Apprenticeships, Skills, Children and Learning Bill

My Lords, I start by declaring an interest as a member of the corporation of Guildford College and as an honorary fellow of the City and Guilds institute. My task otherwise is to begin the winding up of this long debate. The breadth of the issues covered makes this task somewhat difficult. At the core of the Bill are three developments. First are the new arrangements for 16-to-19 education, which follow from the Education and Skills Act 2008, which raised the learning leaving age to 18. Secondly, there is the implementation of the Leitch recommendations in relation to skills training, and in particular the development of apprenticeships and so-called demand-led provision. Thirdly, there is the revamping of the QCA and the separation of the role of qualifications regulator from that of developing the national curriculum. As we have heard, there are also important provisions relating to children’s centres, children’s trusts and children safeguarding; issues relating to teachers and support staff; provisions about how schools can cope with bad behaviour, record and report the use of restraint, search for drugs, alcohol and weapons, and deal with complaints from parents; and, finally, provisions for stopping students avoiding their debts by declaring bankruptcy. It is, as my noble friend Lady Walmsley said in her response to the Queen’s Speech, a Christmas tree of a Bill. The two departments have succeeded in hanging all kinds of ornaments on it. Like so many Bills that come to this House from the other place, barely half of it has been properly scrutinised. It is notable, for example, that at the beginning of the marathon all-night 16th and final Committee sitting in the other place, the Committee had reached only Clause 130 of this 262-clause Bill. Moreover, the Report stage in the other place was dominated by government amendments so, once again, proper scrutiny of the Bill falls on this House. Today’s debate indicates that there will be a lot of scrutiny of a lot of bits of this Bill as we go through it. I should make it clear that we on these Benches have considerable sympathy with the two broad objectives of the Bill—the provision of a coherent framework for the provision of 16-to-19 education, with particular emphasis on apprenticeships and work-based learning, and the setting up of the independent exams regulator. For some time, my party has been calling on the Government to develop a much more coherent approach, not just to 16-to-19 education but to the whole of the 14-to-19 stage. Although the emphasis in the Bill remains on the 16-to-19 stage, there are elements in relation to the provision of sixth-form colleges which seem to look to the 14-to-19 stage. We will be probing this further in Committee. We endorse very much the point of view of the noble Lord, Lord Baker, that we should be looking at the 14-to-19 curriculum. That is the coherence we are looking for. The noble Baroness, Lady Blackstone, challenged me about whether we did not see the opening up of the vocational and work-based routes to education as doing something very positive about the inequalities in education. I join the noble Lord, Lord Layard, in saying yes. I celebrate the degree to which we are putting apprenticeships and work-based learning on to a firm footing. However, the reason we are having to do this now, much too late, is that for 50 years this country has failed 50 per cent of its young people in secondary schools. The secondary school curriculum is based far too much on academic standards and does not give most students something on which they can focus. For those who learn by doing rather than by thinking, the secondary school curriculum is very alien. It is not surprising that many of them want to leave school so early. I say to the noble Lord, Lord Bates, that it is all very well judging everything in terms of who gets five A to C passes at GCSE; quite frankly, the GCSE is an irrelevant exam for a lot of these children. We need a curriculum that meets their purposes much better. When they came into power, the Government rightly asked Sir Mike Tomlinson to look at the secondary curriculum. He came up with an overarching proposal for a diploma, which was rejected. Instead, we have hybrid diplomas. There are three separate lines: the GCSE line; the diploma line, which is about the world of work; and the apprenticeship line, which is about work-based learning. There is at the moment no coherent linking between them; we need a degree of coherence and the overarching umbrella that Tomlinson proposed. But the Government rejected it and we do not have it. So although it is lovely that we are at long last giving work-based learning some real status, it is much too late. We should have done it long ago. My own interests, following my role as shadow spokesperson on these Benches for the Department for Innovation, Universities and Skills, are in the provisions relating to apprenticeships and skills. Here we are witnessing the dismantling of the Learning and Skills Council and in its wake the creation of two further quangos. As many have said, it is not clear that this is an improvement. Indeed, the complexity of the new arrangements in terms of funding and accountability leave many people quite bemused. I am not alone in having seen detailed organigrams which try to clarify the situation. I was quite amused by the briefing issued by the Bill team, which described the new YPLA—and the Minister almost repeated it—as, ""a new, slim-line NDPB which will support and enable local authorities to carry out their new duties"," in relation to 16-to-19 education. A paragraph further on, it expands on this role, stating that the YPLA will be, ""providing national frameworks to support (LA) planning and commissioning, ensuring coherence of commissioning plans, managing the national funding formula and providing strategic data and analysis … Once local authority commissioning plans are agreed by the sub-regional group and the regional planning group, the ""YPLA