care. Our decisions in the next bidding round of the national skills academies programme will reflect these core national priorities. The second of our decisions is to increase the power of learners to drive up quality in the skills training sector by giving them more choice over where and when they train, and better information on how to exercise that choice. To give effect to that greater choice, we will set up new skills accounts, which will enable students to shop around for training, backed by good information on how well different courses and colleges can meet their needs. Critically, we are going to more than treble the number of public and private institutions where accounts can be used to over 1,500—not only creating new options for learners, but creating a big incentive for providers to design courses that attract students. The further education sector has made significant strides in improving the quality of its provision over the last decade. Many of our colleges are performing at world-class levels, and overall success rates have increased by over 40 per cent. in the last 10 years. We will build on this by providing progressively greater autonomy to colleges that demonstrate teaching excellence, but also by cutting funding to low-priority and poorly provided courses. We will invest in the courses that employers judge are in line with their needs and requirements. Finally, we have decided to simplify the organisational clutter of public bodies delivering skills policy. We welcome the recommendation of the UK Commission for Employment and Skills to reduce the number of separate publicly funded agencies by over 30 and will work with them and others to make that happen. Our new model will make the regional development agencies responsible for leading the regional skills strategy in each area, working in partnership with local authorities and others. This skills strategy shares its fundamental challenge with our recent higher education framework. They must equip our people to prosper in a globalised knowledge economy. They must contribute to our return to sustained and sustainable growth. The goal of this strategy is a skills system defined not simply by targets based on achieved qualifications, but by ““real world”” outcomes—relevant quality skills with real market value. It will be driven by the realities of a changing global economy—by demand from the British businesses and individuals who have to prosper in that economy. The clearer the demand, the better the system will work. Our expectations of business will rise. We will strengthen the role of employer-led sector skills councils and business-led regional development agencies in shaping an excellent supply of courses and training, designed in direct response to local and national employer needs, but we will also expect businesses to make a greater contribution to the funding of skills training for their work force. We need a culture in which all employers take the view that the skills of their staff are one of the best investments they can make. Our ambition is that, thanks in large part to the innovations in this strategy, three quarters of people should participate in higher education or complete an advanced apprenticeship or equivalent technician-level course by the age of 30. This strategy empowers the further education system above all to compete to meet the needs of businesses and learners. That will put further education where it belongs—right at the heart of the knowledge economy, at the heart of our recovery and our future prosperity.