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5.44 pm
Mr. Graham Brady (Altrincham and Sale, West): I am tempted to say that I am following a lot of balls, but that is a reference to the closing remarks of the hon. Member for Blackpool, South (Mr. Marsden), not to his speech.
The name "Learning and Skills Council" is neither here nor there. It does not matter whether we call it a learning and skills council or a training and enterprise council. However, the way in which the councils are constituted and the responsibilities and powers that they are given are enormously important. There is no doubt that the Bill proposes sweeping change. That change may offer some benefits, but it also poses considerable dangers.
As for the constitution of the learning and skills councils, we are undoubtedly witnessing a very deliberate and determined process of centralisation. Allowing the Secretary of State, in the first instance, to appoint the learning and skills councils will provide an enormous opportunity for a Secretary of State to stamp his or her own ideological slant or to impose his or her own model on the process of post-16 learning and training. There are dangers there. We are potentially moving towards a much more uniform model of post-16 education.
Local learning and skills councils will be appointed by the national Learning and Skills Council. However, the national council will exercise that power with the Secretary of State's approval. It will be important to watch exactly how that process is conducted and what use is made of the powers of patronage and the power to control the make-up of those bodies--which will have enormous power in both schools and colleges across the country.
The proposed system will be more bureaucratic and centralised, and will allow less independence for further education colleges, schools and local education authorities. One of the perverse, slightly schizophrenic aspects of the Government's education policy is that they
really cannot make up their mind about what they want to do with local education authorities. In the School Standards and Framework Act 1998, Ministers were determined to get rid of grant-maintained schools and to bring back power to local education authorities. In the Budget, they said that they do not trust local education authorities and that money will have to go directly to schools. In the Bill, funding of post-16 education in school sixth forms is being removed from local education authorities and given to learning and skills councils.
It is regrettable that the new councils will no longer be business-led, as TECs are. That causes some concerns.
Although it is not a black and white matter, I differ strongly from the hon. Member for Blackpool, South (Mr. Marsden) on the distinction between skills and education. He seemed to regard the distinction as entirely spurious, but I think that there is some validity in it. In placing the whole structure of post-16 education and training under learning and skills councils, it is important that we do not risk according a lower status or less recognition to the non-vocational aspects of education. Vocational education occurs in school sixth forms, and non-vocational education occurs in colleges of further education.
Although that is right and proper, if we remove control of school sixth forms from local education authorities or from schools and give it to learning and skills councils, there is a danger that the councils' objectives--which may be far more biased towards the provision of vocational skills and education--may lead to a diminution of provision of non-vocational education. We need to be very cautious about that.
Perhaps it is a slightly old-fashioned view, but I think that it is important to say as often as possible, in the House and when debating education issues, that there is value in education for its own sake. There is value in non-vocational education that is not directly oriented towards training people for work or otherwise providing employment skills. There is a danger that the thrust of the Government's policy might take them too far in a direction that was probably first pursued by previous, Conservative Governments--the belief that all post-16 education should be about skills and jobs. It is slightly surprising that Labour Members have forgotten that danger, as they used to enjoy branding Conservative Members as philistines in these matters. It does not all have to be directly about skills and jobs. I agree with my hon. Friend the Member for New Forest, West (Mr. Swayne) that much important educational work is being done in the provision of the building blocks that can form the basis of vocational training.
My hon. Friend the Member for Maidenhead (Mrs. May) spoke about sixth form funding, a vital issue that the Government must get right. I would be more inclined to accept ministerial assurances about "levelling up" to the per capita funding currently available in school sixth forms were it not for the fact that I, like my hon. Friend, sat and listened to precisely the same assurances when we were told that when grant-maintained status was removed there would be a "levelling up" to expenditure in grant-maintained schools. That simply has not happened. Schools in my constituency lost £120,000 of revenue funding owing to the loss of grant-maintained status.
The Government assured us that the revenue of other institutions would rise, but that has not happened. If the same happened as a result of the transition from the current funding of school sixth forms to funding through the Learning and Skills Council, there would be considerable anger, and considerable problems for many sixth forms. Inevitably, some sixth forms involve a higher unit cost, given the need to maintain a varied curriculum for a relatively small group of pupils.
I have already raised in the House the current problems in the borough of Trafford, where the cost of providing the new post-16 curriculum is not being passed on to local schools by the local authority. That means a loss of some £400,000 a year to local schools with sixth forms, on top of the loss of grant-maintained status in the case of most of my local schools. If funding was levelled down, or if, as suggested by my hon. Friend the Member for Maidenhead, sixth form numbers increased and funds did not increase commensurately, there would be a real problem.
