argyrotsipi/train-dataset huggingface dataset:
Technical and Further Education Bill — House of Commons, 2016-11-14
Topic: Education
Lucy Maria Powell (Labour, Centre-left): It is a pleasure to follow the hon. Member for Dover (Charlie Elphicke). It is a rare treat for us to agree on something, but I did find myself shouting, "Hear, hear" about his comments on adult education. All of us in the House would applaud that, but I urge him to look at what has happened to adult education during the past six years, because I am afraid that that ladder has been well and truly kicked away for many of the people wanting to get such skills later in life It is also a pleasure to follow my hon. Friend the Member for Stoke-on-Trent Central (Tristram Hunt). I entirely agree with much of what he said, especially about how we should tackle some of the deep-rooted causes of inequality and of the lack of social mobility in this country. To the issues he raised about the quality of early years education, which is so critical, and technical and vocational education, which we are discussing today, I would only add that we need enough quality teachers teaching all our children, but especially the most disadvantaged It is worth pondering for a moment, if you do not mind, Madam Deputy Speaker, that we should have been in the Chamber this evening to discuss a different education Bill—the education for all Bill, which was going to force all good and outstanding schools to become academies against their wishes. The Technical and Further Education Bill was only meant to be a small part of the bigger education for all Bill. I am glad we are not discussing that Bill, because it would have been a terrible mistake to force good and outstanding schools, against their wishes, to become academies, when we simply do not have the capacity, oversight and accountability in the system to tackle such a change. We all have to admit that in its place, we are left with a much-reduced education Bill. None the less, it contains some important principles, as others have said. I welcome the extra focus on post-16 vocational and technical education and the extra support the Government are giving it. As my hon. Friend the Member for Stoke-on-Trent Central said, we should all welcome the direction of travel I want to raise a couple of issues with the unintended consequences of the Sainsbury review and how it is being implemented, including through measures in the Bill. I worry about the idea that, at 16, someone should choose either an entirely technical education or an entirely academic education. That is more akin to the grammar school era of the 1950s and ’60s than today’s world of work and modern economy. Most of the jobs that we need today and will need in the future involve a blended mix of academic and vocational education. They require general applied qualifications, where those two streams come together. As many Members have commented, that is exactly what the best university technical colleges and further education colleges provide—highly academic and highly technical education alongside one another.
Technical and Further Education Bill — House of Commons, 2016-11-14
Topic: Education
Peter John Kyle (Labour, Centre-left): My hon. Friend mentioned joint pathways being undertaken by the same further education institutions. She might like to know that the secondary school where I am chair of governors has a construction academy attached to the main academy. We do everything from elite sport right through to construction and vocational pathways. It is all prestige and all rooted in academic and vocational attainment, all under one roof. We can do it from the beginning right through to further education.
Technical and Further Education Bill — House of Commons, 2016-11-14
Topic: Education
Lucy Maria Powell (Labour, Centre-left): I thank my hon. Friend for that excellent intervention. It sounds like just the sort of institution we should explore further and support As I said, many of the jobs that we need today and will need in the future require both types of education. The pathways into professions such as nursing, engineering, health and social care and many more require a blend of general applied and academic education, as well as technical and vocational education. That will be especially true in post-Brexit Britain, where the supply of such workers is likely to be reduced further, particularly in nursing, social care, health and engineering. Closing down those pathways at this point in time could have serious unintended consequences It is a well-trodden pathway for people to go to university to study nursing, health and social care or engineering with an applied general academic qualification and some technical BTEC qualifications alongside it. That pathway is highly regarded by universities. We should be careful about closing down that pathway, because if Ministers look they will see that the vast majority of the tens of thousands of undergraduates who come into the system through that route have that blended mix of academic and vocational qualifications.
Technical and Further Education Bill — House of Commons, 2016-11-14
Topic: Education
Robert Howard Marris (Labour, Centre-left): My hon. Friend is making a powerful case. We need to think about technical education not just for the jobs of tomorrow, but for the jobs of the day after tomorrow. I am considerably older than her and my hon. Friend the Member for Luton North (Kelvin Hopkins) is a little older than me. When he entered the workforce, let alone when I did decades ago, many skilled jobs existed that do not exist now, such as in printing. Typesetting basically does not exist now. The world has changed and we have to equip the coming generation with not only the skills they need now, but the flexibility to adapt to what the workforce will look like, inasmuch as we can foretell that, in the next 30 years.
