Skills, Vocational Training, and Further and Higher Education
Thursday, 3 September 2026
Contributions
Motion to Take Note
Moved by
Baroness Morgan of Huyton
That this House takes note of the action needed on skills, vocational training, and further and higher education to improve outcomes for those from deprived and disadvantaged communities and strengthen regional growth.
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.
Lord Baker of Dorking (Con)
My Lords, I congratulate the noble Baroness on initiating this debate. We have not debated practical and technical education in this House since 2010, so this is the first time in 16 years, and we have three minutes—it is absurd. This House is not holding the Government to account on education; we should have an education Select Committee. I also congratulate the Minister, the noble Baroness, Lady Smith, on holding her position in government. There was no chance of her being dropped—she is far too talented—but I thought she might be promoted; I am glad she has not been for the time being, because her knowledge in education is profound. What is more, her real virtue is that she supports the colleges I have been promoting for 15 years; that is, university technical colleges. Those colleges provide education for 14 to 18 year-olds, and we now have 44 colleges and 21,000 students. The thing of which I am most proud is that they have the lowest level of youth unemployment of any schools in the country. If you leave a bog-standard comprehensive, there is an unemployment rate of 16.4%; it is less than 5% for those leaving a UTC. Last year, 22 of our colleges provided no one who was NEET, and that is unique. So we need technical and practical education in our schools. These colleges are very popular; we have 45, but we have to turn 5,000 or 6,000 children away each year. We need therefore to expand, but we cannot expand by having new schools, because none will be built in Britain for five or seven years due to falling school rolls. We have devised a way in which we can improve technical and practical education fundamentally by inserting into a bog-standard comprehensive a sleeve of practical and technical education from 14 to 18—the UTC sleeve, as it is called. I am glad to say that one of these is going to open next week in Barrow-in-Furness. BAE Systems has its factories there, but it cannot recruit students from the schools in Cumbria suitable for what it wants to do. This school will be operational next week. There will be 120 students starting, and they will decide themselves whether they want to go down the technical or the academic route. Some 90 so far have elected to do the technical route and 30 the academic, all under the same roof. That is a triumph. Quite apart from that, I am glad to say that Andy Burnham is very keen on UTCs and sleeves, because he asked us two or three years to deliver the MBacc. A sleeve will start in a Manchester school next year, providing practical and technical education between the ages of 14 to 18. We therefore have the support of rather a key figure in this area, but we need many more. The thing about our schools is that a good technical education needs workshops as well as classrooms; some have to be converted. It needs machines such as milling machines, lathes, laser cutters, metrology mechanics, and CAD and CAM software. It also needs teachers capable of teaching those subjects to the children; that is, people who have had experience in business. It also needs the active support of local companies so that they can take their youngsters into their workshops, into their factories, for practical experience. I suppose that the Government will wait for Mr Milburn on technical education, but I hope that when we hear of their policy, they will recognise that they have a model for expansion, which is the UTC sleeve. That is the real heart of it. I will give one small piece of advice to the Minister. I hope that when Mr Milburn has replied and the Government develop the policy and announce it, they will not just start technical education at the age of 16. That is too late; it should start at 14. We are the only country in Europe that does not teach its children below 16 practical and technical education. That is one reason why youth unemployment in Germany is exactly half of ours. This is an important debate; I thank the noble Baroness again for raising it—it is excellent. I hope the Government will come forward with proposals as soon as possible. The thing about the sleeve is that it can be done instantly and quickly. I offer one last piece of advice to the Minister: whatever she comes up with in terms of the policy, it should not start at 16. We must start at 14. We are the only country that does not teach children below 16 a technical education. We are on the cusp of something very important and very exciting, and this will help the Government because it will stimulate economic growth.
Lord Addington (LD)
My Lords, I have listened to the first two speeches. The noble Baroness, Lady Morgan, hit on something towards the end of her speech that I do not think anybody who knows anything about the subject will disagree with. It is the work of a decade to correct the problems here. You have to get into a system and change it, you have to change the cultures and the training, and you have to make people think in a slightly new way. The NEET problem, according to everything that anyone who has been here has listened to, and according to the Library briefing, has been growing for over a decade. It is a fact that a group of children, who are now young and established adults, have gone through a system of education that does not seem to have touched them or brought them in in any way or form. Many of them left the education process way before they reached the end of compulsory education, and people have been happy about it. I say that because the first report I have seen into off-rolling in the schools system came out of the House of Commons in 2020. Something about our current structure of education means that anybody who is not a benefit to their school in terms of examination grades is a real problem not only to the school but to the professional and personal development of those running it. If we can do something here that starts to address that, we will do something very positive. The noble Baroness said quite a lot and referred to basic skills, such as English and maths—and the Minister will probably have written that into her response to me. I am dyslexic. I am president of the British Dyslexia Association. I still would not pass a written exam in English. You struggle with maths because it is simply a different language, and the language-processing bits in the brain do not pick it up as fast. The papering over of the cracks of short-term memory is still there, so you will always have these problems—and that is just one group. Anybody who struggles with special educational needs, or who comes from a home that simply does not take them seriously, is always going to struggle with these skills. We have to find better ways forward. I congratulate the Government, and indeed the previous Government, on emphasising the level 2 lower entrance requirements to go on and train. If we are to do this, we must stop people being isolated and branded failures so early. The new SEN paper may well start to address this but, once again, it is the work of a decade. I see that the Clock is against me. Openers used to get a wee bit longer, but there we are. When the Minister comes to respond, I hope she will emphasise how we are stopping people being branded failures and making sure that schools and the education sector are given a reward for keeping these people in school and not punished when it comes to league tables.
The Lord Bishop of Leicester
My Lords, I too am grateful to the noble Baroness, Lady Morgan, for securing this debate. I also express my gratitude to Alan Milburn and his team for firmly putting the number of young people out of education, employment and training on the political agenda. I think there is real cross-party consensus on the need to address what Alan Milburn was right to call a “moral crisis” facing our young people today. I sincerely hope that when the second part of his review is published, his recommendations will be taken seriously. Mr Milburn referred to the drivers behind rising NEET rates as a whole-system crisis; I would go further and characterise it as a whole-society crisis. There is an important role for community organisations to play—whether they are faith groups, uniformed groups, sports clubs or youth clubs—and for all of us as neighbours, friends and mentors to young people. In my time today, I want to focus on one area specifically: volunteering opportunities. They provide the intermediate layer between individual and labour markets and can help build young people’s skills and confidence to equip them for the world of work. Many of us will be familiar with the experience trap. When you are first trying to get a foot on the career ladder, you need so many years of experience to get a job, but a job is the only way to get that experience. This is where community groups can make a real difference. In these settings, young people can learn, practise and develop new skills, and ideally have their first leadership opportunities. Developing skills is not simply a matter of absorbing knowledge—which is where the classroom environment is at its strongest. It is about having one’s gifts and talents recognised, put into practice and stretched. In the most recent government youth social action survey—which, noble Lords might be disappointed to hear, has not been run since 2019—over half of 16 to 20 year-olds said that social action had improved their self-confidence and communication skills. Significant numbers also reported improvements to their ability to work as a team and motivate others, and to their social skills more generally. I urge the Government to think holistically about skills development, the foundations for learning—here the Government’s ambitions for reducing child poverty are especially important—and the many contexts in which all this can take place. These include, but are not limited to, colleges and universities. I am impressed by the Government’s ambition in introducing work experience placements for young people long out of work—but, as it stands, these placements will reach fewer than one in 10 of the roughly 948,000 young people not in education, employment or training. Will the Government consider adding a supported volunteering strand, delivered through the volunteering community and faith sector, to their skills, vocational training, FE and HE strategy? In so doing, I believe the Government could help thousands more escape the experience trap, realise their potential and help society benefit from their gifts.
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.
Baroness Fraser of Craigmaddie (Con)
My Lords, I add my thanks to the noble Baroness, Lady Morgan, for securing today’s debate. I will focus on an area too often treated as niche, but which I believe tests our whole approach to skills, vocational training and further and higher education. I am talking of the training pipeline for professional dance. My researcher, Emilia Braddon, as part of the King’s College London parliamentary internship programme helped produce our report called “Creating the Next Billy Elliot”. It found that specialist dance training, though an internationally renowned area, is under real threat from funding pressures, policy blind spots and declining access. Dance and the performing arts contribute over £11 billion in gross value added to our economy, yet the pipeline behind that contribution—the music and dance scheme and the centres for advanced training—face rising costs, no real-terms funding increase, one-year cycles that leave families unable to plan and lost outreach grants that once found the talent in the deprived and disadvantaged communities that we are focused on in today’s debate. Talent is, sadly, not enough. Geography matters. A child in Wakefield or Bradford can reach training in Leeds; a child of equal talent in Bournemouth without the means to travel to London often cannot. Nor is this an England-only regional issue. The Royal Conservatoire of Scotland offers training of genuine international standing, but a child in the highlands faces the same barriers as one in Cumbria. Because skills policy is devolved, our funding schemes and our data on where the gaps lie stop dead at the border. I would therefore advocate a pan-UK mapping exercise and far greater cross-Administration co-operation. Underpinning everything is funding stability. It is disappointing that the Government have yet to confirm funding beyond the current 2026-27 cycle when MDS schools are auditioning for 2027-28 right now. Funding for outreach must be treated as infrastructure, not as an optional extra, or the pipeline will never reach the children who need it most. Finally, strengthening regional growth in all postcodes across the UK requires genuine four nations co-operation. Westminster, Holyrood, the Senedd and Stormont need to share data, best practice and—where it makes sense—co-funding routes. None of this is about one art form or one sector, region or nation. It is about whether a talented child, wherever they are born, has a fair, funded and stable route to vocational success.
