Queen’s Speech

My Lords, debates on the Queen’s Speech have to be rather fragmentary because they can cover four departments with four ministerial responsibilities. They can best be described by an old English word that was first coined in the reign of Elizabeth I, ““mingle-mangle””. The Oxford English Dictionary defines it as a ““confused medley””. It also has a pejorative definition, which has fortunately fallen out of use, as well as meaning food for swine, but that cannot possibly describe the debate in your Lordships’ House. In introducing the debate, the Minister, who has a reputation well beyond this House for his expertise in health, spoke mainly on that subject. He touched on education, but his heart is in health and he is listened to with enormous respect. He did the mingle and it falls to me to do the mangle, which is education. I am old enough to know a mangle and have turned one, usually after school on Mondays. I want to talk on education because over the next 18 months the Government are embarking on huge reforms in education and training. Few people recognise the extent of the reform that we are about to enter into, which will put enormous strain on the system. I support many parts of it. Further education colleges will be moved back into local authority control. Diplomas, which I strongly support, are to be introduced in schools next September. In addition, the Government want to expand the apprenticeship scheme dramatically. At the same time, the Qualifications and Curriculum Authority is to be split in two, which is how I set it up in the 1980s. The Learning and Skills Council is to be abolished and replaced by two other bodies. This is an enormous series of changes and quite a few people say that perhaps they should go a bit slower. Barry Sheerman’s committee produced a report last week on how to reconcile apprenticeships with diplomas and encourage more people to go into apprenticeships. Looking through the report, I discovered that the peak year for apprenticeships in employment was when I was Secretary of State for Education. I was not aware that I was responsible for that record, but now I shall claim a lot of credit for it. Since then, it has been decline all the way. The committee said: "““We urge the Government not to assume that the provisions of the Draft Apprenticeships Bill will play a large part in meeting the needs of young people in education and training during a time of economic challenge””." That is really saying, ““Take it slower and try to get it right””. I removed further education colleges from the control of local education authorities in the 1980s because they were neglected. They were undervalued and underfunded. When a local authority had a choice between capital expenditure on a primary school or an FE college, the primary school won. Councils ensured that the interests of their constituents would win out. FE colleges were undervalued and undercapitalised. In the past 20 years, that has been revolutionised. Under the previous Conservative Government and this Government, expenditure has been dramatically higher. As a result, the Matthew Boulton College in Birmingham is a superb modern building and the FE college in Middlesbrough is even greater. It is going to win an architectural prize as the most distinguished building in Teesside. That may not be too challenging, but it is the most distinguished building in Teesside and finer than any building on the campus of the nearby University of Teesside. No local education authority would ever have found the money for that. FE colleges are going to be sent back to local education authorities in 2010 and 2011, the very years when public expenditure will have to be cut. Irrespective of which Government are in power, it can be guaranteed that 2010 and 2011 will be the beginning of substantial central government and local government expenditure cuts. Will FE colleges get any priority from local education authorities? I think it highly unlikely. I hope that the House realises that I am in favour of many of the things that the Government are doing, but it is all coming too quickly. I am in favour of technical vocational diplomas. I have become very familiar with the curriculum of the diplomas in engineering, construction, manufacturing, production and design, IT and agricultural and horticultural services. They will be introduced into schools next September, but no secondary school in the country can deliver diplomas. They have not got the room, the space, the equipment or the teachers for technical education. They do not exist. If a student wants to do a diploma in engineering next September, he will spend two and a half days at a local secondary school doing English, maths, science and IT and another one and a half days at one or two different training institutes, or perhaps an FE college, to which he is taken on a bus. He will spend the last day on day release. That is no way to make the diploma successful. The Government were absolutely right five years ago to identify the 14 to 19 year-old curriculum. As I was responsible for introducing the curriculum for five to 16 year-olds, I strongly support the curriculum for 14 to 19 year-olds. It has taken five years to work it up. It is central to producing at all levels of education the number of technicians and experts that this country needs. In the next 10 years—again, irrespective of which Government are in office—there will be a massive building programme of nuclear, coal and gas-fired power stations, a huge high-speed rail network, Crossrail and extensive waste treatment plants. We do not have the technicians for this. We simply do not have the element that Germany has in abundance. The education system in our country has failed to produce that degree of technical education and expertise. What can we do about this? Since Easter, my old friend the noble Lord, Lord Dearing, and I have been promoting a new type of school. We call them university technical colleges. The idea is that they will be what they say they are—technical vocational schools—for 14 to 19 year-olds. They are revolutionary, because the age for selection will be 14, not 11. The noble Lord, Lord Dearing, and I happen to agree that that is the best age for selection. That is controversial in the educational world, but as we have gone around talking about it we have been surprised at how many people in the educational world support us. We approached first Aston University to sponsor a new school. If it did so, it would have to find £2 million under the academies programme. It jumped at it. The vice-chancellor, Julia King, is a professor of engineering, as is the pro-vice-chancellor, Alison Halstead. They said that this is just the sort of school that they want. They want to get involved with the education of children from 14 in their specialism of engineering, as the university has teachers who can help those children and equipment that they can use. We then spoke to the leader of the local education authority, Mike Whitby, who said that Birmingham would want such a school, as it was and would continue to be the heart of industrial life in our country. He provided a site in Aston Science Park. Last Friday, we were able to announce the first university technical college. These schools will be for 14 to 19 year-olds and will have 600 to 800 pupils. For those aged 14, there will be two sources of entry: one for apprenticeships and one for students doing diplomas. They are interchangeable. The universities are interested because they see this as a pathway to foundation degrees and even to higher degrees. I am glad to see that the Government fully support them; they certainly have the full support of the noble Lord, Lord Adonis, and his successor, Jim Knight. We are speaking to eight or 10 universities, and every university that we go to says, ““Yes, please, we want to do this””. The school is new and presents problems for the local education authority because of the selection at 14, not 11, which is difficult to achieve, but we believe that this is the future. It also deals with the problems highlighted by the Barry Sheerman report and another report on apprenticeships in the past four days, which both ask how we get apprentices. We get them by taking in half the intake as apprentices. When we have spoken to local employers, they have been immensely enthusiastic. I have been to see the CBI, local people in Birmingham, chambers of commerce and the Institute of Directors, and we have had meetings with several industrialists. They will back these colleges. This is the way forward. I say in all seriousness to the Government that I very much support some of their initiatives, but the system does not exist in our country to deliver a curriculum for 14 to 19 year-olds. To have such a curriculum you must have institutions for 14 to 19 year-olds, otherwise you will fail. This is therefore an important initiative. I hope that the colleges that the noble Lord, Lord Dearing, and I manage to get off the ground in the next year or so will be prototypes like the city technology colleges, which were launched back in 1986 and have now become the city academies. These new university technology colleges will be immensely popular and will be oversubscribed from day one, because they will serve the needs not only of the students but of the nation. We must improve our technical education. We should have had technical schools since 1870. We have tried. Butler tried. Butler’s great plan was for grammar schools, secondary modern schools and technical schools. The first ones to go were the technical schools—infra dig greasy rags. That was a huge mistake. The only country that adopted the Butler scheme was Germany, which has grammar schools, high schools and technical schools. A report published this year in Germany on the whole education system said that the most popular and successful schools in Germany are not the grammar schools—that must please some Members on the Benches opposite—but the technical schools. It is about time that we had such schools here in our country.