Educational Opportunities

[Mark Pritchard in the Chair]

I beg to move,

That this House has considered the matter of tackling barriers to educational opportunities.

It is a privilege to serve under your chairship, Mr Pritchard.

In the UK today, most 18-year-olds—around 64%—do not go to university. I want to focus on the barriers facing the 64% of young people in accessing the education and training that they need to lead fulfilling working lives. I do not believe that they have benefited from the same educational opportunities as the minority of young people who leave school for university, and that makes no moral, social or economic sense. In my view, our system of vocational education and training is not working for the 64%, or for our country.

My constituency of Folkestone and Hythe has incredible potential for a thriving vocational education and training system. It has strengths in the creative industries, independent retail, tourism and hospitality, as well as green energy and nuclear decommissioning. We are home to the Little Cheyne Court wind farm and the former Dungeness nuclear power station. However, the potential for a technical education system to supply those industries, and others, with skilled workers in both Folkestone and Hythe and the UK as a whole remains untapped. In 2022-23, there were 677 apprenticeship starts in Folkestone and Hythe, but only five in the leisure, tourism and travel sector, despite the size of that sector. And despite the significant number of regeneration projects in Folkestone and Hythe, the number of apprenticeship starts in construction, planning and the built environment fell by 49% in 2022-23 compared with the previous year.

Our country has some incredible further education colleges; I commend the work of East Kent college in Folkestone. When I visited during the general election campaign, I was shown workshops, kitchens and classrooms where, among many other vocations, the builders, electricians, carpenters, programmers, chefs and healthcare workers of the future are being educated. The college, which was judged to be “outstanding” by Ofsted in 2023, offers an incredible range of qualifications, including BTecs and T-levels. It offers adult education and there is also a junior college, with a two-year creative curriculum for learners aged 14 and over who want to specialise in arts or business studies. I thank its staff and students for their hard work, and for the grilling that they gave me and the other candidates at a hustings event hosted by the college before the election.

Unfortunately, in many colleges like East Kent college, not all students who complete courses in specialist areas actually go on to work in those fields. That is not always down to students changing their minds; it is also because of the lack of jobs and apprenticeships available in the labour market. Under 14 years of Conservative Governments, apprenticeships starts plummeted, the apprenticeship levy was exposed as inadequate and further education was starved of vital funds. In 2015-16, the total number of apprenticeship starts was 509,000; by 2022-23, that number had fallen to 337,000. Between 2017 and 2024, the number of engineering apprenticeship starts fell by 42%. It was encouraging to see that apprenticeship starts grew by 3% in the month Labour took office, demonstrating employers’ optimism following the change of Government.

I am afraid to say that the Conservatives’ reforms, such as the apprenticeship levy and T-levels, were ineffective. There was not enough flexibility built into the apprenticeship levy and not enough investment in apprenticeships for younger learners. As the chief executive officer of Make UK, Stephen Phipson, has said, successive Governments have provided inadequate funding for engineering apprenticeships, rendering them uneconomical for FE colleges and private providers to deliver. Neither have we had proper alignment between our industrial and our vocational education strategies.

As a result, our skills policy has not been supporting the sectors of our economy we most need to grow. Sectors such as battery technology, electrical vehicle production and renewable technology manufacturing do not receive the funding for apprenticeships that they need, and in turn do not benefit from a steady supply of skilled workers. We need to end the mismatch between what is taught and the skills needed by the labour market. I warmly welcome the Government’s agenda for skills and vocational education and the Budget announcement of an additional £300 million funding boost for further education next year. But we know that in this policy area, as in so many others, funding is not enough—ambitious reform is what we need.

I will touch on three aspects of the Government skills policy: Skills England, devolution and reform of the apprenticeship levy. I support the creation of Skills England, which will end the fractured skills landscape and bring together combined authorities, businesses, workers, trade unions and colleges so that there is co-ordination to meet local economies’ skills needs. It is incredibly important that Skills England will be a strategic body so that it can make sure that our industrial strategy, Invest 2035, and the vocational educational strategy work as one. Only then will sectors such as advanced manufacturing, which is rightly a focus of our Invest 2035 plan, benefit from a predictable supply of skilled labour.

I also support the fact that part of Skills England’s mandate will be to collaborate with the Migration Advisory Committee so that we ensure that our own young talent is trained up and joins our labour market before we reach out to recruit from abroad. We have an abundance of young talent. This is about ensuring that our skills policy makes the most of the talent, work ethic and creativity of our young people while having an immigration system that welcomes the workers we need to get our economy growing and our public services working again. The Migration Advisory Committee has for far too long looked at labour market shortages in a vacuum without thinking about how our skills policy can address those shortages in the long term.