Baroness Hunter of Auchenreoch (Lab)
My Lords, I thank my noble friend Lady Morgan, who is a good friend, for introducing this debate and the noble Lord, Lord Baker, also a good friend, for his customary eloquent insights. The Milburn review is a shocking read. If the million NEETs were to form a city, it would be the third-largest in the UK—larger than Leeds, Glasgow or Cardiff—costing the taxpayer and the economy, as already mentioned, £125 billion a year. Yet Milburn found that 84% of NEETs want to be in a job, education or training and are held back by low expectations and confusing routes into the adult world. I spoke recently at a school in Kent about the amazing opportunities available to people with STEM qualifications. Two girls came up to me and asked, “Do you really think we could be engineers?”. “Of course”, I said, “Why not?”. “My dad says it’s a boy’s job. He says I should do hairdressing”, came the reply. I wish to advocate for girls like her who are disadvantaged just by being female. Their aspirations are not being guided towards the STEM skills critically needed—a million more workers by 2030 in AI, robotics, cyber, energy, engineering, health and more. The Royal Academy of Engineering—I declare an interest as a former director—reports that only 17% of its STEM taskforce are female. Women and girls make up half of apprenticeships, but only 14% complete them; 78% of girls aged 11 to 17 express an interest in tech, but only half pursue it. The newly introduced T-levels have only a 12% female take-up. Yet, without welcoming more girls, there is no hope of creating the workforce of the future. Their potential has barely been tapped. The Royal Academy has called for engagement from primary school on, with STEM-related activities featuring female role models, a modernised curriculum, early high-quality careers advice and clearer routes into work. Girls need to know about someone such as Clare Grey, developing advanced batteries on the Ox-Cam growth corridor, one of the world’s leading science and innovation clusters which is generating £143 billion for the economy every year. I welcome the Prime Minister’s recent announcement on tailored access for children aged 14 to technical skills in every postcode, building on local opportunities and mobilising mayors, local leaders, employers and educators. Young people have not given up on work, and we must not give up on them. I know all noble Lords will do our work to support them.
Baroness Morris of Yardley (Lab)
My Lords, I am very grateful to the noble Baroness, Lady Morgan, for introducing this debate and for the way in which she presented it. I sense, as the noble Lord, Lord Barber, said, that this could be a time when we might make the changes that we have failed to make over the last half a century or more. Despite our pride in what is a good and improving school system in this country, we have a record of relative failure on vocational routes. The noble Baroness, Lady Morgan, referred to the White Working Class Educational Outcomes report, on which we both served. To be honest, for all my years in education, I was genuinely surprised and frightened by the level of disengagement there is between people living in these communities and what the education and school system is delivering for them at the moment. Vocational education, which is the type of route to a better life that these communities particularly value, delivers poorer outcomes and poorer opportunities for people from these communities than it does for many people from more affluent ones. Instinctively, we all know that, if you begin to look at the good apprenticeships that we now have, they are not being accessed by people from white working-class communities. Fewer people from deprived backgrounds are taking the degree apprenticeship route than are attending Russell group universities or the university sector in general. This is not about saying, “That’s a route that serves people from this community”, but it is about offering real choice. While the curriculum is less rigorous, the qualifications are less coherent and the routes to employment are less clear, this route will not serve either the people in deprived communities or the nation and the economy in the way that we need it to. I welcome the Government’s announcements so far in this field, but adding technical education to one basket in 14 to 16 education is not going to cut it. I worry that our thinking is limited by worry about our past failures. Very often when I start a conversation on vocational routes, the first thing anyone says is, “We can’t go back to splitting people into sheep and goats”. Of course we cannot. No one wants that now. A knowledge-based curriculum is there for everyone, but we should not let our past failures blind us to the need to get this right—and we should believe in our own ability to do so. I have never quite bought into the phrase, “You can’t be what you can’t see”. I never use it. I do not like it. It underestimates the vision, imagination and determination of young people to be what they want to be. But I am sure that those young people cannot achieve what they believe and dream they can if they cannot see a clear route as to how to get there. That is the challenge that we face now. I very much hope that the Minister will build on the work she has already done in delivering it.
Lord Lingfield (Con)
My Lords, I too thank the noble Baroness, Lady Morgan. I remind your Lordships of my interest as chairman of the Chartered Institution for Further Education and the Cadet Vocational College. It is about that FE college that I want to speak briefly this afternoon. Community cadets are a growing and vital part of our education service in many areas of disadvantage. These are of course the Army Cadet Force, the Royal Air Force Air Cadets, and the Sea Cadets and Royal Marines Cadets. The boys and girls who take part are often those whom conventional training providers find it difficult to reach. We tend to think of cadet activities as being simply of recreational benefit, but it is clear that the cadet experience provides crucial vocational skills as well. The recent four-year review commissioned by the Ministry of Defence and carried out by a team from the University of Northampton concluded that participation in the cadet forces has “significant positive impacts on … employment and career prospects”. These are “particularly strong for those cadets that suffer economic and other disadvantages”. This, they concluded, is because cadet activities develop self-sufficiency, self-control, confident communication and resilience, all of which are closely correlated with employability. In addition, for some time, the Cadet Vocational College has made it possible for these young people to undertake vocational programmes through the medium of their cadet forces. Some 4,000 or 5,000 learners each year take advantage of these courses, which support progression into further education, higher education and apprenticeships. Among them are many who do not thrive in traditional school environments but, outside the conventional classroom setting, get a second chance. Qualification completion via the college is regularly around 85%. The reach of the college’s work is UK-wide and represents a very successful partnership between government and the voluntary sector. I sincerely pay tribute to Ministers and officials at the Ministry of Defence and the Department for Education who underpin the college’s work by their encouragement, support and grant funding, which enables many disadvantaged young people to begin their paths to employability at no cost to themselves. Next week, the Cadet Vocational College’s dozen most successful cadets in the country will come with their parents and cadet leaders here to the Cholmondeley Room and the Terrace to celebrate their success. Cadet-based vocational education reaches young people through organisations they trust and experiences they value. I commend the work of the Cadet Vocational College to your Lordships’ House.
Baroness Warwick of Undercliffe (Lab)
My Lords, I am grateful to my noble friend Lady Morgan for securing this debate. Her presentation was a tour de force. Having spent much of my career in higher education, I will make three points specifically about that. First, this is one system, not two. The Government’s ambition that two-thirds of young people reach higher-level learning by 25 is the right one. Today, the figure is around half. That gap will not be closed by either colleges or universities alone. We often frame the choice as university or skills, academic or vocational. That is a false choice—Dearing said so in 1997, Augur said so 20 years later, my noble friend Lady Morgan said it today and I am happy to repeat it. Universities should be progression partners for FE and apprenticeships. The sector itself has taken action. Last autumn, Universities UK and the Association of Colleges published a joint strategy for colleges and universities to collaborate rather than compete. London South Bank’s group structure carries learners from entry-level, technical training and T-levels through to degree level. In Greater Manchester, universities and colleges align provision, avoid duplication and plan against regional need. This matters most to the young people at risk of becoming NEET, who face several barriers at once and whom no institution can help alone. Secondly, funding should follow the student and should not fall in real terms. I welcome fee caps rising with inflation, and I hope that automatic indexation is honoured in legislation. This is not a subsidy to institutions; it is a guarantee that a student starting in 2030 is not taught on less than a student starting today. This is the hardest graduate market in over a decade, yet the most recent Graduate Outcomes data shows that 88% of graduates are in work or further study 15 months on, and around three-quarters of those work in high-skilled jobs. Our nurses, teachers, engineers, paramedics and social workers all hold degrees. Thirdly, universities make a substantial contribution to local communities and those from disadvantaged backgrounds, which deserves to be recognised. Across the UK, they generate £265 billion in economic impact annually, support around 768,000 jobs and play a central role in attracting investment, fostering innovation and helping businesses grow. The Atom Valley innovation district in Rochdale has established a centre of expertise in advanced materials and sustainability—CEAMS—jointly delivered by Rochdale Development Agency and the University of Manchester. It is ensuring that businesses with strong potential can access the tools and support needed to grow. Universities should connect skills to employers and regional economies. We need strong colleges, strong universities and strong partnerships between them. This is an ambition worthy of our support. As the Prime Minister writes his 10-year plan, will the Minister ensure that higher education is treated as part of the answer on opportunity, not as a competitor?