Technical and Further Education Bill — House of Commons, 2016-11-14
Topic: Education
Peter John Kyle (Labour, Centre-left): It is a pleasure to follow my hon. Friend the Member for Scunthorpe (Nic Dakin), who shared with us his professional experience of guiding many young people towards the paths that they need to take. It is a shame that we have not given greater priority to further education in the past, because the skills challenge that we face remains acute, as it has been for a very long time. My hon. Friend the Member for Ashton-under-Lyne (Angela Rayner), the shadow Minister, shared with us her own rocky path from secondary education to a career and secure work. A number of people find it a difficult path. That is the challenge that the Bill seeks to meet, and many of us are supportive in respect of both the path and the challenge I left my school in Bognor Regis—ironically, the constituency of the Minister for School Standards—with almost no usable qualifications. I had to return to secondary school at the age of 25 to obtain the qualifications that I needed in order to return to the education system. I know from first-hand experience that for many young people, the door to education is slammed shut and needs to be broken down. We all tend to assume that the doors to education, and indeed to all our public services, are open all the time. I am very keen to remind Labour Members, as well as others, that doors are often shut and that it is our job to break them open, rather than expecting individuals to remove the barriers to getting the best out of our public services the first time round without waiting for the second.
Technical and Further Education Bill — House of Commons, 2016-11-14
Topic: Education
Kelvin Peter Hopkins (Labour, Centre-left): My hon. Friend is making a strong point. Some years ago, funding for adult education at sixth-form colleges was taken away. Excellent teachers and wonderful facilities are no longer used in the evenings, which used to enable adults to go back and take A-levels, for example, and possibly go to university after that. The door was shut very firmly some years ago, and it should be reopened.
Technical and Further Education Bill — House of Commons, 2016-11-14
Topic: Education
Kelvin Peter Hopkins (Labour, Centre-left): It is a great pleasure to speak in the debate and to follow my hon. Friend the Member for Hove (Peter Kyle). He is currently the chair of the all-party parliamentary group on further education and lifelong learning—a job that I had many years ago. I have had a long association with the further education and post-16 sector. I taught in further education more than 40 years ago, and while I was teaching a basic statistics course I discovered that one of the major problems with education in Britain is the poor level of mathematics teaching. The students I taught had difficulty with basic computation, multiplication and division. I found that quite shocking at the time, but the problem has continued Some 20 years ago, the great Lord Claus Moser produced a report on numeracy and literacy, finding that more than 50% of the population was functionally innumerate. He illustrated that point by saying that 50% of the population did not understand what 50% meant, which is quite surprising—if not shocking. More recently, I asked the former Secretary of State, the right hon. Member for Surrey Heath (Michael Gove), why we were having to recruit so many qualified engineers from abroad and he said that it was because our mathematics is not good enough to produce sufficient engineers. There is a serious problem.
Technical and Further Education Bill — House of Commons, 2016-11-14
Topic: Education
Robert Howard Marris (Labour, Centre-left): Does my hon. Friend agree that part of the problem with mathematics is down to English culture? It is still acceptable for people to say words to the effect of, "Ooh, I don’t do maths," without that being seen by their interlocutors as an admission of abject failure. It is just seen as a bit of a joke. It is a cultural problem. This is about not only the education system, but our culture, particularly in England. It is appalling.
Technical and Further Education Bill — House of Commons, 2016-11-14
Topic: Education
Kelvin Peter Hopkins (Labour, Centre-left): I agree with my hon. Friend, but it is changing and I am optimistic about that. People such as me who are good at maths are regarded as being a bit of a geek, but what is wrong with being good at maths? In the country of Isaac Newton, Isambard Kingdom Brunel and Alan Turing, why should we be ashamed of being good at maths? That is being addressed, but we are still having to recruit thousands of engineers from abroad because people cannot do the maths to become engineers through our education system As I said, I taught in further education 40 years ago, but I also spent four years as chair of governors at the then Luton College of Higher Education when we were producing hundreds of qualified engineers doing ONCs, HNCs and then AMIMechEs and so on. They were good engineers and they could do the maths. It may just be that we have declined in some areas because the manufacturing demand is not as great as it was. We are now trying to pick up the manufacturing sector again and we are realising that we have missed out on maths I am happy to say that Luton College of Higher Education went on to become the University of Luton and then the University of Bedfordshire. The vice-chancellor is now Bill Rammell, a former colleague in Parliament, and its chancellor is Mr Speaker—the greatest honour of all—and I am absolutely delighted about that. I have also been a governor of the superb Luton Sixth Form College for 25 years. It does brilliant work and gets better and better every year Barnfield College is also in my constituency. A dozen or so years ago, it was the first ever general FE college to be given beacon status, but it went into serious decline and wound up almost collapsing into a state of failure a year or two back. It has now been picked up by its great new principal Tim Eyton-Jones and I am sure that it will be revived, but it needs Government support. It should never have been allowed to get into that situation. The neglect of colleges was criminal. Barnfield is now on the up and will be great again, but it needs the active support of Government, particularly in finance In Parliament, I was for some years chair of the all-party parliamentary group on further education and lifelong learning—lifelong learning is also important—but I am now chair of the all-party parliamentary group on sixth form colleges and am pleased about that. Colleges in general, FE colleges in particular, have been neglected over decades. Colleges represent an abused sector of education, and one reason for that is that so many people in the political sphere have no connection with further education. They go to posh schools—grammar schools, public schools, whatever—and then to university. Indeed, some become special advisers—a former Spad is in our midst now—and then go into politics never having touched further education or understood what it is about.