I also believe that it is important for more powers over skills and technical education to be devolved, because the UK still has variation in our regional economies. For example, the creative industries are very important in Folkestone and Hythe, and nationally that sector contributed £124 billion to the UK economy in ’22. In the west midlands, the automotive sector is important. On Teesside, there is a resilient chemical sector, and there is still a proud steel industry in Scunthorpe and Port Talbot. Different regional economies will demand different focuses and priorities for policymakers, so I endorse the Government’s plan to ensure that there are local skills improvement plans and that adult skills funding will be devolved to combined authorities.

Reform of the apprenticeship levy is long overdue. The levy is a tax on employers with a wage bill of over £3 million a year that funds apprenticeships. The problem is that the funds levied can be spent only on very specific types of training. For example, businesses cannot use the money to fund any courses shorter than one year. The new growth and skills levy will be critical, because it will mean that businesses will be able to pay for a greater range of training options, apprentices will have more choice and apprenticeships can be shorter than a year. It is very important that employers will be required to fund more of their level 7—that is, master’s degree-level—apprenticeships. The money saved there will be reinvested into foundation apprenticeships, which will give younger workers more opportunity and flexibility.

I know that the road ahead is challenging. Between 2017 and 2022, the number of skills shortages in the UK doubled to more than half a million, and by 2022 skills shortages accounted for 36% of job vacancies. Training expenditure is also at its lowest level since records began in 2011. Yet if we get skills policy right, the opportunities are huge. Total revenue from the apprenticeship levy is forecast to grow from £3.9 billion to £4.6 billion by 2029 due to rising wages. A broader skills base will mean more productive jobs, higher labour productivity, stronger wage growth and rising living standards for all workers, not just university-educated professionals. That will benefit young people, many of whom feel demotivated and disenfranchised and believe that the 21st century economy does not serve them. In places where they have been given a pound shop instead of a workshop, they may be right.

On future policy development, can the Minister provide more detail on the timeline for when we can expect the different phases of development of Skills England? I would also be grateful to know how the Government plan to align Invest 2035 with their post-16 education strategy. Both those strategies require prioritisation, so what sectors do the Government plan to focus on to drive up the number of apprenticeship starts? Are there any other areas of education and skills policy that the Government would like to devolve to local economies rather than combined authorities? For example, there is no combined authority in Kent. What plans do the Government have to ensure more apprenticeship starts in the industries of the future, such as artificial intelligence, autonomous vehicles, green energy and new nuclear?

I thank the hon. Member for securing this important debate. Somerset is home to Agratas, which is a 40 GWh gigafactory at the Gravity Smart Campus. It is creating jobs and boosting the green economy. It is important that local people in Somerset have the skills to work in those jobs, so does the hon. Member agree that we should encourage local partnerships between schools and industry to teach science, technology, engineering and maths skills and offer those opportunities?

The hon. Member is absolutely right, and that is exactly what Skills England is going to do. It is about the collaboration between all the different stakeholders in society, not just businesses and colleges, to enable us to get to a point where the skills need is being facilitated by education providers.

A high quality vocational education system will improve social mobility, and be one of the best ways to tackle the precarity of the low skill, low productivity and low pay economies that have been built over the last 14 years. I look forward to working with the Government to break down the barriers to opportunity for the 64% of young people who do not go to university, and to build a vocational training system that we can all be proud of.

Order. The debate is very popular and oversubscribed; over 17 Members want to speak. To get everybody in, I am afraid that I will be imposing a time limit of two and a half minutes. I call Jamie Stone, who I am sure will set a great example.

It is a great pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Pritchard. I congratulate the hon. Member for Folkestone and Hythe (Tony Vaughan) on a most interesting speech.

If one visits the Scottish Parliament—some Members may have done or may in future—one cannot help but admire the woodwork. The joinery, carpentry and cabinetmaking are of the highest standard. I was on the Committee that oversaw the building of that Parliament—it nearly cost me my seat in the 2003 Scottish election, but that is beside the point. What struck me very forcibly was that in the United Kingdom we did not have the cabinetmaking and joinery skills to produce a finished article of that quality. Most of the work was done by people from Romania, Poland and other eastern European countries. My point is that when skills disappear, they can sometimes disappear forever.