Baroness Blackstone (Lab)
My Lords, I welcome this debate but have just one regret: it is half the length needed to allow over 30 speakers properly to address the important and complex questions it raises. I intend to focus on just one issue: the need to avoid reinventing the wheel and instead return to the Tomlinson report of 2004, which provides a brilliant approach for our curriculum and exam reforms to attacking educational disadvantage among pupils aged 14 and over. Alan Milburn reminds us in his interim report on 16 to 24 year-old NEETs that they now constitute one in eight young people. He makes it clear that it is not a new problem but is getting worse, with growing numbers demotivated from learning, absent from school and without a job later. This is a drag on economic growth and a huge loss of individual potential. The Prime Minister recognises the need to address it via vast improvements in technical and vocational education from the age of 14 to encourage those turned off by the current school curriculum and to improve their chances of employment. This is welcome, but there is a danger that his proposals will divide pupils permanently at the early age of 14 without the flexibility to move later from one to the other. We ditched the 11-plus; we must not introduce a 14-plus. Enter the Tomlinson report: it strove to integrate academic and vocational education, recognising that those opting for an academic route need skills too. They also need to acquire an ability to apply their knowledge. All young people need academic and vocational education at school after the age of 14. Those underachieving all need not just vocational study but literacy, functional maths, communication and ICT, as Tomlinson proposed. He recommended the rationalisation of qualifications into a new diploma framework, dropping both GCSEs—which, scandalously, nearly one-third of pupils fail at present—and the narrow and overspecialised A-level system. His report was backed by Education Ministers at the time but rejected by Tony Blair, who feared a fight or row about A-levels. Failing to take it forward was a wasted opportunity and, I believe, led to magnifying the NEET problem we now face. If it had been implemented then, we would have had a totally different and far better system after 10 years. I think it was Blair’s greatest mistake in domestic policy. Will the Minister and her senior colleagues, including the Prime Minister, return to the Tomlinson report and consult its author and Peter Hyman, a former special adviser under Blair, who advocates it and has thought about a few ways that are needed to update it?
The Lord Bishop of Coventry
My Lords, I welcome the Government’s renewed focus on technical education, youth employment and regional growth. Vocational and technical education can be one of the strongest levers for social mobility, but only where it is genuinely accessible to those who face the greatest barriers. On numerous occasions over the past 30 years of ministry, I have seen young people thrive and flourish into work due to the investment of colleges and businesses working together to enable this to happen. Although there have been many reasons to be encouraged during my tenure so far in Coventry, it was deeply discouraging to learn of this year’s 9% GCSE attainment gap between London and my region, the West Midlands. If we are serious about opportunity in our nation, we must ensure that high-quality technical pathways are available to all young people wherever they live and not only in areas that already benefit from stronger educational outcomes. I believe that we cannot develop high-level apprenticeships at the expense of levels 2 to 4. These entry-level routes are often the vital first step towards skilled employment and further progression. Apprenticeships must be accessible to the third of over-16s without a grade 4 in English and maths. Too often, these young people become stuck in a repeating cycle of resits, without means of professional development. Apprenticeships must both remain open to those without GCSE qualifications and provide flexible opportunities to develop literacy and numeracy while employed. This is particularly important for SEND learners, as we have heard, for whom repeated GCSE resits can become a source of frustration and disengagement, despite strong vocational talents. Fewer than 27% of adults with learning disabilities are in paid employment, but Mencap’s research shows that 86% of unemployed people with a learning disability desperately want to work, with all the rights, responsibilities and dignity that this brings. Apprenticeships can also provide an invaluable route into work for those for whom English is not their first language, and whose education may have been disrupted by migration, displacement or family trauma. We must recognise potential wherever it is found, rather than excluding people because they did not reach a particular academic threshold at 16. Without flexible vocational pathways, capable young people, as we have heard, risk leaving education altogether and becoming NEET. The economic costs of this are significant but so too are the social and personal consequences, and I note especially the mental ill-health crisis prevalent in this generation. Locally, I have been encouraged by the work of Moreton Morrell College in Warwickshire. For example, its levels 2 to 4 floristry course provides a valuable vocational pathway for young people, and I have seen how their work has enriched churches and communities in my diocese. Importantly, it also provides pathways into careers in farming and agriculture, a vital component of the rural economy. People flourish best when they can develop their skills holistically while contributing to the common life. This is a vital, dignifying, individual and social good.
Baroness Whitaker (Lab)
My Lords, it is a pleasure to follow the inclusive approach of the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Coventry. I congratulate my noble friend Lady Morgan on instigating a vital debate, and my noble friend the Minister on policies that widen access to skills and training, but some will not reach these opportunities. Alan Milburn’s searing diagnosis notes that 50.8% of females and 41.3% of males characterised as “White: Gypsy or Irish Traveller” are NEET. He says that “Black, African and Caribbean young people had the highest NEET rates of all ethnic groups included in large scale national surveys”, but Gypsy, Roma and Irish Travellers are, in the National Institute of Economic and Social Research report, “2.5 – 3 times more likely to be NEET” than average. Their increase in NEET status is 210% for Irish Travellers and 155% for Roma. However, the population context, at 0.16% of 18 to 24 year-olds, is too small for large-scale surveys. My first plea to my noble friend the Minister is to include in government analyses specific research into this neglected minority, and disaggregate Gypsies, Irish Travellers and Roma students so that the experience of these very different communities is clearly seen. Alan Milburn omits race prejudice, the cause of negative assumptions about motivation and ability. The EHRC reports that Gypsy, Roma and Traveller families experienced the highest level of prejudice of any minority ethnic group. Those who succeed in work often hide their heritage, thus also hiding useful role models. He is surely right that alienation from paths to qualifications and employment begins in school. Gypsy, Irish Traveller and Roma children—again, because their actual experience tends not to be identified—suffer different but widespread bullying and have a far higher dropout rate in all schools from that and other causes than any other minority ethnic group. Often, it is the provoked victim who is excluded, not the perpetrator, but there is no proper research. NGOs point to a lack of valuing of their cultures and history—the Council of Europe ranks the UK lowest in coverage of Roma experience and history in textbooks—lack of positive contact with parents, digital exclusion, especially during the Covid lockdown, and lack of support to get such children up to entry to skills training. I recommend this month’s Friends, Families and Travellers report on educational inequalities for useful proposals. I declare an interest as its president. FFT’s pledge to get schools to report on progress to welcome their Gypsy, Traveller and Roma students works, as does a successful initiative for higher education institutions, which I was proud to launch in your Lordships’ House. Will my noble friend the Minister affirm her support? The gap is now in further education institutions, of particular importance for the acquisition of skills. How can my noble friend help here? Without more practical attention, some marginalised families will continue to behave in a marginalised way and very many others will never get the chance they—and we all—could use well. Should we really allow this injustice to continue?
Lord in Waiting/Government Whip (Lord Wilson of Sedgefield) (Lab)
Before we move on to the next speaker, this is a very important debate and I am really enjoying listening to it, but we need to stick to the three-minute limit. We are going over only by several seconds, but those seconds add up, and we do need to hear from the Minister.
Baroness Garden of Frognal (LD)
My Lords, I too thank the noble Baroness, Lady Morgan, for this debate and her masterly opening remarks. It is most welcome that this Government have realised how harmful has been the purely academic emphasis of the previous Government, which alienated the many young people whose skills and interests lie in practical, vocational subjects. It generated a harmful waste of potential in the skill areas which the country desperately needs: engineering, construction, hospitality, as well as the arts, music, dance—which the noble Baroness, Lady Fraser, spoke about—and arts and craft skills. Some of those historic crafts have become endangered, as detailed by the Heritage Crafts Association, of which I have the privilege of being a vice-patron. Many of these crafts have regional associations and generate jobs and pride in their localities, as well as producing practical and beautiful artefacts which can be life-enhancing for those who have been marginalised by their formal schooling. Can the Minister say what measures are being taken to ensure that there are trained teachers in the vocational areas to ensure that all children find something at school to enthuse them? We should also be mindful of speakers of other languages at a time when ESOL—English for speakers of other languages—provision has become fragmented for over 5 million people in England and Wales who do not have English as a first language. Time was when such classes were free and opened opportunities to many people to use their skills and talents in this country. Sadly, those days have gone, but community cohesion is increasingly important as we see divisions in race and religion becoming violent in some of our communities. Surely ensuring that we all have a common language should be given a high priority. Can the Minister say what provision is made available for ESOL classes to enable better integration of our citizens who struggle to speak good English? As a former chair of the Cadet Health Check Team, I strongly support the words of the noble Lord, Lord Lingfield, in pointing out the value of the cadet forces, which give life-changing opportunities to so many young people. I worked for City & Guilds for some 20 years on vocational qualifications, which opened my eyes to the amazing work of further education colleges, which are too often overlooked. One problem is that nearly all politicians and civil servants have taken the university route and are reluctant to give due attention and funding to a sector with which they have no connections and see as not so worthy. Yet FE carries the hopes and aspirations of millions of young people, and indeed of adults seeking to improve or change their qualifications and chances in life. For many disadvantaged young people and those with learning disabilities, the prospect of going away to university is daunting and financially unrealistic, whereas their local college is accessible. Colleges offer such a wide range of programmes of learning, from basic skills through to occupational competence and indeed apprenticeships and degrees. Yet their staff are still underpaid and the colleges underfunded. What do the Government propose to do to support and enhance the vital work of further education colleges, which would also be a key factor in solving the NEETs problem?
