Apprenticeships, Skills, Children and Learning Bill

My Lords, I find little to welcome in the Bill. As the noble Baroness, Lady Blackstone, said, it is a ragbag, a mishmash, a thing of shreds and patches pasted together by a tired department at the fag end of a Government. If it were merely trivial, it would not merit discussion, but it is also harmful, because it also establishes an elaborate and burdensome bureaucracy of immense complexity which will not benefit technical and vocational education. The only question that must be asked about the Bill is: does it improve technical and vocational education in our country? I do not think that it will. Back in the late 1980s, when I was Education Secretary, I visited many FE colleges. Several of them I found to be immensely depressing places, down at heel, dirty, shabby and with poor equipment. By any measures that we had at the time, 40 per cent were failing. I decided that drastic surgery was needed and I removed them from the control of local education authorities. Since then, the golden age of FE dawned. The noble Baroness will certainly support me in removing things from local education authority control, because by removing polytechnics from the control of local education authorities, I provided her with the institution which she now adorns as vice-chancellor. Taking control away from local education authorities was necessary, because whenever it came to a choice in an LEA between a primary school and a nursery school and a new wing in the FE college, the primary school and the nursery school won out because there were councillors saying, "I want that primary school in my bit of the constituency". When the FE colleges were removed and made independent, they literally made the best of it. A principal of an FE college only a few weeks ago referred to the period until now as a Camelot for further education. As a result, today, how many FE colleges are failing? Not 40 per cent, but 4 per cent. That is the system that the Government want to mess up and change completely. It is a great success story. Go to Birmingham and look at Matthew Boulton College, the FE college in the centre of Birmingham. It is a magnificent building. It stands comparison with any building in the whole of the universities of Birmingham. When I went there, it was full of the latest equipment. There were hundreds of students full of self-esteem and pride at going to an institution which was as good as a university. That is very enhancing; they wanted to go back to study there. Go to Middlesbrough. Look at Middlesbrough College. Not only is Middlesbrough College the best building in Middlesbrough, it is the best building in the whole of Teesside. It stands alongside the University of Teesside and is better than any of the buildings in the university. Those colleges cost more than £100 million. No local education authority would provide £100 million to build an FE college, but those are the colleges that will transform our country. That is the system that the Government are now dismantling—they are dismantling it because they will return the FE colleges to the control of local education authorities. In my view, that will be a disaster. I hope that my noble friends on the Front Bench are noting what I am saying, because, in a few months, they will be sitting over there and will have to defend this complexity, nonsense and chaos. They will be attacked by noble Lords opposite who are now Ministers who will say, "We left you a perfect system. What a mess you are making of it". They have not left you a perfect system; they have left you a mess. Just before I finish on the subject of colleges, I ask the Minister a specific question. I recently visited Lewisham College, which is at the junction of Greenwich, Lewisham and Southwark. It has proposals before the Learning and Skills Council, in suspension at the moment, for a new college costing £140 million designed by Norman Foster—the noble Lord, Lord Foster. The contracts are about to be issued. This is spade-ready, so I hope that the Minister will give it her approval. Some of her colleagues, such as the Chancellor of the Exchequer, Mr Darling, and the Business Secretary, the noble Lord, Lord Mandelson—I think that they are still in post at the moment—have been saying that one of the things that the country must have is big public sector projects to stimulate the economy, so why has this college not been approved? Why is it on ice? I know that she will not have the answer in her brief, but perhaps she could ask one of her colleagues in the Civil Service to answer later. The Learning and Skills Council is now in the doghouse because it went over its budget, so it is a very easy body to attack. Why did it go over its budget? It went over its budget because it was ambitious. What is wrong with being ambitious for further education? Ambition is all about reach and grasp. Let us remember what Robert Browning said—that, ""a man’s reach should exceed his grasp, Or what’s a heaven for?"." I do not condemn the Learning and Skills Council at all; I find that it has transformed the state of further education in our country. What is the Learning and Skills Council replaced by? It is replaced by three bodies that we have mentioned already: the Skills Funding Agency, the Young People’s Learning Agency for England and the LEAs. When the noble Baroness, Lady Walmsley, cited three bodies, she underestimated the Bill. I remind the House of the other bodies which the Bill sets up: the CYPP, the CTB, the CDL, the MIAP. Does the Minister know what the MIAP does? Does it report to her? Does she appoint the chairman? I am sure that she knows what she does with the QCDA, the NAVMC, the EYFS, the CCIS, the AACS, the ISA, the IEB or—last and best—the SSSNB: not one S, not two Ss, but three Ss. What does the SSSNB do? Does anyone in the House know? We are being asked to approve this Bill. This is the complexity of the organisation which the Government are creating. This is gobbledygook soup; it is a sort of deep Brown Windsor. I hope that my noble friends will look