I worked as a young man at a yard in Wester Ross called Kishorn, where the mighty Ninian Central Platform for the North sea was built. I worked at Nigg, where a number of the hard steel jackets were constructed. At the highpoint of Nigg in the early 1980s, some 5,000 people worked there. They were highly skilled: they were trained in welding, fabrication and all manner of supporting disciplines to achieve some of the greatest structures ever built for the North sea. Today, many of those people are retired or nearly at retirement age, and my big worry—this echoes the point made by the hon. Member for Folkestone and Hythe—is that although those people could pass on the skills and train young people in them, there is no effort to make that happen. We could be faced with a parallel to the situation I described at the Scottish Parliament: skills could disappear.

I am heartened by the news from Hull that turbine blades are going to be constructed there. That is good news and the Prime Minister was quite correct to emphasise that today. The point is that we should be making far more floating offshore structures in the United Kingdom—the cells, the blades and the towers themselves. While we have the fabrication skills in different parts of the UK, including in my constituency in Scotland, we should get that business going again and be training up the next generation.

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairship, Mr Pritchard. I thank my hon. Friend the Member for Folkestone and Hythe (Tony Vaughan) for securing this important debate and for his compelling and comprehensive survey of adult education.

For centuries, Scotland had one of the best education systems in the world, but that is not the case today under the Scottish National party. Attainment has been falling for years. As recent programme for international student assessment reviews show, standards in literacy, mathematics and science are falling, and that is closing doors for children and young people in my seat. The response in Glasgow, I am afraid, has been to cut 172 teaching posts this year, with further cuts to come.

The attainment gap in Scottish schools is widening. Where someone is born is becoming more, not less, important than it was and barriers for poorer children are increasing. It is worth saying that the Government are tackling one of the causes of the attainment gap—poverty—by introducing legislation that will make work pay and tackling family poverty by increasing the national minimum and living wage. However, the SNP is also responsible for the attainment gap in our schools and that is preventing young people from getting good jobs and being able to provide for their families.

A simple example of that failure is that since 2010, there has been a material drop in school attendance. If someone does not go to school, they do not learn. There has also been a general worsening of behaviour in Scottish schools since 2016, shown by figures from the Scottish Government themselves. Put simply, in many Scottish schools, parents, children and teachers have great fear and worry about school behaviour. Nicola Sturgeon made it clear that closing the attainment gap was her main objective, but the SNP has failed on that.

Adult education, which my hon. Friend the Member for Folkestone and Hythe spoke so compellingly about, is critical for jobs for people in Scotland. The OECD recently carried out a study of Scottish adult education and other matters in the west coast of Scotland, where my seat is located. It reported that career guidance for adults is “challenging to access” and financial incentives to invest in reskilling and upskilling workers are very low. That has a terrible impact on low-paid workers in Scotland and a real impact on both economic growth in Scotland and such critical matters as the transition from oil and gas to renewables.

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Pritchard. I commend the hon. Member for Folkestone and Hythe (Tony Vaughan) for securing this broad-ranging debate on barriers to education opportunities. There are many things that we could talk about, but in 150 seconds I will restrict myself to three things.

The first is about free school meals. Labour Members said some pretty terrible things in 2018 about what we would do to eligibility for free school meals. It did not happen. In reality, the number of children eligible has risen from about one in six in 2010 to one in three most recently, and that is despite employment, the number of children growing up in workless households and the number of people in work and on low pay having come right down. What will the Government do to keep entitlement at around the same level as now even after universal credit roll-out has concluded?

Secondly, I want to ask about the holiday activities and food programme, which has been successful for young people. I am sure the new Government would not dream of cutting it, but a lot of local areas—I know that one in Yorkshire has been discussing the matter very recently—want some reassurance and some forward visibility about what will happen with the HAF programme after the end of this year.

Finally, I wanted to ask about breakfast clubs. The Government have talked a great deal about primary school breakfast clubs and people are quite disappointed about the scale of what they have heard so far. The total percentage of primary schools in England covered by the first phase is, I think, 4.5%. They also talk about breakfast clubs as if they were something novel, whereas in reality there are thousands in schools across the country already. So when they say they need to move slowly because they need to have a pilot, what does the Minister think needs to be piloted? Is it the type of bowl or the angle of pour of the cornflakes, or is it just that they are trying slow down the roll-outs?

Thank you, Mr Pritchard, for your chairmanship. One of the many legacies of the previous Government is a crisis in education and overwhelming barriers to opportunity for young people. Those barriers do not diminish with age, as gaining new skills is difficult in a country where employer investment in training and development has fallen by a third

The UK economy is facing a severe skills shortage. Over the next decade, we will need 350,000 construction apprenticeships, 1.3 million skilled tradespeople and 130 naval nuclear roles. However, apprenticeships have started to decline sharply in recent years, highlighting the need for a focus on them. First, we want to create more opportunities for apprenticeships. Despite a chronic skills gap, for every apprenticeship, there are three applications. We need to restore financial incentives to small and medium-sized enterprises to take on apprenticeships, make the apprenticeship funding model more transparent, and get into our communities and showcase to children, young people and parents the opportunities that are out there. We need to increase financial support for the apprenticeship rate; it is set at £6.40 at the moment and that is just not enough to survive on. We need to expand foundational apprenticeships and introduce shorter apprenticeships for those who cannot afford the 12 months, and we have to simplify the system and increase the flexibility.