Baroness Caine of Kentish Town (Lab)
My Lords, I thank my noble friend Lady Morgan for her excellent speech and this important debate, which is ever more critical as we live in and look to a future revolutionised by digital automation. The evidence is unequivocal: creativity is becoming one of the most critical human capabilities. Deloitte warns of an “imagination deficit” in organisations, where curiosity, empathy and creative problem-solving are now the essential skills that enable people to thrive alongside artificial intelligence. The World Economic Forum identifies creative thinking as a top workforce skill for 2025, and LinkedIn’s global workforce survey shows that senior leaders rank creativity above analytical reasoning as the most important soft skill for the modern workplace. Creativity is not a luxury; it is the engine of innovation, adaptability and resilience. If we are serious about preparing young people for the future, it needs to be recognised as a core capability, not peripheral or optional but central to the skills and education agenda at all levels, including higher-level skills in higher education. If we lag behind the realities of technological change, automation will not liberate opportunity; it will deepen exclusion, creating new barriers for those who already face the greatest challenges. Creative and digital industries are two of the biggest growth sectors in our modern industrial strategy. They overlap, and so increasingly do their skill sets. A substantial proportion of England’s local authorities, including 11 of the 19 mayoral combined authorities, identify them as priorities for growth and for their skills policies. I wholeheartedly believe that enabling devolution, collaboration and flexibilities to local areas is key to success on this agenda. However, it also needs alignment with national policy, which responds to what key industries and devolved Administrations are prioritising, and indeed what the industrial strategy is saying. For example, in higher education, creative courses are not currently on the list as eligible for modular support through the lifelong learning entitlement, and that list has been cited as key to deciding which courses will be eligible for the soon-to-be announced maintenance grants for those from disadvantaged backgrounds. In addition, this year, no creative courses are allowed to bid to the Strategic Priorities Fund for capital grants. The message that sends out from Whitehall is that these courses are not valued as much as the very important STEM areas, and underlying that, one suspects, is reliance on debatable datasets that relate to earnings and the ability to pay back student loans. If we want to strengthen regional prosperity and improve outcomes for disadvantaged learners, we must ensure that the skills we value and teach also match the world they are entering, not the world we are leaving behind. That is one where both digital tech and creative education need to be equally valued and ever intertwined.
Baroness Hazarika (Lab)
My Lords, I also thank the noble Baroness, Lady Morgan, for raising this very important debate. I am proud to follow the noble Baroness, Lady Caine, and indeed echo much of what she said about the importance of the creative industries. I declare an interest: I am a board member of the BPI, which represents the recorded music sector. As we all know, the music sector brings in a huge amount of prosperity to the United Kingdom and brings us a lot of joy. It also puts so many amazing British artists on the map. We know that arts and culture has been a great British success story. The music industry provides a good model for how we could do skills in the future, where you have industry coming together with government at a national and regional level to create brilliant institutions where young people can get world-class training in skills. Just look at the BRIT School in Croydon, or at ELAM, the East London Arts and Music school. These schools are amazing, vibrant and exciting; you go there and you feel the energy. They are like something out of the TV show “Fame”. I wanted to join, but sadly they were not taking mature students when I went along. We know so many amazing artists who went there: Adele, Olivia Dean, Raye, Lola Young. These people sell millions of albums, bring in so much money to the Exchequer and provide so much joy. I am delighted that the music industry is working with the Government to establish a new centre of excellence in Bradford, West Yorkshire, with the BRIT School North. That brand new college will offer 500 precious places. The thing that is brilliant about these kinds of collaborations is that you are talking not only about front-of-house stars but about hundreds and hundreds of young people getting trained up with those amazing backroom jobs—production, set design, all that kind of thing—which can provide people with so many rich, interesting, varied careers. I also just want to make the point about qualifications. We have to make sure we do not kill off the pipeline of creative talent. Last year, A-level music fell to just over 4,500 pupils. That is a great worry. The choirmaster Gareth Malone has flagged that we could be facing a “cultural crisis” due to killing off this pipeline. The number of children taking arts at GCSE level in state school has fallen by 41% since 2010. That is not a great statistic. So we must not kill the goose which lays those golden eggs. Finally, we talk a lot about technical skills, but we need to instil confidence in young people as well. It is not just what you can do on a computer or on a screen but verbal communication, making eye contact and being able to hold conversations with people. This is a great debate and very timely.
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.
Baroness Alexander of Cleveden (Lab)
My Lords, I also thank my noble friend Lady Morgan. When I arrived in your Lordships’ House 18 months ago, I had just become the chair of the body that certifies every electrician—there are 170,000 of them across the country. I immediately encountered deep concern among employers about the fate of apprenticeships—the bureaucracy, the cost of training and the support needs of the young apprentices. This malaise deeply pained employers who had invariably come up the apprenticeship route themselves. Many noble Lords have mentioned what has happened in the last 18 months. The Milburn report published in May has been seminal. As others have said, it has been uncompromising about the moral scandal of a million NEETs, clear that young people desperately want to work and candid about the multidimensional roots of this crisis. As so often in politics, timing matters. There is not a Member among us who did not have conversations during the Recess about the future of the jobs market. Yet the public fear that politicians, in the parlance of today, “craft the narrative” or “tell the story” but too rarely stick around to solve the problem. So in my remaining time, I will talk about the momentum since the Milburn report—not on the supply side, which has dominated our discussions today about what is happening in the education system, but in stimulating employer demand. In June, it was £3,000 for employers taking on an eligible young person. In July, 22,000 defence apprenticeships were announced. In August, it was £10 billion for new affordable housing, fuelling new construction contracts. This month saw the first of 22,000 extra college places including free apprenticeship training for eligible under-25s. Next month, £2,000 will be paid to small employers for each new under-25 apprenticeship. November will see the nationwide rollout of the Government-backed job guarantee placement scheme for long-term unemployed young people. Altogether, all this ramps up and translates into half a million opportunities to earn or learn over the next three years. It is not the full answer, but it is getting closer to the scale of the challenge. But success will not just come from investment, but from effectiveness. We need to strip back misplaced red tape and substitute it with a single-minded focus on skills. I am delighted that the Government are now scrapping the laundry list of social value demands for contractors bidding for public works. The complexity was trading out to common sense. From January, job creation and skills development will be the only social value requirements on businesses competing for public contracts. The Milburn report highlighted that the Netherlands has changed the trajectory and outcomes for young people. Giving a generation back their future is a battle to be won in our time. It will be done family by family, firm by firm and postcode by postcode.
Lord Nagaraju (Lab)
My Lords, I also thank my noble friend Lady Morgan for securing this important debate. I declare my interests as set out in the register, particularly as a director, adviser and shareholder in AI and tech companies. If we are serious about social mobility, education cannot be a one-off event at the beginning of life. Disadvantage does not end at 18. Technology is now changing faster than any single qualification can keep pace with. Lifelong learning is, therefore, not an optional extra. It is part of the economic infrastructure. The challenge is already stark. Young people from lower working-class backgrounds are more than twice as likely not to be in education, employment or training as those from professional backgrounds—it is 22%, compared with 9%. At the same time, Skills England says that demand for key occupations in priority sectors is expected to rise by nearly a quarter over the next decade, with particularly strong growth in the digital and engineering professions. Critically, it says that the education pipeline alone will not be enough. Significant reskilling of the existing workforce will be essential. Artificial intelligence brings these two challenges together. The Government’s AI labour market research found that 35% of surveyed organisations struggled to fill AI roles. Government-commissioned vacancy analysis also found significant advertised salary premiums for AI skills. Yet in 2023, 60% of expert AI vacancies were advertised in London and the south-east. If the skills, opportunities and higher-value jobs remain concentrated in the same places, AI risks widening regional inequality rather than reducing it. I welcome the Government’s building blocks—the AI skills boost, the level 4 AI and automation practitioner apprenticeship and the lifelong learning entitlement, supporting eligible courses and modular studies from January 2027. However, flexibility on paper does not necessarily mean access in practice. A learner in a deprived community may need a pathway from essential digital skills through applied training to an apprenticeship or modular higher education alongside meaningful work experience, careers advice and support with practical barriers. This is where FE colleges, employers and regional leaders can be powerful partners. I welcome the Government’s commitment to reach disadvantaged young people through programmes such as TechFirst. Will the Minister ensure that this opportunity extends beyond schools into lifelong learning and that local skills improvement plans and devolved skills funding will open pathways into AI and emerging technology careers for disadvantaged communities? Will the Government publish the participation, completion and employment outcomes by deprivation and by region? If we do this, lifelong learning can be both a ladder of opportunity and an engine of regional growth.
