Lord Barber of Chittlehampton (Lab)

My Lords, it is an honour to follow the right reverend Prelate; I strongly support the sentiments he described. I also thank the noble Baroness, Lady Morgan, for putting this on the agenda in the way that the noble Lord, Lord Baker, welcomed, because it is such a fundamental subject and theme for us. I also thank her for her excellent speech; I agreed with every word. Next month will be the 50th anniversary of James Callaghan’s famous speech at Ruskin College, in which he drew attention to the need to focus on standards and employability. We are still working on the legacy of that. The other person I want to draw attention to is the noble Lord, Lord Baker. I am honoured and privileged to follow him in this debate. We are all in his debt, not just for the amazing Education Reform Act 1988 but for his continuing 40 years of work to drive higher education standards. He is an exemplar to us all. Over the decades since that 1988 legislation, the school system in this country has become globally admired. The reason is not the debates we have had—of course there have been disagreements—but that, underlying them, there have been some fundamental principles that all Governments have stuck to over that time: education is a priority; you need to set standards, devolve budgets and responsibility to schools, hold them to account, intervene decisively if they are underperforming and focus all the time on the quality of teaching. Those principles have been adhered to for the last 30 or 40 years. Conceptually, it is not difficult. The difficulty is ensuring that consistent adherence over time, and this has never been the case with vocational skills and FE. There has been too much chopping and changing and not enough focus on the quality of teaching. We might have led the world in this field too, but so far we have chosen not to. Now is the time we should choose to do so. Taking the new Prime Minister’s lead, we are now in a position to do exactly that. We can develop the kind of agenda that the noble Baroness, Lady Morgan, laid out. The four principles that she outlined are excellent. I add that we need better articulation between schools, colleges and universities; we need to build further and faster on the welcome recent progress in careers guidance; we need thriving apprenticeships that build a ladder all the way up to degree apprenticeships; we need a demand-led system—as the noble Baroness advocated—and employers who encourage work placements and spell out what they want in detail at a level of specificity; and, above all, across parties we will need to give this consistent priority over the decade that the noble Baroness referred to. Let us now choose to lead the world in skills, employability and vocational education. That is the road to 21st-century prosperity. It will take a decade, but we can start today.