at this very carefully indeed and decide that it will be inoperable. What will happen? LEAs will be responsible for 16-to-18 education, so they will sponsor it in colleges that they do not own; have staff whom they cannot appoint, control or change; and be unable to change the curriculum. That is really intimate, is it not? It is just there. The LEAs will provide the per capita funding. What is the answer to capital? Let us suppose that an FE college wants to build a wing costing £20 million to increase its teaching of tourism and hospitality. Who will pay that: the SFA or the LEA? I ask the question because the Government have not answered it yet. They say that they do not quite know whether the SFA or the LEA will pay the £20 million. We should forget the LEA wanting to pay for it; no LEA will fork out £20 million. For £20 million, you can have a secondary school or two primary schools, so the SFA will pay. Why do we not leave the Learning and Skills Council where it was, because that is what it has been doing? This, again, shows the absurdity of the changes that the Government are making. This will add to the confusion and complexity. I shall give an example of where this will be very confusing. At the moment, one body—the Learning and Skills Council—funds further education. In the future, a college will have to go to the Skills Funding Agency, to its local LEA, to the Department for Work and Pensions—a Minister from that department should be here; I do not think that the Minister is from it—and then to employers, because when Train to Gain is faded out, employers will be expected to step up to the mark. As a result, FE colleges have been made a political football. This will be very damaging indeed. What should be done? Here I mention the work that Ron Dearing did. We regret his absence in this debate very much indeed. I first knew him when he was chairman of the Post Office. He was the most successful chairman of any nationalised industry I came across. I was the Minister responsible for the Post Office at the time, and I was fortunate to be the first one to appoint him to his first job in education as the chairman of the body that dealt with polytechnic qualifications. Thereafter he went to the Polytechnics and Colleges Funding Council and the Higher Education Funding Council for England. When successive Ministers, both Conservative and Labour, wanted something fixed, they rang up Ron—the great Mr Fixit of education. Ron Dearing was passionately dedicated to vocational and technical education, on which he did a great report. In the last year of his life, he and I worked together to establish a new type of school in our country. We agreed that the best age for transfer was 14 and not 11. I know that that is controversial: I will not debate it now because it needs a long debate. By 14 years old, most youngsters know which way they want to go. We set about trying to recreate the schools left by Rab Butler; that is, the old technical schools of 1945. He left grammar schools, technical schools and secondary modern schools. The first to go were the technical schools because they were infra dig, a bit greasy and everyone wanted to be the school on the hill. That was a huge mistake. One reason why Germany has 55,000 workers in the automotive industry and we have 5,000 at Luton is that we have not addressed the problem of basic engineering technical skills, which are done by technical schools in Germany. German technical schools are now more popular than German grammar schools. Ron Dearing and I set about trying to establish new schools, with the full support of the noble Lord, Lord Adonis. We wanted universities to be involved. First, we went to Aston University and asked it to sponsor, under the academy programme, a new school in Birmingham for 14 to 19 year-olds. We said that there would be two elements of entry—half apprentices and half students—to do engineering diplomas. Aston University said that it would sign up for that. Then we went to Birmingham City Council, which had to provide the site. Fortunately, the council is again in the hands of the Conservatives with a very imaginative leadership. It said, "Of course we will do it". The project was approved by the Government before Christmas. The project manager has been established. The new school in Birmingham will be built for 600 to 800 pupils aged between 14 and 19 and they will specialise in engineering, production, manufacturing and design. I believe that that is the way forward and is the sort of thing to which the Government should be more openly committed. They should not tinker around with the measures that they are doing now. Beyond that, we have approached another dozen universities and we are well advanced with proposals. These schools will restore in Britain a capacity to produce specialists and technicians at all levels. If we are going to build nuclear power stations and Crossrail, and be able to do all the things we want to do in our country, we will have to have technicians at all levels. Because a university sponsors each of these schools, the path goes through to foundation degrees as well. That should be the answer to technical and vocational education in our country. The Government were right to identify the 14-to-19 curriculum, but to have such a curriculum you must have institutions to teach it. The Government were right to have diplomas, but what will the diploma students do this year? They will do three days in their secondary school, studying English, maths, science and IT. On another day they will be bussed to a college somewhere to do engineering and on the final day they will be bussed for day release. They will have three different places for study, which cannot be right. You need institutions where specialisms such as engineering, construction or medical skills can be taught alongside basic subjects. The Government give nodding approval, but they do not go out trying to sell the idea in a big way. I believe that that is the way forward for technical and vocational education. I cannot see that this Bill helps us at all.