Technical and Further Education Bill — House of Commons, 2016-11-14
Topic: Education
Robert Howard Marris (Labour, Centre-left): Does my hon. Friend recall the reorganisation of Government Departments in about 2007—sadly under a Labour Government—when the Department for Innovation, Universities and Skills was set up? It took a week for the Government to realise that they had not put further education in either of the two possible Departments.
Technical and Further Education Bill — House of Commons, 2016-11-14
Topic: Education
Kelvin Peter Hopkins (Labour, Centre-left): There is another story, which may not be true, about what happened when incorporation was introduced in 1993. When the legislation was going through, the then Education Secretary was asked what was going to happen to sixth-form colleges and he said, "Oh, shall we put them in the FE sector?" It was a last-minute thought just to drop them into that sector. Sixth-form colleges are really schools and had they stayed with the local education authorities, we would by now have a lot more of them because LEAs would never have given away all the sixth-forms from their schools to create new sixth-form colleges because they were a different, independent sector Unfortunately, LEAs, and indeed, councillors are possessive about their institutions and do not want to give them away. I have experience of that, because when I was chair of governors of the Luton College of Higher Education, we had a battle royal to get that college into the higher education sector—out of LEA control and into the Polytechnics and Colleges Funding Council. The chief education officer threatened to sack the college principal for pursuing that avenue, and I had to intervene to say to the CEO publicly, "If you sack the principal, you will have me to contend with and I will fight you all the way." He backed off and we got what became the University of Luton and, subsequently, the University of Bedfordshire. LEAs are, understandably, possessive and they are not going to give away their sixth-forms to move towards sixth-form colleges. Had they done that, our education system would be much better, but that is another story.
Technical and Further Education Bill — House of Commons, 2016-11-14
Topic: Education
Kelvin Peter Hopkins (Labour, Centre-left): I thank the hon. gentleman for his intervention, but I think the majority of Members, probably on both sides of this House, have not gone through the further education sector. A small number have, and they understand this, but a high proportion are not very familiar with FE and the vast contribution it makes to our society, in all sorts of ways.
Technical and Further Education Bill — House of Commons, 2016-11-14
Topic: Education
Karin Marguerite Smyth (Labour, Centre-left): I agree with my hon. Friend. I went to an FE college to do my A-levels, but what he is saying applies not just to politicians, but to people in our media, our legal establishment and throughout other walks of life. They do not have experience of going through that sector, which means that it is often the forgotten sector.
Technical and Further Education Bill — House of Commons, 2016-11-14
Topic: Education
Kelvin Peter Hopkins (Labour, Centre-left): I agree with my hon. Friend about that, and of course another cultural factor is the fact that we are not aware of things. As my hon. Friend the Member for Wolverhampton South West (Rob Marris) says, there is this idea that mathematics is something we do not do; we say, "Oh, I can’t do maths". People do not boast about how they cannot read. I want to make sure that everybody can read, and we should have adult education to make sure that everyone can. There is a problem with our mathematics, and I invite Ministers and shadow Ministers to visit the wonderful sixth-form college where I am governor to find out how to do things well, because so much that goes on in our college is brilliant.
Technical and Further Education Bill — House of Commons, 2016-11-14
Topic: Education
Lucy Maria Powell (Labour, Centre-left): I find myself feeling how I did during my A-levels, when I was the only girl in the class doing science A-levels—it has taught me well for this place. Does my hon. Friend the Member for Luton North (Kelvin Hopkins) agree that the issue of maths teachers is now a looming crisis in this country? Someone who has a first or a 2:1 in maths is a very desirable potential employee, and therefore the teaching route is just not as attractive as it once was and we are facing a crisis in maths education.
