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Building a High-Skilled Economy

I hear what the Minister says, but the new Government still have some way to go in setting out more generally how they propose to build on Labour's progress in upskilling and reskilling our population, and particularly in outlining how some of the more strategic objectives on skills shortages will be met at regional level. That may not be easily deliverable at local authority level, so the Government have some more thinking to do about our regions. The progress made under Labour was recognised by the UK Commission for Employment and Skills in its national skills audit, published earlier this year:""Significant progress has been made in raising the qualifications levels of the workforce and stimulating supply over the last ten years, so that compared to other OECD nations our supply of highly skilled people is likely to place us 10th in the OECD by 2020."" When Labour left office we were on track to move up the OECD league table in terms of the advances we had made in skilling our population. There is thus a considerable challenge to the Government to maintain that progress. Similarly, recent publications from Universities UK and the Russell group comment on the strength of the university sector, while arguing that if current standards and quality are to be maintained investment must continue. We may hear something about that in the Budget next week, but it remains to be seen whether protection will be given for education not only pre-19, but post-19, so that we continue to be internationally competitive. Not only did the Labour Government invest heavily in education generally, including further and higher education, but that investment was accompanied by a strategy to widen participation, to raise aspirations and to ensure that all young people who felt they could benefit from a university or a level 4 education had the chance to do so. I have not yet heard from the new Government whether they will continue to have that high level of aspiration for our young people. The Leitch review very much led us in that strategy. The Minister mentioned the review in his opening speech, but he did not mention whether this Government would keep the very demanding Leitch targets, which stated that 90% or more of the working-age population should have a level 2 qualification, 68% should have a level 3 qualification and over 40% should have a qualification at level 4 or higher. I would be interested to hear whether the Minister thinks those targets should stay in place. Good progress was being made towards reaching those targets when Labour left office. The Liberal Democrats have often said—I often heard this during my election campaign—that although Labour had made advances in reskilling the population, those had been confined largely to the better-off. Interestingly, data from HEFCE show clearly that that is not the case. A HEFCE publication earlier this year, which looked at trends in young participation in higher education among different groups in England, stated that to overcome gaps in the data on disadvantage at an individual level, the study that it used looked at levels of disadvantage in local areas, taking figures from 8,000 census wards across England. The authors of the study also selected a range of indicators, and they said that, looking across the indicators, they had to conclude that since the mid-2000s young people from disadvantaged areas are substantially more likely to enter HE, that most measures of the gap in participation between most and least disadvantaged areas had fallen, and that the majority of additional entrants to HE have come from more disadvantaged areas. That means that Labour was not only upskilling the population, but it was extending access to higher education to those that had not previously been able to benefit from it. That is another substantial challenge for the new Government: they must—and we will be watching whether they continue to do so—extend opportunities and widen participation in the way that Labour did. The audit that I mentioned earlier also talked about the importance of increasing skill levels further and identified key areas where there are skill shortages: in management and leadership, in professional skills, at the technician and equivalent level, at intermediate vocational levels and care services, and in customer service and general employability skills. It is important that we continue to make good those skill shortages. The audit also identified key sectors where we need to be improving the skills levels of our young people and work force in the future if we are to remain internationally competitive. It was interesting to see the areas that had been outlined, which I think are familiar to all of us in the Chamber. They have been identified as low carbon; advanced manufacturing; engineering and construction; financial and professional services; the digital economy; life sciences and pharmaceuticals; the creative sector; care services; and retail, hospitality, leisure and tourism. Our university and FE sectors are in a sense already embracing this brave new world, because they have already started to think of new ways of delivering courses that give much greater flexibility. I pay tribute to New College Durham for pioneering professional apprenticeships, for leading the drive for good-quality HE in FE, and for developing partnerships between HE and FE. I would welcome a visit to the college from the Minister, because he could meet the staff and see some of the fantastic work that is going on. The Minister talked about international competitiveness in his opening speech. If we are to remain internationally competitive, we must keep our levels of reskilling high, which means that we will need to know how many young people and individuals in the work force are being skilled and reskilled. If we are not skilling sufficient people, we will need to put additional measures in place. That will mean that we will have to retain some targets, so I would like to hear the Government's thoughts about that.