will check these to ensure they cohere and are affordable. The YPLA will then fund local authorities to meet their agreed commissioning plans"." So much for this light-touch authority. Despite the fact that I welcome the attention given to apprenticeships, there is a real question whether we needed this legislation at all. Since the Learning and Skills Act 2000, which I remember the noble Baroness, Lady Blackstone, taking through this House—it was the Bill on which I cut my legislative teeth—we have set up the sector skills councils, which have gradually taken the lead in developing, in conjunction with accrediting organisations such as City and Guilds and Edexcel, the apprenticeship frameworks for each sector. The Economic Affairs Select Committee of this House, in its report on apprenticeships, endorsed the lead taken by those employer-led councils, although it noted a number of anomalies, in particular the varying amount of time required to complete a full apprenticeship according to sector, and suggested some kind of mechanism for developing equivalence. It also suggested a clearing house for apprenticeships. The National Apprenticeship Service which the Bill sets up to some extent fulfils those functions, but it is set up as part of the Skills Funding Agency and, if truth be known, there is no explicit mention in the Bill of the National Apprenticeship Service as such. Whether we really need all the paraphernalia of central registration, certification, specifications, frameworks and agreements that the Bill sets up is a moot point. It would seem to add a good deal to the bureaucracy of a system that is already working quite well, and it is odd that, while it is clear that the proposals intend to build on and develop the existing sectoral arrangements, the sector skills councils, as the noble Baroness, Lady Wall, mentioned, receive no mention at all. The Children, Schools and Families Select Committee in the other place, in its examination of the draft Bill last autumn, asked whether this legislation was really needed. The Minister, the noble Lord, Lord Young, responded that the Bill was of "symbolic importance". The Select Committee remarks in its report: ""This appears to us to be perhaps the driving force behind the Draft Bill. We question whether it is a good use of Parliamentary time to consider ‘symbolic’ legislation"." From these Benches, we can only say that we agree. While we endorse the concept of the National Apprenticeship Service flying the flag for apprenticeships and acting as a co-ordinating body for the various sector skills councils, we do not see the need for this heavy-handed approach. A light-touch NDPB was all that was needed, which we shall suggest in Committee. A number of other issues on apprenticeships came up in the debate which merit a mention. My noble friend Lord Cotter and the noble Lord, Lord Sheikh, raised the role of small and medium-sized businesses. They will have a real problem in handling the bureaucracy. The Select Committee in this House suggested group apprenticeships, which I believe are compatible with the Bill, but, again, there is no mention of them in it. As the noble Lord, Lord Sheikh, said, there is a great danger of the bureaucracy becoming overwhelming for a firm which has only half a dozen employees. Secondly, the issue of whether apprentices should be required to be employed or to meet minimum qualifications has been raised by quite a number of people. Like the noble Baroness, Lady Morris, I, too, will take on board the points that Barnardo’s and Rathbone make. Many people would benefit greatly from the work-based route to learning; they can achieve a great deal, if somewhat slowly, and need a way into an apprenticeship. We do not want to shut that door or create barriers there. The same is true of the points made by my noble friend Lord Addington about dyslexia. At the college where I am a governor, there was a case of a girl who came in regarding herself as a dummy to do a level 1 course. Because we put every new young person through an assessment test, the college picked up immediately that she was badly dyslexic. She has been at the college for five years and is doing a national diploma, which is a higher education qualification; she will end up with a foundation degree. So, provided that you support people with dyslexia, they can actually achieve a great deal. The initial assessment is of vital importance. Careers advice has been mentioned by a lot of people. My noble friend Lady Garden mentioned it, and very many people have said how inadequate they feel that Clause 35 is. Clearly, we will all be looking at that—and the Minister is on notice that there is a lot of feeling around the House about that one. The noble Lord, Lord Layard, referred to progression. It is very important that apprentices are not stopped in their tracks. The point that he made was that if a young person had only a level 1 qualification they could only do a level 2 apprenticeship; then they are stymied because they cannot go on to a level 3 apprenticeship. That is madness; they really should be allowed to do that. I turn to the two organisations that will inherit the mantle of the LSC—the YPLA for the under-19s and the SFA for the over-19s. I have already questioned the role of the YPLA. We have also very serious misgivings about the SFA. Above all, we do not understand why that organisation, which will have wide-ranging responsibilities and wide funding responsibilities for adult skills as well as running four important further services—not just the National Apprenticeship Service but Train to Gain, which has a budget of well over £1 million a year now, the Adult Advancement and Careers Service and the National Employer Service, all set up as part of a Civil Service department with the Civil Service at the top—is an agency. It is not even an NDPB. It has very little autonomy and is said to be under the thumb of the department. Surely such an organisation needs to be able to do its own thing and have the same degree of autonomy as its 16 to 19 