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Mr. Boswell: I appreciate that the hon. Lady is a London Member and I have visited FE colleges fairly near her constituency recently. Will she concede that there is concern about whether the proposed structure for London and the local learning and skills councils, particularly in the northern sector, will be able to deliver adequately and meet the needs that she has properly addressed? Does she agree that there is also concern across the sectoral boundaries in London about whether it will be possible for colleges to make perfectly sensible collaborative arrangements to secure the adequate supply of high quality training for skills and education across the metropolis?
Ms Ryan: The hon. Gentleman makes some important points and, if he waits a while, I shall come to them.
Some 120,000 jobs are on offer, but people lack the skills to fill them. One in four Londoners has minimal qualifications or none and we need to raise drastically the level of technological skill among young people in London. We also know of the barriers that exist for black Londoners and members of minority ethnic groups, who are far more likely to be unemployed and far less likely to get the job. That is unacceptable. I am therefore pleased by the strength of the Bill's equal opportunities approach.
On the point raised by the hon. Member for Daventry (Mr. Boswell), London will have five local learning and skills councils. Essentially, three options were before the
London Development Partnership, but it did not suggest the one that I favoured. I preferred the "wedges" option--which would have got rid of the inner and outer London doughnut and established travel-to-work areas to slice up the city--and saw sense in the pan-London LSC option as London is essentially one labour market, but our councils have been broadly based on the training and enterprise councils, although there are obviously fewer. I believe that that option can succeed.
The hon. Member for Maidenhead (Mrs. May) said that the Government failed to consider what was needed in local areas, but they and the London Development Partnership considered London's needs and decided that it would be best to build firmly on the good practice and partnerships that are already in place and take them forward. I think and hope that, in a number of years, I will be able to look back and say that the best option was chosen. We are building on good practice and partnership while achieving a coherent structure and a quality agenda.
However, the establishment of the five local learning and skills councils raised some issues, not least for Capel Manor college in my constituency, which is the only specialist horticultural college in London. It has a national and international reputation and is doing an excellent job, but it was concerned about relating to five different councils and thought that it might run into some of the problems that it had faced with local education authorities. It was worried that it would need to be represented on, and have an input to, each council and concerned about sorting out the financial situation across five different bodies.
I made representations to the Under-Secretary of State for Education and Employment, my hon. Friend the Member for Croydon, North (Mr. Wicks), on that issue. He corresponded with the college and took note of what it had to say. He wrote:
I want briefly to discuss the work of the national training organisations. The White Paper "Learning to Succeed" said that NTOs have a pivotal role to play in the new arrangements. Many of us are delighted by that and the Bill's strength is that it is more demand led than the current provider-driven system. To ensure that that continues, and in acknowledgement of the work and relevance of NTOs, I am pleased that the Government have backed an amendment in the other place that will
mean that, as well as providing a national, regional and local focus on skills, the Bill will ensure that industrial and occupational needs are met. It is right and welcome that national training organisations are recognised by the Secretary of State as the employer voice on education and training issues.
I welcome the LSC prospectus, and especially the reference to meeting the need for skilled child care workers to support the national child care strategy. To date, training and enterprise councils have played a pivotal role in training out-of-school child care workers, and have increasingly been involved in the development and provision of the training infrastructure to support child care for ages 0 to 14. It is vital that that role continues under the LSCs to ensure that the development of this substantial work force is no longer marginalised as low-status, low-paid work, or separated from other forms of vocational training and development.
An estimated 100,000 new jobs in child care and early education and play work will be created in the coming years. As many as 60,000 people will be required to staff new out-of-school provision alone. We must ensure that the emerging Qualifications and Curriculum Authority's national framework of child care qualifications continues to be disseminated to local post-16 providers, and that those providers are supported in offering learning opportunities for workers in out-of-school child care, because there are considerable shortages of provision.
Caroline Flint:
I am glad that my hon. Friend has raised the important issue of child care workers and their training. Does she agree that it is vital that the LSC liaise with early years development and child care partnerships at local level, and enable parents to take part in the courses put on by the providers, wherever they may be?
Ms Ryan:
My hon. Friend makes the point well. Indeed, my next point was that local learning and skills councils must work closely with early years development and child care partnerships. We must identify and ensure provision for a wide range of learning opportunities for child care individuals, organisations and employers.
LSC should be the favoured body to oversee the vocational training of child care workers and the development of family friendly policies by employers. We can be proud of the achievements to date of TECs and local education authorities working with early years development partnerships in this emerging area. I am concerned that there could be a loss in this field unless each local LSC has a specific child care brief. That would ensure that the work that I have outlined is co-ordinated, and that specialist knowledge provided by child care development teams informs the work of LSCs. I would like child care to be added to the equal opportunities brief in the functional diagram of a local LSC in paragraph 2.22 of the prospectus.