Technical and Further Education Bill — House of Commons, 2016-11-14
Topic: Education
Kelvin Peter Hopkins (Labour, Centre-left): Indeed. In my day, it was certainly an excellent college and we did our very best I keep digressing from the points I am trying to make. One problem we have is that we try to pick up problems in mathematics post-16, in further education—as shown in Alison Wolf’s report—when the real problem is lower down. If someone misses out on maths in primary education, they will have much more serious problems later on. Picking it up later is much harder than picking it up at six, seven, eight or nine. My two granddaughters are studying at a wonderful school, and they are very good at maths. One was doing her long division, or whatever, yesterday, and she got everything right, because they are being well taught now. I hope that that will feed through the system, but it certainly was not the case all those years ago when I was teaching At the sixth-form college—I hope that this can happen in FE colleges as well—we are putting massive resources intensively into retakes for GCSE maths. The retake results, as in most places, were appalling until about two years ago; then we introduced a system with extra resource and the best possible teachers and we doubled the pass rate for GCSE retakes. That means that many more youngsters can go off to university or to apprenticeships with a maths qualification at A to C. It can be done, but it is hard work and takes more resource. I hope that the Government will recognise that. If they want to get the maths results up post-16, resource has to be put in. That means recruiting more teachers and ensuring that we have the best teachers teaching maths—people like my hon. Friend the Member for Manchester Central (Lucy Powell), who feel comfortable with the subject. Someone who is comfortable with maths is more likely to be a good teacher of maths than someone who feels uncomfortable or who has it as an add-on to something they have been doing elsewhere There are many other points I wish to make, but some have been made by my hon. Friends and by honourable colleagues on the Government Benches. The contribution that sixth-form colleges must make to our communities and our economy is vital for our future. If we do not get it right, we will not have the successful future we should have. We will see a declining scientific and technical culture, which we cannot afford. We must ensure that our maths is good and that our maths teaching is good at every level. Picking it up in further education has to be done, even though it is difficult, and I support Alison Wolf and her report, but we have a long way to go to ensure that we catch up with some of those other countries.
Technical and Further Education Bill — House of Commons, 2016-11-14
Topic: Labor
Kelvin Peter Hopkins (Labour, Centre-left): The hon. Gentleman is right to focus on our poor productivity level, but poor productivity often results from the availability of cheap labour because employers are not forced to invest in modern technology. That is a factor in the equation. Low productivity and low-priced labour are a problem for us.
EU Funding: Community Groups — House of Commons, 2016-11-28
Topic: Labor
Thangam Elizabeth Rachel Debbonaire (Labour, Centre-left): A key aim of European funding for community groups is to promote skills and employment. Last week’s autumn statement appeared to have no long-term strategy for investment in skills and employment. Given how important this is for the UK to compete globally post-Brexit, does the Secretary of State agree that this shows yet again that the Government simply have no plan for Brexit?
Troubled Families Programme — House of Commons, 2016-11-28
Topic: Social Welfare
Katherine Anne Green (Labour, Centre-left): Does the Minister accept that the report shows that although this was purportedly designed around the payment by results model, it was no such thing? Local authorities simply delivered the number of families for which there was funding. What do the Government intend to learn from the failure to design an effective contract? How will they ensure that in future taxpayers’ money is well spent?
Adult Social Care — House of Commons, 2016-11-28
Topic: Social Welfare
Lilian Rachel Greenwood (Labour, Centre-left): Yesterday, the former Health Secretary, Stephen Dorrell, commented on the Chancellor’s autumn statement, saying that it was "a mistake" not to provide extra investment in the social care system, which was "inadequately funded". Last week, directors of social services said social care was "in real jeopardy", and the Conservative leader of Warwickshire County Council said that "it is no exaggeration to say that our care and support system is in crisis." The Minister says that he is providing extra money, but when are the Government going to wake up and provide the funds needed to prevent the whole system from collapsing?
Adult Social Care — House of Commons, 2016-11-28
Topic: Social Welfare
Questions: [R] The Care Quality Commission says that the social care system is about to topple over. The LGA says that councils cannot cope with the cost pressures, and much of the funding that the Minister has discussed is either repackaged funding or funding that will not kick in until late in this decade. When is he going to come clean about the scale of the crisis, take his head out of the sand and lobby the Treasury to make sure that the promised money for 2020 is brought forward and we get to grips with the care crisis?
Angela Eagle (Labour, Centre-left): Thank you, Mr Speaker; you may have caused me some trouble later this evening. In the past six years, the Government have cut social care funding by nearly £5 billion. In my authority of Wirral, there is a £3.5 million hole in the budget only halfway through the year. The system is on its knees, and there has been an 18% increase in emergency admissions to hospital as a result. The Prime Minister did not have an answer to this last Wednesday. When is the Minister responsible going to have an answer?