Skills and Post-16 Education Bill [HL] — House of Lords, 2021-07-15
Topic: Education
Deborah Wilcox (Labour, Centre-left): My Lords, I move this amendment in the name of my noble friend Lord Watson of Invergowrie. This amendment sets out the complementary roles of schools, colleges and universities by joining up the wider education and skills system so that it better meets society’s needs and gives people the skills they need. Delivering this means ensuring that we develop the right balance of autonomy, authority and accountabilities that will enable schools, colleges and universities to focus on the complementary roles they can play together and with other partners over the long term. This must involve a genuine partnership, with providers empowered to stimulate and challenge articulated demand, rather than act as passive policy recipients. It means ensuring that this is meaningfully accessible to all and involves an effectively joined-up wider education and skills system. Colleges do not work in isolation to meet the education and training needs of their communities. Schools and universities are important parts of the system, so they should be part of the planning process. Amendment 8—in the names of my noble friends Lord Rooker and Lord Bradley, as well—therefore sets out the complementary roles of schools, colleges and universities in delivering on LSIPs Currently, there is a lack of a comprehensive, long-term education and skills plan that brings together all parts of the system towards the same vision. Different parts of the system have different policy priorities and initiatives. The current reform agenda is not sufficiently addressing this. It deals with only one part of the system—colleges—without exploring the need for complementary alignment with universities, schools and other providers. At the same time, this means that the role of education and skills in addressing wider policy priorities and strategies is not always recognised—for example, the role of colleges in welfare, health and net-zero policies There is a lack of any system to co-ordinate the 16 to 18 offer at the local and subregional level between schools and colleges. This leads to insufficient provision and limits student choice of programme—for example, when multiple competing providers concentrate on a narrow offer at the expense of less popular or minority provision At the university level, there is contested ground over the higher technical level 4 to level 5 provision and who is best placed to offer this, leading to unproductive competition between colleges and universities. If a whole education system approach is not taken to local skills planning, there will be a disjointed system that is not efficient or effective in its use of public money and does not best meet the needs of students and employers There should also be an exploration of a national 10-year education and skills strategy sitting across government, to deliver on wider policy agendas and to give stability to all parts of the system, creating a duty on schools and universities to collaborate with colleges and employers in the development of skills plans, so that the training on offer efficiently meets the need of local areas. I therefore beg to move.