Clause 10
Education and Inspections Bill
11:30 am
John Hayes (Shadow Minister (Vocational Education), Education; South Holland and The Deepings, Conservative)
Yes, the Government have got some of this right. I would be the first to acknowledge that the Under-Secretary’s personal commitment to the matter is undoubted. I know that he has given considerable attention to the Foster report, but the Government start from a difficult position on skills, because we have a skills crisis. No Government want to admit that, but it is clear from the interim Leach report—we expect the final report this summer to say nothing different—that the task is immense.
One of the dilemmas at the heart of the matter is the fact that the Government’s core skills entitlement for those up to the age of 25 might well further skew the resources and attention of FE away from upskilling and re-skilling the existing work force towards a second chance for those up to 25. I put that point to the Under-Secretary as he has challenged me on the matter.
One understands entirely why the Government want to give the entitlement, and I do not wish to question their intention or ignore the necessity of dealing with core skills, which are vital to the life chances of individuals and to national competitiveness. However, I worry about the impact that the policy might have on FE, which is already telling us that the Skills for Life campaign concentrates resources in a way that makes it even harder to get at the hardest to get at groups—older people, more disadvantaged people, existing workers or people outside the work force. That is my judgment, and that of some FE principals to whom I have spoken. I raise that caveat to my general words of praise of the Government and the Under-Secretary.
As I have said, we should be even more creative and imaginative in reconstructing the provision of skills training. We must be radical in breaking down the barriers between schools, colleges and employers, and we must look more closely at how courses are designed and how to implement vocational education. We must think much more laterally about such matters.
In meeting the parity of esteem challenge, we can borrow from accreditation practice in industry. We can draw on the best talents available in each sector and not be hidebound by the conventional structural barriers that can lead us to replicate and contradict some of what is done in vocational education.
I am not ignoring the points that the hon. Member for Mid-Dorset and North Poole made about the need to consult FE and the important debate to be had about the role of school sixth forms and sixth-form colleges. I do not intend just to be adversarial, but I am just not sure that I agree with her about what FE colleges should be doing.
The hon. Lady makes an important point in that my argument is most applicable in places where it iseasy in practice to access the kind of mixed provision through collaboration that she advocates. That kind of provision is probably more straightforward to access if one lives in a conurbation or other area in which it is easier to get about than it might be in a rural area in which travel distances and the simple act of getting to the places where learning and resources are located make things more difficult. In rural areas, it is harder to construct a model around what I said in relation to Sir Andrew Foster. There, travel issues are a profound problem, particularly for younger learners. We shall say more about that when we consider transportation in the later parts of the Bill. The viability of post-16 provision because of numbers in sparsely populated areas—another matter that relates to the hon. Lady’s comments—also needs to be factored into our considerations, but perhaps that is a debate for another time.
It is right that we take full account of the important role of colleges, and that we understand the significance of vocational education in the mix of education that is to be provided, and which is affected by the Bill. It is right, too, that we make a judgment about how and from where we want that educationto be provided. However, I am not instinctively sympathetic to the amendments and nothing that I have heard has made me more so, but I shall be interested to hear the Minister’s response to them.