Lord Young of Acton (Con)
My Lords, I too congratulate the noble Baroness, Lady Morgan, on arranging this debate. I declare an interest as the author, eight years ago, of a Centre for Policy Studies paper on technical education. I acknowledge the work of my noble friend Lord Baker, who has done so much to set up vocational and technical schools—most of which have been a great success, but not all of which have been an unqualified success. Of the 58 UTCs that have opened since 2010, 14 have closed. Studio schools, which are also vocational and technical schools for 14 to 19 year-olds, have fared worse; 59 have opened since 2010, and at least 26 have closed. The problem is that some of these schools became dumping grounds for children that neighbouring comprehensives did not want because they were expected to do poorly in their GCSEs. How can we stop technical and vocational education being seen as inferior to a more academic pathway? The answer is to grant these schools the ability to select according not to ability but to aptitude for the occupations for which they are designed to prepare children. The most successful occupational school in the country that admits under-16s is the BRIT School, a performing arts school in Croydon which admits children according to their abilities in the performing arts. Both Tom Holland and Adele are among its most successful alumni. That model has been replicated by Birmingham Ormiston Academy, and a second BRIT School has been approved to open next year in Bradford, as the noble Baroness, Lady Hazarika, said. Overseas, the most successful technical and vocational schools also select for aptitude, from South Korea’s Meister schools, which place 93% of graduates directly into employment, to the selective vocational academies of New Jersey, which send pupils to Princeton, Yale and MIT. None of these systems treats technical education as a consolation prize for children who struggle with academic subjects. They treat aptitude for trade as no less real or worthy of cultivation than aptitude for science or maths. I recognise that any form of selection is controversial, but I am not proposing selection by ability, only by aptitude. Academies are already permitted to select up to 10% of their pupils for aptitude in particular specialisms, such as music. Finally, no primary legislation is required to bring about this change. The Secretary of State already has this power, used for Birmingham Ormiston Academy, to grant a derogation allowing an academy, including UTCs and studio schools, to select by aptitude where there is a demonstrable local need. All that is required is the will to use it more widely. If the Minister, when she returns to her place, would like to learn more, I will happily send her a copy of my paper.
Lord Griffiths of Burry Port (Lab)
My Lords, I add my thanks to the noble Baroness both for introducing this debate and for snatching every single remark that I had carefully put together by way of a contribution to this debate. We will have to sort this out at dawn with pistols. It is a great privilege to hear the wisdom that has come from so many quarters in this debate. It gives me an opportunity to offer my thanks to and admiration of the noble Lord, Lord Harris, for all the work he has done, even given the qualifying remarks that we heard a moment ago, which has provided a platform over its longevity on which to build and develop some of the ideas that have been in play. So here I am, likely to finish before three minutes. Since I think that is worth saying, I do say it. It also allows me to put in a personal word: since I came into your Lordships’ House—nearly a quarter of a century ago now—I have consistently had young teenagers on work experience in my office. They amount now to dozens. Also, a student, either an undergraduate or a postgraduate, has given me 10 hours a week of support with some aspects of my work. One is up there beavering away at the moment on something I will sign off when I go up there. I mention this not to point to my own virtue but to say that I have become aware of the help that has been given to these young people when they apply for jobs and are able to say they have had some experience in Parliament. It may therefore be an obvious thing for us to say, but we can make our practical contribution to the solving of problems we have been sharing with each other this afternoon. So here I am. I will count the next 40 seconds as a credit on my next speech.
Baroness Nargund (Lab)
My Lords, it is a great pleasure to follow my noble friend Lord Griffiths. I might finish before three minutes as well—I am not sure. I congratulate my noble friend Lady Morgan on securing this very important debate and on her excellent opening speech. We have heard from so many noble Lords from across the House, highlighting different sectors and opportunities. Skills, training, employment, health and regional growth are deeply interconnected. If we want to reduce regional inequalities, we must create opportunities for young people where they live. Today, nearly 1 million young people are NEET. Behind that statistic is an enormous reservoir of talent and potential that our country cannot afford to lose. As a doctor who has served for nearly four decades in the National Health Service, I want to talk about how the National Health Service can help with skills, training, apprenticeships and employing young people who are not in education, employment or training—and, in doing so, support regional growth. We have two challenges: young people who need opportunities and a healthcare system in desperate need of a sustainable workforce. Why not bring them together? We often think of our National Health Service simply as a healthcare provider. We forget that it is the largest public sector employer, and in fact one of the largest employers in the country if we include all legal entities, with a distinct presence in virtually every community across our country. This gives our National Health Service a unique opportunity to become an anchor for skills, training, apprenticeships, employment and regional growth. This should not be about finding young people any employment; it should be about giving them a career, a qualification, security and a future. A young person gaining skills and securing employment improves their income, independence and health. Their salaries are spent locally, growing the local economy, and communities retain talent so local productivity grows. Furthermore, an NHS workforce drawn from the local communities it serves will understand the needs of that community, creating a win-win situation for regional growth and wealth. Therefore, I ask my noble friend the Minister: as the Government consider the solutions phase of the Milburn review, will they explore the NHS as an anchor for skills, training, apprenticeships, regional health and growth? The NHS has the potential to deliver a practical solution to the NEET crisis while delivering regional growth.
Baroness Sater (Con)
My Lords, I also thank the noble Baroness, Lady Morgan, for securing this important debate. I would like to raise two points today: financial literacy and careers guidance, which are part of the same conversation and can transform lives. We want young people to be career ready, but they also need to be financially ready. Young people today are growing up in an increasingly challenging financial world, so more than ever they need the confidence to make informed decisions. I welcome the Government’s direction of travel in strengthening financial education in the national curriculum, as these life skills are important. Although financial education is statutory in primary and secondary education, it is not statutory in post-16 years. Many are urging the Government to embed it into the post-16 pathways. This is especially important when young people are faced with immediate financial decisions, such as wages and renting, for the first time. We need the right resources, more teacher training and curriculum time to ensure that good financial education reaches every child, regardless of where they live and at the right time in their lives. My second point is about careers guidance in schools. We all welcome the focus on the need to get more young people into further education, apprenticeships, training and employment at 16, but there is an immediate need to do more to ensure that young people know what those opportunities are, where they can lead and how to get there. Some young people already have networks around them to explain different careers, arrange work experience or introduce them to an employer, but many disadvantaged young people do not. Good careers guidance in schools can be a great equaliser. Ofsted’s 2023 review found that a third of schools reported poor staffing levels and high staff turnover affecting careers provision, while a quarter identified funding as a barrier. Careers departments need to be better resourced, and there must not be a postcode lottery. The Library briefing makes an important point here: employers have highlighted a lack of workplace experience, confidence and work readiness among young people. Good career guidance has the power to address many of these issues. The Government’s careers guidance, updated in June 2026, cited evidence that high-quality careers provision is associated with around an 8% reduction in the likelihood of young people becoming NEET. The evidence suggests an even greater impact in schools serving the highest proportions of disadvantaged learners. The Library briefing also highlights that among 18 to 21 year-olds there is a 12.7 percentage point gap in participation in education and apprenticeships between disadvantaged young people and their peers. Opportunity works only if young people have the knowledge, understanding and confidence to take it. If we are serious about social mobility, we must make sure that disadvantaged young people are not disadvantaged twice: first by their circumstances, then again by lacking the support and knowledge to navigate their future. Their future should be determined by their ambition and ability, not by the circumstances into which they are born.
Lord Liddle (Lab)
My Lords, like my noble friend Lord Griffiths of Burry Port, I find that the quality of this debate has left me with very little fresh or new to say. I want to emphasise some of the very important points that have come out in the debate. The first is that our basic school system still has a lot of improvement to make. The report from Teach First showed how children from free school meal backgrounds were pretty much doomed to failure in our system. Something has to be done, and that agenda of reform of schools has still to be pursued. A lot of people have paid compliments to the Milburn review. It is one of the best documents of its kind that I have ever seen in my political experience. For those noble Lords who have the stamina, there is the debate on an ageing society tomorrow, which I am standing in to lead. We on your Lordships’ Economic Affairs Committee have come to the conclusion that we can afford an ageing society only if the employment participation rates of people over 50 are radically increased. That has all sorts of implications for how people develop their lives in education and how they can continue after the age of 50. The other point I would like to emphasise is the one my noble friend Lord Barber made about the lack of consistency written into further education, apprenticeships and skills policies. We desperately need that consistency—the kind the noble Lord, Lord Baker, has shown at a personal level throughout the last 40 years or so of his life—in our politics and structures. My final point is that we should not, as my noble friend Lady Morgan made very clear, see this debate as a choice between further and higher education. The expansion of universities, to which Prime Ministers Harold Wilson and Tony Blair both made an enormous contribution, has been one of the drivers of opportunity and social mobility in this country. We should never forget that, and we should never allow opponents on the right to make the argument that more means worse. It does not. We have to develop ladders of opportunity between further and higher education, in which the universities have a key role to play. As my noble friend Lady Morris said, we cannot let degree apprenticeships be confined to a socially select few.
