My Lords, the incentive I would like to see is schools being allowed to take credit for the performance of the children they let go into technical education. If a child might get only Ds in history and English but they are good for an A* in BTEC business, and the school can get credit for that, the school’s interests will align with the child. It would also be a good thing for the performance tables. We have superb data because it is easy enough to collect them, but why should a school be penalised for a kid who arrives in the year before GCSEs, having had a dreadful education beforehand? That is not fair; nor is it fair that a school which has really looked after a child and brought them on to the point where they have the get up and go to attend a UTC then gets no credit for it. If a school feels that the best interests of the child will align with the way it is going to appear in the tables, there is a real hope for making progress in this area. We should be doing this anyway to ensure equity between schools, so I hope that this is a direction we might consider going in.
I like the amendment about a technical version of UCAS, which is immensely helpful to schools. Everything is in one place and it would all look and feel the same. You know how it works and what is required and it becomes easy to provide support and advice for the children using it.
Apprenticeships are a great challenge. Companies have a horrible habit of not admitting they have apprenticeship places until about two weeks before they want people to apply. They suddenly appear, enough people apply, and they disappear again. This is not the way in which a school can work or how young people should be asked to work. We have to discipline companies to make it clear in good time that they are open to apprenticeships so that people who are interested can see what is on offer year round and
put their names down. I know that it will never be a regular cycle such as UCAS, but we need to discipline the system so that it works in the interests of children, and something like UCAS would help. A UCAS system would also provide a place to find all the information. If someone is looking for an apprenticeship they might not cotton on to who the education provider is, who to go to, which Ofsted report applies, where to look to find the outcomes, and other data that will tell them whether a particular apprenticeship is worthwhile. Something like UCAS would draw all that together. I would not actually use UCAS. It is a horrible institution that believes in making as much money as possible from the students passing through its system and it is run in the interests of universities rather than kids. But as a concept it is great, and we really ought to see whether we can do something along those lines.
It is high time that Amendment 11 was brought in. We all know how badly schools can behave. The noble Baroness, Lady Morris of Yardley, says that it is a matter of incentives as well. Let us have a structure which provides the stick and the carrot—this is the stick. Let us have a system where schools know that they are expected to do things. I presume that access means physical access. It cannot just be, “Well, we’ll pass your emails on”. Clearly the access will be moderated by the school and the teacher will sit down with the kid afterwards and tell them where they need to be really careful about such and such. However, at least it is progress in the right direction.
I hope that we might look at expanding subsection (3). There are some really important intermediary organisations which perform a function in this area. To name just one—Women in Construction. It performs a specialist job and looks after a particular subset of pupils, and it is doing that in a co-ordinated way, which makes it much better than your average local FE college, let alone a building company that happens to have some apprentices. Giving access to some of these collaborative organisations is a very useful supplement to the direct education and apprenticeship providers.
Turning to the carrot element again, there are other ways of doing this, and that is what my Amendment 34A seeks to achieve. It would allow money to flow to schools and organisations and would open up in a positive way the pipeline between what is going on in the creation of technical opportunity and the kids in schools.
There is a lot beyond what appears in Amendment 1l and schools are doing much that is positive. They invite people in to talk, and make arrangements for internships and work experience placements for their children. A lot of organisations are helping, but it is an immense burden on a school at a time when we are facing something like an 8% cash reduction for schools over the next three years. It is a hell of a thing to ask a school to add to its functions without in any way adding to its budget.
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For employers faced with paying the apprenticeship levy who would like to recruit some apprentices but cannot, it seems worth finding some way of giving them the power to ask, “Can we use some of this
money to open up the pipeline into schools and improve the interface between business and technical education?”. I am not trying to push the Government into doing that now, but I would like to see them have the power to do so. I would also like to see them have the power to support organisations such as Women in Construction in their efforts to get through to schools if this is what is needed to open up the pathway into schools for particular areas of industry. This is an entirely positive thing for schools. They would not be looking at immediately losing their students, although it may have that effect. This is about supporting students, improving their education and giving them resources at a time of great shortage to connect with all that is possible. As I say, the amendment is not trying to compel the Government to do anything, but I would love them to have the power to do it.