My Lords, in its 2014 report Sense & Instability, City & Guilds made a wryly humorous and powerful case for much greater coherence, greater focus on building on success and greater attention to effective implementation in skills policy. With the White Paper and this Bill, along with associated developments such as T-levels and, we hope, far more radical change to apprenticeships, it is clear that the present Government are moving in that direction—a trajectory that we on these Benches fully support. This amendment seeks to make those policy ambitions more concrete by placing their funding arrangements on a statutory footing.
The goal of joining up the wider education and skills system so that it better meets society’s needs and gives people the skills they need is by no means easy to reach. It also requires that goal to be embedded in a long-term national strategy, most appropriately on something like a 10-year horizon. That strategy needs to sit across government, so that it can more imaginatively bring coherence across departments, as well as give greater stability at college, local and regional levels. Crucially, it requires a matching long-term funding settlement.
It is already possible to see how this kind of cross-departmental approach can bring huge benefits, for example in areas such as sustainability and the green agenda, tackling the recruitment needs of nursing and other allied professions, the major changes facing the automotive industry and the significance of digital skills—all of which require colleges to play a major part in delivering the required skills to individuals, employers and businesses. The need for such a longer-term strategic investment has been called for by the Education Select Committee, is an underlying strand in the White Paper and is being signalled by the additional funding already released to colleges, as well as the lifelong loan entitlement already announced. The Augar report also signalled the clear advantages of treating HE and FE in a more comprehensive way. We look to see how the department intends to see that continue to affect policy.
Clearly, much will depend on the comprehensive spending review and the continued impact of the pandemic on public spending. It would, however, be helpful to have an indication of how such a long-term strategy is being developed and, as the amendment indicates, how it will translate into concrete recommendations and thence long-term action. I beg to move.