Lord Moynihan of Chelsea (Con)
My Lords, I too congratulate the noble Baroness on securing this debate. Although I did not agree with everything she said, I thought she made the most important contribution to this debate when she said that it does not really matter what kind of education you want to go on to or what kind of vocation you have: if you do not have numeracy and literacy, you are done for. Given my meagre three minutes, I will stick with that point—in particular because, apart from the noble Lord, Lord Addington, nobody has referred back to it. In this entire debate, full of good contributions, we are missing that key point. If you grow up innumerate and illiterate, you cannot use a bank account or fill in a form: you are not capable of participating in our society as a fully functioning adult. Yet one in five children in this country leaves school functionally illiterate, innumerate or both. That number is probably increasing at this time, post-Covid, rather than diminishing. Yet we know the solution. We have a real-life scientific test going on with the Gove reforms—in England, but not in Scotland and Wales. We have seen the Scotland and Wales results collapse, and the Gove reforms in England are taking us higher and higher in the PISA tables. That is despite the fact that approximately half the schools in this country have adamantly resisted imposing the Gove reforms, which are very straightforward—the imposition of phonics for literacy and Shanghai maths, or something similar, for numeracy. All over, we get people saying that those reforms have not worked. But when we see them in their perfected way, at a school such as Michaela, where they have discipline, love, high expectations and a knowledge-rich approach, almost no children leave that school innumerate or illiterate. These are not selected children—40% of them come from free school meals backgrounds. It can be done, including at the school my noble friend Lord Young founded. It is done all over this country, but in many schools, these reforms are not adopted. Why is that? Why are we allowing that? It starts here and it goes on to the colleges of education, and we have seen an appalling glimpse of it in the Jason Arday case. They are all keen on teaching about racism, white privilege and colonialism, and they never teach the knowledge-rich approach—Shanghai or phonics. Unless we all get together and face reality, we will have more children leaving school illiterate and innumerate.
Lord Whitty (Lab)
My Lords, as the last speaker, and having only three minutes, although I would dearly love to contend with what the noble Lord has just said, I will not do so. I also will not comment on the many speeches that have been made, many of which I agree with. For far too long, one’s educational qualifications at 18—or lack of them—have determined not only what happens to you when you join the workforce but how your whole career develops. We need to alter that. I will not comment in detail on the various speeches that have been made, and I have dropped my own detailed points. I just make this point, which is as much of a problem for the Prime Minister and the Treasury as it is for Education Ministers and those in the education system. Employment is not seen as one of the key strategies for government, either in the Treasury or Whitehall. We have a department of employment that is to some extent lost within a department that is largely concerned with the details and expenditure of welfare. We need a proper department of employment that covers training skills for the future, as well as the education system, further education and the interface with higher education. Until we get that, we are not going to get delivery of a proper strategy. We will get details we can improve, but the strategy needs to be accepted by senior Ministers in this and future Governments. For a long time, employment has not been one of the top priorities and has become a poor relation, despite the incredible efforts by many in the education and training system to improve the situation. As Alan Milburn’s report points out, we have not been short of interventions by government over the past few years. There has been scheme after scheme to improve the situation, and we are going to get a few more. What has been lacking is a strategy and a priority. The lead for that can come only from the top. The machinery of government needs to reflect that, and only then will we gain the respect for all aspects of employment and training that is needed. I do not see the signs, as yet, that we, as the present Government, have fully addressed this. We have the opportunity to do so, and I think the priority is there and has been laid out in many interventions today. It is time that we ensured that the machinery of government reflects the centrality of employment in defining our lives, the quality of our lives and the sense of self which applies to so many people. Until that happens, we are going to have this debate time and again.
Lord Mohammed of Tinsley (LD)
My Lords, I join noble Lords in thanking the noble Baroness, Lady Morgan, for initiating this important debate and I thank all noble Lords who have taken part in it. What has come through is very clear: this is not simply a debate around qualifications. This has been a debate around opportunity, social mobility and economic growth. The central question for me is this: how do we ensure that every young person, whatever their background or postcode, has a genuine route to meaningful work, as we heard earlier, further education or a secure future and do not—as many noble Lords mentioned, in particular the noble Baroness, Lady Alexander—become NEET with all the issues that Alan Milburn has identified? We look forward to his second report. For too long, the education system has presented universities as the default measure of ambition while vocational education has too often been treated as second best. University is absolutely the right choice for many young people, but it should not be the only route to success. We have heard that clearly in the debate today. A young person who wants to become an engineer, an electrician, a technician, a care professional or a builder should be able to pursue that ambition through a high-quality technical or vocational route and have the same status and respect as someone pursuing an academic degree. That is why I remain attracted to the dual system model that combines classroom learning with sustained structural workplace experience. We can learn from other countries such as Germany and the Netherlands, as we heard from the noble Lord, Lord Baker, at the start of the debate. Their vocational system demonstrates the value of giving young people both theoretical knowledge and practical competence. That additional workplace experience matters. We heard from the noble Lord, Lord Griffiths, about some of us practising what we preach by giving young people the opportunity to shadow us. I have had one young person, Louie Xenos, shadowing me this week and she is watching the debate. She helped to formulate not only this speech but my Oral Question. It is important that we create work experience opportunities for young people and then go out and advocate for them within industry because, too often, young people are told that they lack experience when the very businesses employing them are the ones that do not give them the opportunity to gain that experience. How can we tell a young person that they need experience when we have failed to give them that opportunity, as I mentioned earlier? No vocational system will succeed unless employers are properly incentivised to participate. I would like to see strong incentives for employers to recruit young people facing the greatest barriers, including care leavers, young people with SEND and those who have experienced alternative provision. Young people furthest from the labour market—I note the comments of the noble Baroness, Lady Morris of Yardley, about white working-class young people—cannot be those least likely to receive their first opportunity. We must look into the findings of that report and see how we can help that cohort of young people. We also need to move away from a culture of short-term recruitment and low retention. Training should be seen as an investment in people and in the future workforce rather than as a simple cost. That is why I support greater flexibility in the growth and skills levy. As we heard from the noble Baroness, Lady Morgan, at the beginning of the debate, small and medium-sized businesses, in particular, need a system that allows them to use training and support for the skills their workforce and the local economy generally require. If we want vocational education to succeed, as we heard from many noble Lords, we must also fund further education properly. As my noble friend Lady Garden said, further education colleges often work with young people who have the greatest need, yet they continue to face significant financial pressures. We should extend pupil premium-style support into post-16 education so that disadvantage does not stop counting when a young person leaves school. They still have those needs. We must also ensure that FE colleges are treated fairly financially, including through the ability to reclaim VAT so that they are not placed at a disadvantage with sixth forms. We should also encourage partnerships rather than competition between institutions. Collaboration between universities and FE colleges can open opportunities that neither can provide alone. We should also recognise that education does not end at 21. People change careers. People lose their jobs. They may become carers. Industries may disappear, and new industries emerge. That is why lifelong learning matters. The lifelong learning entitlement has the potential to give adults greater opportunities to retrain and upskill, but lifelong learning must mean more than lifelong borrowing. People from disadvantaged backgrounds must be able to access opportunities without financial barriers preventing them participating. We also cannot seriously address young people being outside education or employment without addressing mental health and other barriers. For some young people, the problem is not a lack of ambition. It may be poor mental health, disability, caring responsibilities, poverty, lack of confidence, or simply not having anyone to help them navigate the complicated system, as we heard earlier about career services in schools. That is why organisations such as the Duke of Edinburgh’s Award are so valuable. Volunteering, physical activity, developing practical skills and working as part of a team can build confidence, resilience, leadership and well-being. Those opportunities are particularly important for young people who may not have the same networks or advantages as their peers. Finally, I want to turn to regional growth and devolution. The skills needs of a place like Sheffield, where I am from, are not identical to those of Manchester, Cornwall or London. In South Yorkshire we need to think about advanced manufacturing, engineering, construction, clean energy and the future of our steel industry. Others may have other priorities. The people who understand those needs best are the ones that are closest—the local employers, colleges, universities, councils and combined authorities. I therefore welcome the direction of travel towards greater regional decision-making that we have heard from the Prime Minister. But devolution must mean real power, real resources and real accountability. We should not simply devolve responsibility while keeping the important decisions and funding in Whitehall. There is a danger that we focus on qualifications, structures and funding mechanisms and forget the individual young person at the centre of them—the young person who leaves school without the grades expected of them; the care leaver navigating adulthood without a stable family network; the young person with SEND who wants to work but needs the right support; the adult who needs to retrain because the industry they have worked in for years is changing. They do not simply need more choices on paper; they need a route that actually works. From these Benches, I make five simple demands. First, to give vocational education the status it deserves; secondly, to make further education a genuine pillar of our education system; thirdly, to give employers the incentives and flexibility to create meaningful training and employment opportunities, particularly for those facing disadvantage; fourthly, to integrate skills with mental health, employment and wider support, because people’s lives do not fit neatly into departmental boundaries; and finally, to devolve power and funding so that regions can build the skills systems their economies and communities actually need. Opportunity should not depend on postcodes, as we heard from the noble Baroness, Lady Fraser, and others; nor should ambition be defined by whether someone chooses a university lecture theatre or a workshop floor. A successful education system recognises talent wherever it exists, gives people the skills they need to use their talent, and gives them a genuine opportunity to succeed. That is the education and skills system we should all aspire to build.
