Lord Docherty of Milngavie (Non-Afl)

My Lords, I begin by adding my thanks to my noble friend Lady Morgan for this timely debate. I do not have time to discuss our school system and its relentless focus on A-levels, whose only purpose is to act as a kind of sorting hat for which university a pupil will attend; or why, as a number of noble Lords have mentioned, many white working-class pupils and their families do not believe that doing well at school reliably leads to opportunity, financial security and a good life; or to discuss the related need for parity of esteem between further education, apprenticeships and higher education. The Prime Minister is right to call for that. I will instead focus on the headwinds facing adult education, which is used by adults for whom school did not work out or who wish to retrain. From 2010, funding for adult education was slashed: the number of adult learners fell from over 3 million to around half that number. Yet we are in the foothills of an economic revolution, driven by AI, of a scale not seen perhaps since the first Industrial Revolution. No one—including those developing AI—can be entirely sure where it is going to take us. The impact of new technologies in the short term is often exaggerated, but history shows, if anything, that impact over the longer term is underestimated. So it is universally acknowledged that the impact of AI on employment and the jobs available for people to do will be unprecedented. The nearest comparison in my lifetime was perhaps the retreat in the early 1980s in the UK from heavy extractive industries, and there are some lessons to be learned. We had long known that change in the UK was coming. In Germany they knew that too. But in Germany they prepared: from the late 1960s they planned for the transformation of the Ruhr Valley, with significant investment in further education, adult education, community engagement and infrastructure to ensure that the change was managed and that no one was left behind. In the UK we just let the market rip, and we are still living with the consequences of that. The scale of change needed is immense. We will need new levels of innovation and investment, and perhaps, as I think the noble Baroness, Lady Morris, hinted at, the abandonment of conventional thinking, if we are to effectively support people. Are we up to the challenge of reimagining the role of adult education, rethinking its purpose and scale, in a changing jobs market the like of which we have not seen before? To embrace the spirit of the age we have to be optimistic. We have to navigate this change. We have to plan.