The measures in the Bill are welcome and necessary. I particularly welcome the whole thrust of the measures to raise standards in post-16 education and of the quality agenda. I welcome the new inspection proposals. The focus on teacher performance and student achievement was and is a great strength of the Ofsted system. Post-16 education will benefit immensely from that focus, so the people who really matter will benefit immensely--our young people and our work force.
Too many people have a poor experience of education. Many see lifelong learning as far removed from their daily lives. Bringing together the work of the TECs and the Further Education Funding Council will mean that the false distinctions that have held back our post-compulsory education and training system will be removed. This will be the first time that we have had an integrated or coherent approach to further education and work force training post-16. That is very welcome.
Mr. Michael Howard (Folkestone and Hythe):
The hon. Member for Enfield, North (Ms Ryan) was right to say that there is a great deal to be done. There always has been, and I dare say that there always will be.
The House will no doubt be relieved to know that I shall resist the temptation to launch into a full-scale defence of the previous Government's record in the face of the casual and ill informed criticism that has been made during the debate. Suffice it to say that the previous Government presided over the greatest expansion ever in the number of our young people entering higher education, developed national vocational qualifications, introduced a range of innovative programmes, and created a proper framework within which those programmes could be developed. The creation of those additional opportunities transformed the lives of millions of our people.
I want the improvement in our training and education system to continue, but I have significant reservations about the Government's approach in the Bill, which leaves a great deal to be desired. Its defects were eloquently described by my hon. Friend the Member for Maidenhead (Mrs. May). In my brief remarks, I want to concentrate on one aspect only: the wanton vandalism that the Government intend to perpetrate on training and enterprise councils.
I have an interest to declare. TECs were established during my period of office as Secretary of State for Employment. The first became operational in April 1990, 10 years ago almost to the day, and the last was launched in October 1991. I cannot and do not claim any credit for the concept. That properly belongs to my immediate predecessor, my right hon. Friend the Member for Sutton Coldfield (Sir N. Fowler). It was his White Paper "Employment for the 1990s", published in December 1988, which proposed devolving responsibility for the Government's training and enterprise programmes to local level, and injecting into them a strong infusion of private enterprise.
The essence of those imaginative and visionary proposals was that the local groups that were invited to submit propositions for the establishment of TECs would be led by employers. The objective of the proposals was set out in the White Paper in these terms:
The training of young and unemployed people, on which Governments have rightly spent so much money over the years, has one objective: to help those being
trained to get and keep a job. It is local employers who provide those jobs. The direct involvement of local employers in this process--putting them in the driving seat and giving them ownership of the training--is the best possible guarantee that the training will achieve its objective of equipping unemployed people to fill the jobs that are available.
Similarly, employers are likely to know best what help for enterprise is most likely to succeed, and which enterprise programmes are most likely to help firms that are starting or are still small and want to establish themselves and grow.
That was a new and ambitious approach. It involved giving private sector bodies a large amount of public money with which to achieve the goals they were set. One of the most encouraging features in those early years as we were setting the TECs up was that there was all-party support for the initiative.
In the whole of the time I was Secretary of State for Employment, the shadow Secretary of State was the right hon. Member for Sedgefield, the Prime Minister. This is what he said about TECs:
The Government are now doing precisely what the Prime Minister said that they would not do: they are scrapping everything that has been achieved and are starting again. They are not retaining the training and enterprise councils, but destroying them. Is there any justification for that change of heart? I do not believe that there is.
We recognise that there will be a need for cross London co-operation when planning and allocating provision. We expect that LSCs will work together in London with a light touch co-ordinating mechanism. The exact form that this pan London co-ordinating body will take has not been agreed. However, it will mean that the five local LSCs will be able to agree common approaches to collective problems including developing strategies for sectoral cross regional provision.
My college is heartened by that news and in a letter to me it says that it is
delighted with the letter from Malcolm as it illustrates a real understanding of the potential inefficiency of small specialist providers, such as Capel Manor College, dealing with individual LSCs. They would welcome the opportunity to report directly to a London-wide body, co-ordinating the servicing of specialist needs across London.
That is good news for regional organisations up and down the country, and my college and I have good reason to thank my hon. Friend the Minister for paying attention to those issues.
The Government hope to place "ownership" of the training and enterprise system where it belongs--with employers.
The logic of that approach was--and is--simple and compelling.
The worst thing a Labour Government could do would be to scrap everything that has been achieved and start again.
I suppose that if the current Secretary of State had said that and it was put to him now, he would say that he was only joking. However, the Prime Minister is not renowned for his jokes, so we are entitled to assume that he was serious--as of course he was.
Labour will retain Training and Enterprise Councils but will make them more broadly representative of their local communities.
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