Baroness Cash (Con)
My Lords, my congratulations to the noble Baroness, Lady Morgan of Huyton, on securing this excellent debate and my thanks to noble colleagues for their contributions. I am struck yet again by the level of expertise we have in this House and the value that brings when we are talking about such important matters. I have also been saved from many of the points I planned to make by hearing from the noble Baronesses, Lady Morgan and Lady Morris, the noble Lord, Lord Baker, and many other colleagues. The best use of time, therefore, is to focus instead on two things I would like to address specifically. A number of people have referred to the fact—indeed, the review the noble Baronesses have overseen talked about this—that skills do not begin at 14 or 16. These are life skills, and they begin from the very early years. Many noble Lords are aware that this is a passion of mine, and I cannot resist the temptation to address it on this occasion. The very first skills anyone learns are motor skills, speech, relational skills, emotional regulation, and the capacity to learn itself. According to this year’s survey of over 1,000 reception teachers, one in four children started school not toilet trained. Three in 10 could not tell a teacher they were hungry, frightened or needed the toilet. A third could not dress themselves. Many cannot hold a pencil or sit up on the carpet because they do not have the strength built by running, climbing or play. It is beyond tragic. A third, when handed a book, swiped the page as if it were a screen. Reception staff lose two and a half hours of teaching every day helping children catch up. Last September, 37% arrived not ready, up from 33% the year before. The sharpest regional declines are in the north-east, the West Midlands, the north-west and London. When a peer-reviewed study was done following 8,000 Bradford children for 12 years, those not school ready at four were nearly three times as likely to be out of education, employment and training at 16. A number of noble Peers today have talked about this being a decade of work. It is a lifetime of work, and it is urgent. Before we even begin to address the skills, the vocational training and the higher and further education issues that so many others have raised today, we need to start urgently to catch these babies and infants at the very beginning of their lives. If we do not, undoing the damage will be too difficult and their chances will already be harmed. There is hope. In the same survey, 94% of parents wanted national guidance on readiness, and 88% of them believed their own child was ready—but the teachers had that number at only 63%. So there is a gap of parenting knowledge that we cannot and should not neglect. I know the Minister is looking at all this, and she is aware of my support with everything she is doing in this area. However, I hope she will forgive me if I press further and harder on what else we could be doing and what the Government, in my view, must do. In 2004, Stoke-on-Trent found 64% of its children starting nursery with delayed language. It trained 5,000 practitioners and parents in early attachment and language, and delay fell markedly. Parent Gym, the programme that I founded, a six-week parenting course, was evaluated by the University of Warwick. It found large gains in parents’ confidence in skills at the end of just six weeks, which delivered outcomes in the primary schools that ran it. The Government’s milestone is 75% school ready by 2028, and there is no time to waste. Once these years are gone, it cannot be undone. Where is the plan for how the definition of school readiness is to be communicated to every new parent? Where are the system and the measures for assessing that progress? I hope the Minister can tell us when we are going to see a national information campaign about what screens are doing to the developing brains of these babies? From infancy they are being sat in front of screens, which is impeding their life chances. The other thing I want to talk about very quickly, with time running out, is work readiness. Again, the skills that are needed—soft skills, behavioural skills and experience—are crucial, and many noble Peers today have raised this in their contributions. We have to provide the work experience that has gone from young people. The number of teenagers who now work during the time when they are studying has fallen off a cliff since the 1990s. This has been happening gradually over time; it has halved. The self-esteem and confidence built by earning, turning up, getting paid and seeing the result of your efforts have gone. As the mother of a 16 year-old, I know that it has been impossible for her, despite all her best efforts, to find any summer jobs over the last couple of years. This country is spending £25 supporting a young person on benefits for every £1 helping them into work. The answer to that arithmetic is not better managed dependency. It is a good start to see in the Milburn recommendations the subsidising of work placements and work experience, but we need to do more. I am grateful to a number of noble Peers today for raising the AI issue, which is at the heart of some of the issues around employment and jobs. The change is happening so rapidly. Young people need to have soft skills and executive functioning skills, as we talk about it now in SEN—knowing how to organise themselves and how to show up punctually. We take these things for granted, but for the Covid generation these are missing. We need to think about what we do in classrooms, whether in schools or in further education, to equip young people to go into the workplace and thrive. I am very grateful to so many noble Lords for their contributions, but I single out the noble Lord, Lord Lingfield, for his reference to the cadet programme. It is a shame, I always feel, that government has to be run by departments simply because it is so vast, but when we think about our defence needs and the changing face of defence—the fact that it is going to become more technical and home-based, and the fact that we need security in our own borders—we need to think more strategically about mapping and encouraging the jobs that we need for the future. Encouraging young people to take up places with the cadets is just one example of what can be done. I am very grateful also for the reference today to language skills—an increasingly important issue as we become an ever more diverse and inclusive society. It must be vital for children, to be able to participate in their community, to have those language skills. Finally, I believe it was the noble Baroness, Lady Morris, but also the noble Baroness, Lady Morgan, in her opening speech, who said how important numeracy and literacy are as the foundation stones of all this. It was with a little alarm that I heard the new Prime Minister on Tuesday talking about some of the changes he is proposing. I flag my alarm that I hope he is not intending to rip up the foundation stones of what has been a significantly improving education system in England during the last 20 years, through both Labour and Conservative Governments—work to which the Minister herself contributed. There is a lot more to be said, but time is ticking and I am determined not to get another warning from our Whip.
The Minister of State, Department for Education and Department for Work and Pensions (Baroness Smith of Malvern) (Lab)
My Lords, as others have rightly done, I thank my noble friend Lady Morgan for securing this important debate, which has ranged widely. I will do my very best to respond to the range of points that have been raised and to receive written representations from anybody who wants to send them—as I believe the noble Lord, Lord Young, promised to do when I took a little comfort break earlier. As others have said, the breadth of expertise that has been shared today shows that improving opportunity is not the responsibility of government alone; it is a national endeavour. This debate goes to the heart of how we build a fairer and more prosperous country. It is about whether every young person, whatever their background or postcode, can gain the skills, confidence and opportunities they need to succeed, and whether every region has the skilled workforce it needs to grow, attract investment and create good jobs. The issues before us are clear. Too many young people remain outside education, employment or training. Too many adults lack access to flexible routes to upskill or retrain. Too many employers report skills shortages, while too many communities still feel cut off from the opportunities that growth should bring. That is why skills and technical and further education matter so profoundly. They are not peripheral to our economic strategy or our mission to break down barriers to opportunity; they are central to both. The debate is therefore about how government, local leaders, employers, colleges, universities and communities work together to make technical and vocational routes more respected, more responsive and more accessible. If we are serious about widening opportunity and driving growth in every part of our country, we must also be serious about where power sits and who is trusted to use it. As the noble Lord, Lord Mohammed, emphasised, there is an important argument for ensuring that power rests with those closest to making the decisions. That is why I want to begin with devolution, which is a practical answer to a practical challenge when we are thinking about how we build a skills system that reflects the needs, strengths and ambitions of the places it serves. As several noble Lords have noted, opportunity is not distributed evenly across our country and employer demand is not identical from one region to another—a point made by the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Coventry—and the barriers facing a young person in one community may look very different from those facing a young person elsewhere. Local leaders know their labour markets, employers, colleges, communities and young people, and this Government believe that they should have the powers, funding and accountability to act on that knowledge within a national framework that protects quality, entitlement and access. Our approach is clear: shift power away from Westminster, strengthen strategic authorities and build a skills system that is more responsive to local economic need while staying aligned with the national priorities that matter to us all. Noble Lords have also been clear about the scale of that challenge, with almost 1 million young people not in education, employment or training. These figures are not abstract. They represent young lives and talent we cannot afford to waste. That is why we commissioned Alan Milburn to produce what is an excellent interim report. We look forward to receiving his final report with recommendations. We are already working to ensure that we will be able to respond effectively to the recommendations and believe we will be building on progress and action already taken. I reassure my noble friend Lady Morgan and my noble friend Lady Morris, who should be congratulated on the leadership she showed in the white working-class inquiry, that we will want to respond to those issues together. We must ensure that where a young person grows up does not determine what they can become. It is about how we ensure that talented people, wherever they live and whatever their background, can gain the knowledge, confidence and qualifications needed to succeed. Another theme raised by many noble Lords has been the importance of prevention and early intervention. We know that young people who become detached from education or employment often face multiple and overlapping barriers. These can include disadvantage, low attainment, special educational needs, poor mental health, family circumstances and limited local opportunities. They can affect different groups differently, as my noble friend Lady Whitaker, with her usual tenacity, identified with respect to Gypsy, Roma and Traveller children. We know that the consequences can be long lasting and that is why this Government are placing increasing emphasis on prevention, earlier identification, stronger transitions and more co-ordinated support. We are improving how schools, colleges, local authorities and partners identify young people at risk of disengagement. We are strengthening post-16 pathways, introducing