My Lords, I remind your Lordships of my interests in the register, particularly my advice to Purpose on climate education, my membership of Peers for the Planet and the advice I give to 01 Founders on skills development. I thank my noble friend Lady Blackstone for adding her name to my Amendment 52.
The effect of my Amendments 52 is that, when the Institute for Apprenticeships and Technical Education is approving or withdrawing qualifications, it must describe how its decisions align with UK climate change and biodiversity targets. Amendments 60 and 61 aim to ensure that any conditions or guidance to initial teacher training for further education must consider whether they incorporate the UK’s climate change and biodiversity goals. I think that these are important, along with the amendments of the noble Baroness, Lady Hayman, which I very much support and to which I have added my name. I support the other amendments in this group as well. I listened to the noble Baroness, Lady Hayman, when she introduced this group and said that she considered herself no great expert in this area of skills. I consider myself no great expert on climate change, so we sort of meet somewhere in the middle.
There is a bit of a problem, in a way that the noble Baroness, Lady Bennett, was referring to, that in education debates, when we start talking about climate change, people glaze over and say, “Well, it is not really our concern; this is not really our business.” Equally, when we have climate change debates and start talking about education, people say, “Why are you talking about education? That is not really anything to do with it.” The reality is, however, that the two are critically important. It is, as the noble Baroness, Lady Bennett, said, shocking that the Government ultimately do not quite get it, in that the policy and the Bill are silent on sustainability and that we need to address that somehow or other in this Bill.
First, at the time of chairing COP 26, if we are going to be credible, we need to show that we are meeting our treaty obligations that we signed up to in 2015 in the Paris Agreement, particularly in Article 12, which says that,
“Parties shall co-operate in taking measures, as appropriate, to enhance climate change education”
and training.
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Secondly, there is growing pressure to ensure that the education system plays its part on climate change. The Climate Change Committee recommended that the Government consider
“the wider role of the education system in supporting the transition to a net-zero economy and preparing for the risks of climate change”.
Education can play a critical role in driving the behaviour change that we need every citizen of the world to adopt if we are to meet the targets that we want to agree in Glasgow. Some 80% of those participating in Parliament’s climate assembly believed that climate should be a compulsory subject in all schools; this would extend to colleges, which are covered by this Bill because we are talking about provision for 16 to 18 year-olds. Of course, participation up to 18 is now compulsory.
Thirdly, post-16 students want and expect this. According to the Association of Colleges, 91% of students agree that their place of study should actively incorporate and promote sustainable development, while 83% want to see sustainable development actively incorporated and promoted through all courses. Their lecturers agree: 94% of people working in FE colleges believe that all UK learners should be taught about sustainability issues, not just the knowledge. Also, 84% of them feel that, for the sector to be fit for purpose, education policy needs significant change, with the formal curriculum cited as the biggest barrier as to why environmental sustainability is not more prevalent.
Of course, on the narrow issue of skills, these arguments may not be strong enough to persuade Ministers, so I will have a go at coming at it from that angle. If Governments around the world are prioritising this skills agenda because of the rapid deskilling effects of globalisation and technological change, and see in the rust belt—or the red wall seats in this country—the political consequences of people feeling left behind, the stakes are high. The sense of abandonment in those communities is a sign of a reactive skills system that is tortuously slow.
The Bill carries the risk of local skills partnerships responding by planning their immediate skills needs rather than anticipating their future skills needs. They will then wait for the necessary qualifications to be developed and approved if they do not already exist. Then, they will need the necessary staff and learners to be recruited, by which time their skills needs may well have changed. This slow process of deskilling and reskilling needs to factor in now the impact of decisions that we are making on climate change, so you add climate change to the deskilling effects of technological change and globalisation. The transition from a carbon-based to a zero-carbon economy needs to be a just transition.
Look at cars. We all welcome Nissan’s announcement in Sunderland last week, but what of car maintenance? It was truly shocking to me when, last month, Wrexham College appeared to become the first FE college in the country to be able to proclaim proudly that it is now training its students to maintain electric vehicles. I am flabbergasted that we did not have that training going on in this country already—and that is just maintenance. The motor industry does not really want us to talk about the possibility of converting our internal combustion engine cars to electric ones, but those who are selling conversion kits and carrying out that work are doing a roaring trade and cannot sell their kits fast enough. There are huge economic opportunities for us if we can get the skills story right just in that one area. I am supportive of Amendment 10 in the name of the noble Baroness, Lady Bennett, which concerns repairs and is
in the similar territory of being more sustainable because we would be making the resources that we already own last that bit longer by repairing them and converting them to zero carbon.
This needs cross-cutting knowledge beyond technical skills in the silos that, to some extent, it feels as though the Bill wants to trap us all in by making us think mostly about STEM skills as the qualifications for which the Government want to be able to approve funding, rather than the creative—nay, imaginative—skills and cross-cutting thinking that we need to work across silos. According to the Association of Colleges, just one in 200 of our further education qualifications covers education for sustainability; its audit of the T-level curriculum identified similar deficiencies. This is not good enough.
There is evidence of the need for provision in the national curriculum for schools, which I will look to address in my Private Member’s Bill a week on Friday; if anyone is interested in signing up for that debate, the list is open. However, climate and sustainability are similarly lacking post 16, so we have to do this. The problem then, in the post-16 environment, is how to shift the sector towards prioritising this because we do not have a national curriculum at the post-16 level for us to impose things. As I have already said, it is not in many qualifications and there is not really much of a pastoral role post 16.
So how do we do it? In this Bill, we are moving to a demand-led system so, through the amendments in the name of the noble Baroness, Lady Hayman, we are seeking to influence that demand by trying to influence what is going on in terms of the local skills partnerships’ demand for this sort of thinking, mindset and learning. In my Amendment 52, I am asking for the qualifications regulator also to have to think about this. Given that IfATE has already issued a non-mandatory sustainability framework, I am seeking merely to ensure that that framework has proper status and that the regulator must continue to have regard to it.
On my other two amendments, we need teachers who are confident and competent in talking about sustainable development and climate change across the curriculum and across different subjects. I am doing some work with the Eden Project at the moment; some of the work it has done to point out how you can teach learners about—and give them confidence on—sustainable development and climate change across the whole curriculum, not just geography and science, is really instructive.
In many ways, my inclination would be to leave it to the professionalism of teachers to get on with that, but that is not really the style of this Government. They like teachers to be told what they are supposed to do in their training; yesterday, they announced a consultation on initial teacher training in which they are trying to prescribe absolutely everything. Oxford University and Cambridge University have already denounced this, saying that, in that case, they will abandon ITT. I will not get too distracted by that but I will say that, if the Government want to prescribe initial teacher training, they need to prescribe putting climate change and sustainable development in it.
Finally, I am still thinking about whether we might want to put in a new clause amendment around an entitlement for post-16 learners to be able to access sustainable development education, but I will first listen to what the Minister has to say in response to this group before I decide whether I am persuaded that we need to go down that road.