Amendment 36 provides for the introduction of personal education and skills accounts, commonly known as skills wallets. As stressed by many of your Lordships during the passage of the Bill, there is growing discontent about the way in which post-16 education and training are provided and the reality of the skills needed for our population.
We know that in future the average British worker will do several different jobs throughout their lifetime; almost half will retrain completely during the course of their career. Meanwhile, the number of adult learners has fallen dramatically, almost halving between 2004 and 2016. With technology advancing and the world of work always rapidly changing, skills learned at 18 or 21 will not last a lifetime. It has never been more important for people to continually develop new skills. Yet our higher education and student finance systems are still tailored mainly to people taking their first degree or beginning an apprenticeship around the age of 18. Meanwhile, there is a desperate shortage of funding in the FE sector. The current system limits the opportunities, and people do not get the chance to make the most of their talents. Do we not want to empower people to develop new skills, so that they can thrive in the technologies and industries that are key to Britain’s economic future? Championing flexible lifelong learning will give people the power to follow the path that best suits their ability. A skills wallet would be open to every adult over the age of 18 and resident in the UK.
I remind the House of the quite important words of the previous Secretary of State for Education when introducing the lifetime skills guarantee:
“What we are determined to do, and what we must do, is give people the opportunity to retrain and upskill, so that if one door closes, they will have the key to open others.”
He went on to say that the Government
“stand for empowering everyone in this country, wherever they live. We stand for the forgotten 50% who do not go to university.”
The measures that he wanted to see
“will embed greater flexibility in the technical and vocational system to support not just young people but adults who need to retrain and upskill at any point in their working lives.”—[Official Report, Commons, 1/10/20; col. 541.]
Those comments justify the need for this amendment. I beg to move.