What about the creation of new sixth forms? I return to the question of the objectives and priorities of the learning and skills councils. A very successful sixth form was established a few years ago in one of the high schools in my constituency, New Wellington school. It is developing and becoming an important part of the school; it is popular with pupils, and I think that it should remain. From my reading of the Bill, however, there is a danger that a learning and skills council taking an overview of post-16 provision in a certain area might favour one model of provision rather than another. It might prefer, perhaps for financial reasons, to enlarge colleges of further education, rather than continuing to fund sixth forms or allowing new ones to be established.
My constituency also contains a successful and expanding college of further education, South Trafford college, which is involved in a number of innovative programmes. It provides training in many other parts of the country and has a link with the Army. It is currently providing training in Harrogate. I would not like a loss of independence to restrict such entrepreneurial activity on the part of further education colleges.
The Bill states that learning and skills councils "may" provide funding for local education authorities for sixth form provision, but as far as I can see it does not require them to do so. There is a genuine fear--it is not scaremongering--that the equality of education currently being provided will not be guaranteed.
I shall conclude soon, because I know that others want to speak. The hon. Member for Worcester (Mr. Foster) talked about pastoral care. The principal of South Trafford college said to me last Friday that there are inevitable differences between the pastoral care available in a large further education college and that available in a school sixth form. Those differences are caused by the size of the college and the fact that it has a large number of part-time or older students, so a different kind of care is inevitably needed and provided. Even 16 to 18-year-olds sometimes choose to go to an FE college rather than a school sixth form because they want greater independence in the style of their education.
Mr. Ian Pearson (Dudley, South):
Learning and skills, along with innovation and entrepreneurship, are the global currency of the new knowledge economy. Britain's future economic prosperity will depend on having a well-educated, highly skilled work force that can adapt to the massive changes in learning and work that will take place over the next decade or more. It is an indictment of the previous Administration that, in Britain today, more than 6 million adults have no formal qualification and more than one adult in five has a lower level of literacy than is expected from an 11-year-old. The glaring problem of skill shortages across the country, particularly at technician level, is also a result of their failure, which contributes to Britain's 25 to 40 per cent. productivity gap with France, Germany and the United States.
I am the first to admit that the best further education colleges and training and enterprise councils do a great job, but too often their performance has been patchy and disappointing. Drop-out rates in further education and in TECs are far too high. Qualification achievement rates in the FE sector vary from 34 per cent. to 94 per cent. In TECs, course completion rates vary from 40 per cent. to 70 per cent. We cannot afford to tolerate delivery systems that are at best flawed and second rate. Along with the expansion that we want in further education in the coming years, we need modernisation and reform. I am pleased that the Bill provides for that.
On Second Reading in the other place, Baroness Blackstone said:
First, it is a bit rich of the Conservatives to criticise us on the grounds that the Bill is bureaucratic. They introduced TECs, which, on average, spend 14 per cent. of their budget on administration. They have a TEC operating agreement that runs to more than 100 pages and monthly, if not weekly, reporting to the Government offices for the regions. Their agenda was strangled by the Conservatives.
However, I am acutely aware that we need to consider whether we can do things better across a range of Government initiatives. I use the analogy of whether we can put foot to floor faster.
Can we get better at moving from voting resources in the House of Commons to delivering them to people on the ground, whether they be students, trainees or workers? We need to look again at the Government model--the traditional civil service model. As a party, we have spent much time thinking about politics and policy, but we have not examined the system to get to the implementation
level. Where new Labour thinking is needed is in ways of having a lean production model for getting benefits to those who need them most. I am optimistic that, through the Bill, we can provide a lean-burn model that shows how it can be done.
Secondly, on collaboration rather than competition, I have been around a number of FE colleges. In my local area, we have four FE colleges within six miles. They offer similar courses in mechanical and electrical engineering. All are under-resourced. All offer poorer-quality education and training for that. If they came together and offered one or two courses in a subject, they would be far more efficient. Each of the 10 FE colleges around the Birmingham area employs more people in marketing than Birmingham council did when it covered all 10. That cannot be an efficient use of resources.
We need to develop a system that offers real quality and choice. Across a range of areas, private sector providers already offer training courses that TECs contract with. We need to examine whether the private sector should offer some courses that have traditionally been offered by the FE sector: for example, information technology, law and accountancy. There is strong evidence that private sector training providers already offer courses of a far higher quality than the average further education college in those areas.
Thirdly, I focus on customer need. We need to talk about different types of customer. For the individual, there must be choice and quality provision. For employers, we need to ensure that, as customers, they get the skilled employees that they require and that local learning and skills councils reflect the skill needs in their areas. They need discretion to be able to do that.
There is a community customer need, too. I am concerned that some of the good things that TECs did in economic development should not fall through the cracks in the system. It is clear that learning and skills councils need an explicit local economic development agenda.
The LSC will focus on customer need, collaboration rather than competition, and on cutting out bureaucracy.--[Official Report, House of Lords, 17 January 2000; Vol. 608, c. 878.]
I fully share her sentiments. Given the limited time available, I shall make three brief comments.
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