Further Education and Training Bill [L ords]

Part of Orders of the Day – in the House of Commons at 4:57 pm on 21 May 2007.

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Photo of David Willetts David Willetts Shadow Secretary of State for Education 4:57, 21 May 2007

I beg to move, To leave out from "That" to the end of the Question, and to add instead thereof:

"That this House
declines to give a Second Reading to the Further Education and Training Bill [Lords] because it will introduce yet another expensive reorganisation of the learning and skills councils, further entrenching the management of vocational training through a regional structure;
it will grant the Learning and Skills Council draconian new powers to dismiss college governors, principals and senior managers;
and despite the recommendations of the Leitch Review of Skills it fails to address the UK's relatively poor performance in intermediate level vocational skills, the growing problem of young people not in education, employment or training, the declining numbers of learners in apprenticeships at all levels, and profound doubts about the timetable for the introduction of the new 14-19 specialised Diplomas."

We welcome this opportunity to debate the future of further education in this country. Although we have reservations about the Bill, we can indeed take pride in a lot of what has been achieved by further education colleges in our country. They do particularly well in Ofsted inspections, with 63 per cent. of FE colleges assessed as good or better. Students report high levels of satisfaction; 67 per cent. are either very or extremely satisfied with their experience of FE colleges. Of course, of those employers who use FE colleges—sadly, many do not use them—82 per cent. report themselves satisfied.

We are proud of what many FE colleges achieve, and we on the Conservative Benches trace that achievement back to crucial legislation that we passed in 1992—the Further and Higher Education Act 1992, which gave FE colleges their freedom from local authority control and set them on the path to the success that they now enjoy. Indeed, in the report that the Secretary of State so proudly says he commissioned, Sir Andrew Foster says:

"Incorporation in 1993 is celebrated by many as a defining moment of liberation. And in many ways it was."

We take pride in what those colleges have achieved in the years since they were incorporated. However, we regret that the Bill is a missed opportunity to tackle the problems facing the FE sector now. Those problems and challenges have been identified in two very useful Government reports, the first of which, by Sir Andrew Foster, listed no fewer than 17 different regulatory and inspection bodies that were crawling over the activities of FE colleges. We would have liked to see those reduced. The report says:

"Currently, the rigours of proving the quality of provision to the plethora of interested bodies, including qualifications bodies, are in danger of detracting from the need for continuous improvement and the ownership of that by FE colleges...There is a galaxy of oversight inspection and accreditation bodies."

When we talk about the burden of red tape, a classic example is provided in the list of the regulatory burdens facing FE colleges contained in Sir Andrew Foster's report. Sadly, the Bill contains no measures that would reduce those burdens on colleges.

The second challenge that the Bill fails to address is that presented by Lord Leitch's report on skills. Lord Leitch is frank on the scale of the skills crisis facing our country. The Secretary of State quoted from the report and I agreed with the quotation that he cited. However, he did not go on to cite some of the other points in Lord Leitch's report; for example, that

"Previous approaches to delivering skills have been too 'supply driven' based on the Government planning supply to meet ineffectively articulated employer demand...The Review recommends a fully demand-led approach".

Lord Leitch also said that planning should not be done by bodies such as the Learning and Skills Council.

Lord Leitch's report identifies that there should not be the level of top-down planning that the system currently faces. Sir Andrew Foster's report identifies the burden of regulation on the FE sector. But the Bill does nothing to tackle those challenges contained in reports that the Government have commissioned.

In the Queen's Speech debate, the Secretary of State, I regret, made a virtue of the fact that the Bill does not engage with Lord Leitch, saying

"We do not see a need to wait for Leitch before the Bill. Indeed, we think that Leitch's report will make such radical proposals that there will need to be a further period of consultation. I doubt very much whether there is anything in Leitch that will necessitate our changing the Bill"—[ Hansard, 16 November 2006; Vol. 453, c.251.]

As so often, there are big issues about the future of skills in our country that the Government have failed to tackle and they have missed the legislative opportunity to do so. Instead, we have far too much fiddling around and reorganising, exactly the kind of things that Governments do when they do not really know what to do at all; displacement activity. In fact, we have the fourth reorganisation of the Learning and Skills Council in as many years. It was established only in 2000. In January 2004, there was the creation of a new regional management team with the appointment of 10 regional directors. We had a reorganisation around two directorates, with three directorates being closed down and further reorganisations in 2004 and 2005.

As we have heard from Labour Members, and as a result of parliamentary questions from myself and others, the Learning and Skills Council has incurred redundancy costs of £54 million associated with the various reorganisations in the six years since it was created. If you add on the £62 million of costs from closing the training and enterprise councils that we created, £120 million has already been spent simply on reorganising various skills bodies in this country. That £120 million could have paid for an extra 32,000 apprenticeship places. We are far from convinced that we need another regional reorganisation.