new technical pathways from age 14, and investing in better data and support systems so that fewer young people fall through the cracks. The noble Baroness, Lady Cash, is right that this starts early and that is why we are improving the quantity and quality of early years provision, tackling child poverty and improving, through our support for families and better start in life information, support and information for parents as well. The noble Lord, Lord Whitty, argued that there should be machinery of government changes to put skills, training and education at the heart of government. I now straddle the Department for Education and the Department for Work and Pensions following the most recent machinery of government change, which puts skills alongside employment support in the Department for Work and Pensions. I think that was an important change. It has led us to the development of the youth guarantee, which reflects the principles we have been talking about that every young person should have a pathway forward, whether through further learning, training, work experience and apprenticeship, or employment support. We are investing an additional £2.5 billion over the next three years into that and the growth and skills levy to support almost 1 million young people and to create up to 500,000 opportunities to earn and learn. In response to the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Leicester, I can say that there are 300,000 work experience places through the youth guarantee, specifically. I turn to further education. Many noble Lords have rightly emphasised the critical role that further education colleges play. They are anchors within their communities. They support young people, adults, career changers and employers, drive social mobility and connect education directly to the needs of local economies. My noble friend Lady Morgan described the excellent work happening in Wigan. Every time I visit excellent FE colleges, I see staff and leaders engaged with the local economy, building its input into the curriculum and building links back to their students; this is at the heart of their success. But too often they have been left behind. My noble friend Lord Barber emphasised the need for high-quality teaching, which has been harder for FE to deliver, given its vacancy rates and the lack of investment it faces. That is why this Government are investing in the FE workforce and strengthening the sector’s foundation, including by providing around £120 million in 2026 to support colleges and other FE providers to address recruitment and retention needs, rising to £365 million next year. It is why we have increased the basic funding of FE and supported, in particular, further disadvantage funding, uplifts for T-levels and an inclusive mainstream fund to help those settings meet more special educational and disability needs. Many noble Lords have rightly emphasised the need to raise the status of technical and vocational education. For too long, public debate has treated academic and technical routes as though one were superior to the other. We want technical excellence to command the same respect as academic achievement, and technical education to be seen not as a second choice but as an excellent choice. I also support the argument made by my noble friends, my noble friend Lady Morgan in particular, that high-quality technical and vocational education is not only about engaging students and is not only for those who would otherwise be disengaged; it should be for everybody who wants to achieve excellence, but via a technical and vocational route. It is important that we keep that at the heart of our ambition and the changes we are making. That is why the Prime Minister has announced new prestigious technical education routes, giving 14 year-olds earlier access to technical skills, work experience and local employers. I hope that the noble Lord, Lord Baker, has noted the emphasis from 14 that the new Prime Minister has brought in. I note the noble Lord’s strong emphasis, once again, on the opportunities that UTC sleeves may well provide in delivering this. But rather than relying on a one-size-fits-all model for delivering this new approach designed by Whitehall, regional mayors, local leaders, schools, colleges and employers will shape pathways around local industries and growth sectors, from advanced manufacturing, AI and digital technology to clean energy, life sciences, construction, health and care, and the creative industries. These changes build on our existing reforms, which demonstrate both the urgency and the ambition. With respect to the point about English and maths, I strongly agree that the literacy and numeracy skills that you need throughout life, often represented by a grade 4 at GCSE, are fundamentally important. That is why we are determined, with all the reforms that we are making pre 16, to strengthen the ability of children to get those qualifications and, post 16, to make sure that the system is focused not on a churn of resits but on the quality of teaching, professional development and the evidence of what works to enable young people to succeed if they have not up to that point. It is why we will also introduce a new level 1 stepping-stone qualification to enable young people to build the foundations they need in English and maths if they have not been successful in doing that previously. Equally, it is important that we emphasise the specialism and the contribution of FE colleges, which is why we have developed 29 new technical excellence colleges, including the 19 announced this year that are backed by £175 million, giving around 65,000 learners access to training for high-demand jobs in advanced manufacturing, clean energy, defence, digital and technologies. That builds on the first wave of construction technical excellence colleges, supported by £120 million of investment, which will train 40,000 construction learners by 2029. Together, that is a practical example of skills policy being tied directly to the industries and places where growth will come from, and it is an investment in the capacity and ability of further education colleges to work alongside those industries to provide opportunities for young people and the skills the country needs. As I have already said, I strongly support the points made by my noble friends Lady Morris and Lady Morgan about the rigour and quality that we must maintain in technical and vocational education. It should not be seen as a second-rate or alternative route for those who do not want or are not able to take an academic route. It must of itself be a prestigious, high-quality and rigorous route, and access to that quality must be open as widely as possible. I take the points made about level 6 apprenticeships, for example, which are offering brilliant opportunities for students but are not currently widely accessible enough to those from disadvantaged backgrounds. It is also the case that young people need a broader range of enrichment and experience, as several noble Lords have identified. The right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Leicester talked about the need for work experience, as I have said, and the role of volunteering in contributing to the sorts of experiences that are important for young people. The noble Lord, Lord Lingfield, rightly identified the benefits that cadets can bring. Others identified important ways in which we need to support young people to progress. I note as well the point, made by the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Coventry, about young people who might arrive at 16 without having had the opportunity to achieve up to that point. That is one of the reasons we are changing the qualifications and the routes for young people—what we would call level 2 post-16—to provide new pathways through an occupational route into jobs and a further study route into the ability to study level 3 qualifications. We cannot let young people lose the opportunities that jobs or further study could offer them. As she often does, my noble friend Lady Caine made a powerful case for creativity across the curriculum and throughout the age ranges. She challenged, as she often does. In a Question on Monday, we will have an opportunity to talk about support for higher education in creativity. We rightly heard from the noble Baroness, Lady Fraser, about the need to ensure routes into dance. This Government have continued to support the music and dance scheme, and I hear the calls for certainty around that. My noble friend Lady Hazarika spoke on the enthusiasm, the opportunities, the enrichment and joy that the study of music can bring, and the need to continue the work that we are doing on financial literacy was emphasised by the noble Baroness, Lady Sater. Several noble Lords highlighted apprenticeships and their powerful role in supporting young people into work and on the path to successful careers. That is why we are investing in them and reversing the sharp decline in apprenticeship starts among young people which we have seen over the last decade. There is an additional £1 billion investment to support 50,000 more young people into apprenticeships over the next three years. My noble friend Lady Alexander noted the ambitious plans that the Government have and rightly identified our need to make it as simple, easy and straightforward as possible for employers to take on apprentices. We have made progress in that area already, and we will keep pushing to make sure that that is the case. To support employers, we will also develop brokerage opportunities locally—as was suggested by my noble friend Lady Morgan; we are piloting them already—to bring together employers and apprentices. An important point was made about the role of higher education. I see—not just because of my job—the system as a tertiary system where opportunities need to work through further education and higher education. Of course, it is the case that very many of the skills that our economy needs will be provided through higher education, not just through an earlier route. That is why we need higher education to provide more opportunities for apprenticeships and to work effectively with further education to develop the level 4 and 5 qualifications that we need in this country. The Government have set out our target to increase the number of young people achieving level 4 and above qualifications. My noble friend Lord Docherty raised adult education, and several noble Lords talked about the need for education to be lifelong. I strongly support that. My noble friend is right that the funding for adult skills has fallen since 2010. Within the constraints that we face, we will try at the very least to maintain the support that is there, because it is so important for reskilling people, getting people back close to the labour market, helping people who have no English and maths to take up their entitlements to that, and supporting speakers of other languages with English—which is one of the things that the adult skills fund supports. The adult skills fund is devolved to make sure that it will be as effective as possible. My noble friend Lord Nagaraju, quite rightly, talked about the need for reskilling and the emphasis on AI, and made the point that that needs to be open to encourage the widest possible participation. In closing, I thank all noble Lords for their contributions. The points raised today will inform our work to build a skills system that is ambitious, inclusive and responsive; one that empowers local leaders, supports disadvantaged communities, strengthens regional growth and ensures that talent, determination and hard work are rewarded wherever they are found. I commend the Government’s approach to the House.
Baroness Morgan of Huyton (Lab)
Very briefly, I thank everybody who has taken part in the debate. I said at the beginning that I hoped we would not have a fuzzy conversation, and we very clearly did not have that. I think the Minister heard a lot of commitment and enthusiasm around the House. We heard that from her too, for which I thank her very much, as I do for the detail with which answered the points made. I was very struck by the noble Lord, Lord Baker, noting that it has been 16 years since we talked about this properly. I suspect that it will not take another 16 years until we do this again. Thank you very much.
Motion agreed.
Source: UK Parliament Hansard API. Debate ID: 5398353.