Secondly, it is vital that we value all pathways. The toxic legacy of the Tories in education and the undervaluing of certain subjects—from vocational courses to the arts and social sciences—have meant a loss in those areas. Inspiring young people into diverse sectors is vital, and many young people and their parents do not see trade careers as an option. We must boost careers advice and awareness of apprenticeships. We must use the growth and skills levy, with which the spending of levy money on accessing outreach should be permitted. Careers advice must also highlight the range of training provisions.

Thank you, Mr Pritchard, for your chairmanship. I wish to contribute to this debate by talking about education opportunities that are close to my heart in the creative industries, and the barriers in this country to a creative education. I come to this place as a proud graduate of University of Chichester in my constituency, and I am living proof that a creative qualification can lead someone down many paths, including to this place.

Years of underfunding and poor organisation means that, despite a booming creative industry in the UK, young people are finding it increasingly difficult to attain the education they need to enter the sector, especially through the state system. There has been a significant drop in arts enrolment at A-level, with a 29% decline since 2010. Government grants for arts education have fallen 40% in real terms over the past decade, and the number of those teaching arts-based subjects dropped by 27% between 2011 and 2024.

I refer Members to my entry in the Register of Members’ Interests as a trustee of Chichester Festival Theatre, which has a thriving learning, education and participation department, and it is leading the way in giving access to performing arts education to those from underprivileged backgrounds. Pallant House Gallery also has a fantastic education and outreach department, and both Chichester College and the University of Chichester are creating the next generation of creatives who will feed into a creative industry, which the hon. Member for Folkestone and Hythe (Tony Vaughan) mentioned, is worth £126 billion to the economy and creates 2.4 million jobs.

The work that charities and organisations are doing in this space to reduce barriers to opportunity is immeasurable, and their work is at risk if local authorities are not appropriately funded to ensure that their non-statutory obligations are protected. The nature of the English baccalaureate means that it restricts take-up of the creative subjects and adds additional barriers to artistic education, which is why the Liberal Democrats are committed to including arts within it and ensuring Ofsted monitors schools so they provide a broad curriculum, including arts, with links to the creative and digital sectors. That would encourage young people to continue with an arts-based qualification, which is shown to be beneficial to their mental health. It would also improve results in subjects such as English and maths, and attainment in education as a whole.

Thank you, Mr Pritchard, for your chairmanship. I thank my hon. Friend the Member for Folkestone and Hythe (Tony Vaughan) for securing this very important debate.

I first got involved in politics because I thought it wrong that, far too often, the postcode in which a person is born dictates their life outcomes. I have spent the past 17 years working with some of the charities that the hon. Member for Chichester (Jess Brown-Fuller) mentioned to tackle that disadvantage gap. I am incredibly honoured to be the national champion for the opportunity mission, because I believe that the most important element of this Government’s priorities is to break down barriers to opportunity and ensure that a child growing up in Clayton-le-Moors in my constituency of Hyndburn has exactly the same opportunities as a child growing up in Chelsea.

I will focus on the issues that we must tackle in the special educational needs and disabilities system, particularly for children and young people who grow up with SEND, but I first want to highlight the absolutely catastrophic situation that we inherited. Sadly, across the country, 20% of children grow up in poverty, but in my constituency of Hyndburn it is 37%. The data is stark. The Institute for Fiscal Studies demonstrates that the earnings of boys who grow up in the most affluent households are 19 percentile points higher than those of boys from the most disadvantaged households, and for girls it is a 27 percentile point difference.

I strongly believe that a strong state education system is the key to overcoming that disparity, so I welcome the significant £1.4 billion schools rebuilding programme and the £2.1 billion we are investing in the repairs fund. That will have a direct impact in my constituency on Altham St James school, Knuzden St Oswald’s school, the Hyndburn academy and Haslingden high school.

My inbox is filled with messages from parents who are desperately fighting the education, health and care plan system. I have to write to the head of SEND at the borough council more than to any other stakeholder. Just this week, a constituent told me that she has been waiting over a year for a copy of her daughter’s EHCP, after an emergency review hearing. In the meantime, her daughter is out of education, just before her GCSEs and transition to college.