partner, the YPLA. Yet here it is, sitting right under the thumb of the department, and indeed an integral part of the departmental machinery. At one of the very many meetings that we have had over the last few months to discuss the Bill, I asked the Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State, Sion Simon, why there was that differentiation between the two organisations. He replied that the two departments had just taken different views as to what they wanted. I cannot really accept that that is why they differ. I would be interested to know why the YPLA is seen to be a hands-off organisation whereas the SFA is potentially a much more interfering organisation. This is a wide-ranging Bill and there are a lot of issues to discuss. One that many noble Lords have addressed is that of Ofqual, including the key issue of whether it will have real autonomy and the extent to which the Bill gives undue power to the Secretary of State to interfere in Ofqual’s remit. I was much encouraged by what the noble Lord, Lord Sutherland, said. We need to look at Ofqual against the criteria that he established for Ofsted. I found his analysis very helpful in terms of what we should be looking at and how we should measure this. There is also the QCDA, which remains under the wing of government, no one being quite certain what its function will be. My noble friend Lady Garden asked how far it would develop assessment techniques. In many senses, the assessment organisations—the City and Guilds and so forth—are those with the expertise here. It is madness for the QCDA to be working in these areas. The national curriculum remains the responsibility of the department and the Secretary of State, and it is right that somebody should put some thought into the development of the curriculum. In fact, lots of people are doing that, but there should be an organisation that advises the Secretary of State on these things, and I see that as the QCDA’s role. It is unclear precisely what that role is. What does "promoting quality and coherence" mean? What is "coherence"? That is not at all clear. Then there is this shadowy JACQA—the Joint Advisory Committee on Qualifications Approval. What is JACQA going to do? Nobody quite knows, which raises a lot of questions. On young offender education, my noble friend Lady Garden made it clear that we Liberal Democrats very much welcome the fact that there is a clear remit for local authorities here. I echo her views that there is an opportunity perhaps to do more, to really look at young offender education and do something worth while about it. It would be lovely to seize the opportunity of the Bill and do something like that. The big question in lots of people’s minds is whether local authorities can live up to the expectations. The problem in all these young offender institutions is that there is such churn. We know very well from other areas that it is difficult for local authorities to ensure that the information about the young people actually travels with them; too often it takes six weeks to appear, by which stage they have moved on yet again. It raises many questions about whether local authorities have the capabilities to handle this. Have they got the funding to handle the responsibilities? Have they got the people with the skills to do it? I am not sure that they have. However, I hope very much that they will. We need to do a good job here because we have let these people down far too often. We generally welcome putting children’s trusts, safeguarding boards and children’s centres on a statutory footing, but we have a general worry that this sector has already seen so many changes and initiatives. It is time to stop changing the goalposts and let it settle down. The knock-on effects of the Baby P case on recruitment in social work have been relatively disastrous. Let us hope that it settles down and that we can achieve something positive out of it. My noble friend Lady Walmsley spoke about the power to search and the recording and reporting of the use of force. A number of other noble Lords also mentioned this issue. It is an important issue, and it is important that we recognise children’s dignity and privacy. It would be lovely if we could see the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child incorporated into British law. We have been asking for that for a long time. This has been a long debate. I have not found it easy to sum up because the Bill covers so wide a range of issues. Many have spoken about only one or two aspects of the Bill. In general, I sense that many welcome its main provisions on boosting apprenticeships and setting Ofqual up as an independent regulator in the area of qualifications and assessment. One theme of the debate has been the perception that the structures being put in place are unnecessarily complex and leave too much power in the hands of the Secretary of State. That has been a recurring theme of Second Reading debates in this House and reflects the Government’s tendency to think that they can fix problems by changing structures rather than by plotting a more evolutionary approach. We have a prime example here of getting rid of the LSC and setting up two more organisations to replace it, rather than merely changing its terms of reference and allowing it to grow into a new role. The result—I echo some of the points that the noble Baroness, Lady Prosser, mentioned—is that we have a churning of institutions, acronyms and, above all, people. There has been a tendency to think that this churn is good, that it keeps people on their toes and stops them becoming complacent. However, there is also a downside in the loss of team spirit and morale. As the Foster report on the capital funding crisis in the LSC reminded us, with all their jobs up in the air it is hardly surprising that the LSC staff took their eye off the ball. With the exception of the clauses relating to Ofqual, we take the view that the Bill is unnecessary and threatens to burden the education system with yet more churn, uncertainty and bureaucracy.