Skills and Post-16 Education Bill [Lords] — House of Commons, 2021-11-15
Topic: Education
Matthew Toby Perkins (Labour, Centre-left): It is a great pleasure to wind up for the Opposition after a good debate on this Bill, with some excellent speeches and important contributions from Members in all parts of the House. I repeat the tribute by my hon. Friend the Member for Stretford and Urmston (Kate Green) to our colleagues in the House of Lords, who adopted a constructive, cross-party approach to the Bill I hope that the Minister has taken note of the contributions to this debate, because much of real value was said by Members on the Opposition and Government Benches. Indeed, two contributions from Conservative Members were—I suspect inadvertently—very revealing. The right hon. Member for Harlow (Robert Halfon) revealed that adult education funding is currently at its lowest level for 23 years. That set me thinking about what might have happened 23 years ago that meant that adult education funding was at such a low level but improved substantially over time, only to reach its nadir now. Of course, a Labour Government happened 23 years ago, and it has taken 11 years to unwind that Labour Government’s investment in adult education to the current nadir The former Secretary of State, the right hon. Member for South Staffordshire (Gavin Williamson), also made a revealing contribution: he said that levelling up is all about investment in human beings—people in every area throughout the country. Of course, he was one of the Secretaries of State who was in power while there was a 40% reduction in adult education. He presided over that. I absolutely agree that if levelling up is to mean anything, it has to mean investment in people, which is precisely what we have not seen under this Government A number of Members spoke powerfully about the role of BTECs. My hon. Friend the Member for Lewisham East (Janet Daby) spoke of Lord Baker’s description of the defunding of BTECs as "act of educational vandalism". My hon. Friend the Member for St Helens South and Whiston (Ms Rimmer) spoke up for her local college and about the number of students at that college who would miss out. My hon. Friends the Members for Luton South (Rachel Hopkins) and for Bristol South (Karin Smyth) spoke of the importance of the BTEC pathway, particularly for disadvantaged students. And my hon. Friend the Member for Birmingham, Hall Green (Tahir Ali) spoke passionately and movingly about his own journey as a BTEC engineering student who went on to be the very first person in his family to go to university, and his pride at seeing his son follow in his footsteps This question is really important, because the Government have set out to trash the reputation of BTECs and then come back and said, "Actually, we’re only going to get rid of some of them—only the low-quality ones." The damage is being done already. Students are on those courses now: 230,000 students who are doing level 3 BTECs are being told that those are poor-quality qualifications. Why make that announcement and create all that uncertainty and then say, "Oh, we’re going to do a review and then we’ll look at the evidence."? This whole approach has been wrong. I welcome the more conciliatory language that we are hearing from the new Secretary of State, but the damage has been done, and we need to quickly hear from him which of those courses will be carrying on, which ones will not and what is the plan for those students who will not be doing T-levels The real worry is that this will result in fewer students from more deprived communities achieving vocational qualifications at level 3. Pulling up that drawbridge will, without question, restrict opportunities, particularly for white working class and black, Asian and minority ethnic students from those communities. The Secretary of State repeated the description of BTECs as a low-quality qualification, so if we are hearing a change of tone, we need to know whether we are seeing a change of policy There was a lot of discussion about local skills improvement plans. My hon. Friend the Member for Rotherham (Sarah Champion) spoke about the extent to which special needs students are missing from LSIPs, which is an important point. We very much welcome the Secretary of State’s climbdown on the subject of metro Mayors and their responsibility in terms of LSIPs, but if the responsibility of those elected to local government in metro Mayor areas is accepted, as was said by the hon. Members for Ipswich (Tom Hunt) and for Central Suffolk and North Ipswich (Dr Poulter), what of areas that do not have metro Mayors? Why is there no local democratic accountability for those areas? It occurs to me that the vast majority of my right hon. and hon. Friends represent areas that have metro Mayors, but the majority of Government Members do not, so they will have no democratic accountability whatsoever. The point made by the hon. Member for Ipswich about the variation in chambers of commerce—some are very good and some are much less good—was well made.