My Lords, I shall speak to Amendment 36A, which is in my name and has been placed in this group. It is also about accountability, but a rather broader form of accountability which links the Government, which is encouraging young people and adults to enter training, and the changing environment, which means that many of them are put at risk in a way that was never the case before.
The amendment relates to Clause 13 and asks that any,
“training provider offering publicly funded apprenticeship training or offering publicly funded education training for students aged 18 or over”,
should be included in the requirements of that clause—in fact, what I would like to see is that extended through the whole chapter.
4.30 pm
I apologise for telling people in this Room something that they probably know very well already, but which many people in the country do not know. A very large number, and proportion, of young people and adults in training or some form of technical or vocational education are not in further education colleges or universities but are with small or large training providers which are not in the public sector. Until now, this has been an extraordinarily ill-monitored part of the training sector and is almost unique in this country. For decades, Governments of different persuasions have encouraged the growth of a very wide range of providers.
We are finally getting some clear data on the scale of enrolment and the number of providers through the Centre for Vocational Education Research at the LSE. I am delighted that the Government are funding this; it is giving us really good data—on a number of things for the first time ever—but I declare an interest as chair of its advisory board. It confirms that this is a very large segment of the training and technical education sector, but even these researchers cannot track the flow of institutions as they come and go, change their names, are taken over, are reconstituted or, as happens all too often, fail. Many of them are very small affairs, but some are really quite big. There has always been a problem here, because many providers get overstretched and many start up then close down as they do or do not get contracts. We have added student loans to this mix and dramatically changed the nature of post-18 education and training across the country.
My amendment takes account of the resulting situation in which the Government encourage people to take loans at any eligible training provider, further education college or university. It is implicit that this is a good and safe thing to do, but at the moment the provider can, in many cases, walk away. I welcome the move to have an education administration regime for further education, but it is extremely important to recognise that a large number of people are now taking out loans who are not in further education colleges and who receive very little protection.
As an example, I will read from the most recent issue of FE Week, which does get its facts right although it sometimes adds some rhetoric.
“Another 100 learners appear to have been left with heavy student loans debt but no qualifications to show for it, after their training provider under investigation by the Skills Funding Agency went bust. … It comes … after the demise of John Frank Training”,
where people were left with student loans that were really sizeable—especially in relation to the incomes many of them were earning—but no recourse and no obvious regime to help them.
We have to recognise that a combination of this unique system in the United Kingdom, particularly in England, with the advent of student loans has changed the nature of the training environment dramatically. We need to make sure that government accountability catches up with it. This is important, morally, at any point but especially so in the context of this Government’s laudable desire to revive and improve technical education and reverse what has been happening over the last decades. On the one hand, we have had a rapid decline in the number of people doing any form of enhanced but non-degree technical qualification and, on the other, clear evidence of shortages in those skills.
When I raised in the House, in the context of the Higher Education and Research Bill, the absence of a protection regime for higher education students comparable to that now offered to further education students, I was told by the Minister that it was not necessary for higher education students, as they were not local in the way that further education students were. He said that they did not need this level of protection. I did not and do not accept that argument, but you certainly cannot advance it with respect to learners who are with training providers. They tend to be adults—often, low-income adults—who are now being asked to take out sizeable loans. These are a genuine burden for which they may well go on being liable for a long time. I really would like the Minister to take a serious look at whether it is not possible to extend this regime, perhaps in a slightly different form, to the many thousands of people who have loans and are with training providers, and where a continuation of this flux, collapse or reforming movement among these small organisations leaves them in an even worse situation than in the past.