Baroness Morgan of Huyton (Lab)

My Lords, I declare my interests as set out in the register. There have been so many reports about the importance of vocational education and our inability as a country to deliver. Many of us in this House have been part of these arguments for years—it is good to see the noble Lord, Lord Baker, in his place—and there is real expertise and experience here. This issue is too important for point-scoring or positioning from any of us. The change needed demands detailed work and we need to thrash this through together, not to seek a fuzzy consensus but to get solutions that survive longer than a Parliament. I hope we can start by agreeing on four principles: first, the importance of aspiration for all students; secondly, the importance of literacy and numeracy for all; thirdly, the need to avoid completely separate vocational or academic pathways; and fourthly, a recognition that a significant group of young people are failed by the current system. I declare an interest as a member of the independent inquiry into white working-class educational outcomes, co-chaired by my noble friend Lady Morris of Yardley and Sir Hamid Patel. Its findings run through what I want to say. I will also draw on the Milburn review and a range of other evidence for which I am grateful. The facts are stark. About 1.25 million white British pupils are eligible for free school meals, of whom only just over a third achieve a grade 4 or above in GCSE English and maths. Of course, that reflects a gap that starts pre school and is picked up at the phonics screen and at the end of primary. As inquiry members, we did not find a lack of aspiration; rather, there was pride, resilience and solidarity, and young people who want good lives in the places they come from. But we did hear of structural barriers and a slow erosion of trust—a growing sense that the system is not designed for people like them. That said, we found great schools and colleges achieving strong outcomes for exactly these children, so none of this is inevitable. That brings me to the second principle, and I want to be blunt: no vocational offer can compensate for weak literacy and numeracy. Alun Francis, chair of the Social Mobility Commission, makes the point sharply. FE colleges already have many young people whose general education has been poor, large numbers are resitting English and maths, and a quarter of 19 year-olds still have limited literacy and numeracy. For most of that group, a technical course will not solve the problem. For those with very low grades, endless resitting helps with neither motivation nor prospects. The Government are right to identify that those with very low grades need another way to develop literacy and numeracy. Those who have a good chance of getting the grades should try again: Mr Milburn’s review identifies English and maths at grade 4 as one of the best defences a young person has against becoming NEET. The answer at key stage 4 is not straightforward and it needs work. We need sustained investment in subject expertise, curriculum leadership and instructional coaching in English and maths in particular. In my view, the full range of GCSEs should remain but not be the only option for all students. There needs to be a new focus on work-readiness skills, and that means that accountability measures will need change. Thirdly, and most importantly for this debate today, we must not build two separate systems. The idea that we should sort children at 14 or 16 into the academic and the practical is recurring, simplistic and wrong. Academic and technical learning are not alternatives; they are complementary and, increasingly, people need both. Technical jobs require cognitive as well as practical skills. We all begin with a general education and many then move into vocational training. What differs is the stage at which the transition happens: a solicitor after a degree, a construction craft apprentice at 16, a higher apprentice in cyber security at 18, and so on. The danger comes when we conflate technical learning with a solution for disengaged pupils. Britain has done this repeatedly, and each time we have reduced the cognitive content and lowered the bar. NVQs separated competence from knowledge and flattered league tables. Too often, the 16 year-olds who took them were not ready for work and could not progress. It was not fair on the students, so let us remember that lesson. There is also a delivery question that we tend to duck. We know that health and social care cannot be taught out of a textbook by a biology teacher. Serious technical learning needs teachers with industry expertise, employers involved in curriculum design and delivery, and environments that simulate the workplace. The Wolf review’s answer, that colleges should deliver options for 14 to 16 year-olds alongside GCSEs, probably remains the right one, and strategic authorities or mayors could now broker it across groups of schools. But the offer must be high quality, delivered by specialists and targeted at those who want it—not aimed primarily at disengaged pupils and not there to replace academic progress. The fourth point is the scale of the failure. Teach First defines persistently disadvantaged pupils as those on free school meals for at least 80% of their education. Its research shows that these students are three times more likely to disappear than their better-off peers. It suggests that the Government should formally define persistent disadvantage, track these pupils’ destinations and name them in the risk-of-NEET guidance. Those are modest asks, and I hope that the Minister will look at them. This matters because of where these young people end up. Alan Milburn’s interim review found more than one million 16 to 24 year-olds not in education, employment or training, at an annual cost to the country of £125 billion—more than we spend on education. How crazy is that? Further education colleges should be local engines of progression, and they need serious investment in staff, facilities and long-term employer partnerships to become them. Their funding was decimated post 2010, and the 16-19 review of funding for schools and colleges that will happen in the next couple of years is important. The 16-19 cohort is the poor relation in the system. FE colleges enjoy popular support in many communities, more than any other part of the post-16 system, so there is much to build on, but they too need to change. Too much provision is still shaped by what colleges have historically taught and by what recruits students, rather than by what local employers need. I have found alternatives and want to talk briefly about Wigan. The college there has aligned itself deliberately with the local care sector—one of the borough’s largest employers, which is facing chronic recruitment pressure. Working hand in hand with the local authority, it has built a specialist centre for health and social care. It runs a traineeship, developed with the council, which takes local 16 to 24 year-olds and combines work experience, on-the-job training and recognised qualifications—a direct pipeline into care careers. On campus, it has created a simulated home environment where students train on the care technology and adaptations that they will use at work. Practitioners from the sector teach alongside college staff. Young people leave with a job to go to, employers get the workforce they cannot otherwise find and the public purse spends less on vacancies, agency staff and unemployment. Now imagine that repeated properly: colleges in coastal towns building provision around ports, energy and engineering, colleges in manufacturing areas co-designing courses with the funds on their doorstep, colleges everywhere working with the NHS, councils and care providers, which are so often the largest employers in exactly the towns we are talking about. That is the bargain. Employers, public and private, shape what colleges teach. Colleges give employers a reason to invest, to offer placements and to hire locally. On apprenticeships, let us be straightforward here: the system is not working. We need a massive expansion of opportunity in poorer communities. There has been a repeated, systemic failure to deliver the scale that successive Governments have promised. Indeed, apprenticeship starts for 16 year-olds have fallen by 40%. Apprenticeships are skewed to older people and affluent areas. In areas dominated by smaller employers, there are simply fewer to be had overall, and the levy bureaucracy favours large organisations in urban economies. It must be made far easier for small and medium-sized employers to take on apprentices: simplify levy transfers, cut the admin burden, provide funding certainty and give combined authorities the money and the responsibility to broker locally, and deal with the mundane barriers that decide real lives. Do not let a bus fare be the reason a young person turns down a college place. The Government have rightly made economic growth their central mission, but we cannot complain of labour shortages, low growth and rising welfare bills while the talent of over a million young people goes to waste. As our population ages, we will depend ever more heavily on this generation to work, pay taxes and sustain our public services. Perhaps for the first time in two centuries, ill health among the young is now actually shrinking the labour supply. What I have described is not a welfare programme; it is supply-side economics for the places growth has forgotten. Wigan’s answer to its care workforce shortage costs far less than the price of continuing to fail, and there is a version of it waiting to be built around the country. Let me be clear: this is not an argument against university. Higher education remains and must remain an important destination for academically able young people, whatever their background. The scandal is that too few from poor communities get there. Some are deterred not by lack of ability but by fear of debt. This means looking again at maintenance and living cost support alongside bursaries, scholarships, and employer co-investment. The failure is twofold: too few young people from these communities who could thrive at university are getting there, and too few of those for whom university is not the right route have a high-quality alternative worth choosing. Higher education needs to change too: more modular, commuter-based and work-integrated study, stronger level 4 and 5 pathways, and employer-backed degrees tied to local industries. Young people should not feel that accessing high-quality higher education is possible only by leaving home or taking on excessive financial burdens. In particular, I ask the Minister whether the Government will respond to the inquiry’s report and to the Milburn review together, because they are, in essence, two halves of one problem. Will they act on the specific proposals to open apprenticeships to smaller employers, and to reform accountability so that sustained progression into apprenticeships and skilled work counts equally alongside progression to university? Will they back further education with both the investment and the expectation of appropriate delivery—it has to be a deal—so that more colleges are tied into the needs of local economies? Crucially, will the Government commit to the long haul? Closing this gap is the work of a decade, not a Parliament. I end these comments not in despair but with ambition. I think we know what is needed. We also know that it needs real rigour to get the right policies and the delivery. What is needed now is the collective will to do it. I beg to move.