Post-16 Education and Skills Strategy

Statement

The following Statement was made in the House of Commons on Monday 20 October.

“With permission, Mr Speaker, I will make a Statement to update the House on the Government’s work to transform further and higher education in this country.

The House should be in no doubt: transformation is what we need, because the world is changing, with artificial intelligence, machine learning, green energy, and new and exciting technologies. Global forces are reshaping the world of work more and more quickly. They bring fresh and exciting chances for growth and opportunity. However, unless education and training in this country also change, we risk missing those chances and our young people risk being left behind.

We have seen that before. Under the previous Government, who thought that colleges and technical education were for other people’s children, apprenticeship starts for our young people plummeted. They talked down our universities and were more interested in headlines for culture wars than in head starts for students. We will never take that path. I know that Members on both sides of the House will agree that we in this country have a duty—to our people, to our businesses and to our great history—not just to keep up but to lead the way.

Today we publish our Post-16 Education and Skills White Paper to seize the opportunities of this changing world, to deliver growth for our economy and opportunity for our communities, and to lead the way. My vision for post-16 education in this country is a skills system that drives growth and is more balanced, more responsive and more reflective of the evolving world of work. It will add dynamism, invention and expertise to our economy, and it will go further by inviting working people to be part of that economic strength, and to add to and share in that success.

The young person who has just left school and is not sure of what is next deserves a range of quality options to choose the route that is right for him—a great apprenticeship, a top course at his local further education college, or to go off to university. A working mother deserves the opportunity to upskill and make the most of her talents. For her, it means more than a job; it means a career, security and opportunity. I want to see that opportunity cascade into our communities, with local businesses becoming more productive, taking on more people and paying higher salaries; hustle and bustle returning to the high street; the skilled workforce that we need to build more local homes; and empowered NHS staff with the right skills to deliver a transformed service that is fit for the future—getting this country moving again.

That is why the skills system is fundamental to national renewal. The White Paper is the turning point in how we go from a quarter of a million skilled vacancies sitting unfilled to a pipeline of top-quality training to fill those jobs and create new ones, from a muddle of confusing pathways to a coherent system meeting the needs of the modern economy, and from further education treated as the poor relation to our colleges standing side by side with our world-class universities.

The public will have heard such warm words about skills before, and they will know that warm words often fizzle out into nothing—no action and no change. But that is no longer the case, because our reform of the skills system has already begun. We have established Skills England, reformed the growth and skills levy, slashed red tape on apprenticeships, introduced technical excellence colleges and stabilised university finances, and we are rolling out the youth guarantee.

Today, we are going further, guided by our industrial strategy. We will fill gaps and meet needs, through our new foundation apprenticeships or through shorter courses in priority sectors, which from April will be funded by the growth and skills levy. To deliver growth, we are investing £187 million for our “Techfirst” digital skills and AI learning, £182 million for engineering, £182 million for the defence talent pipeline and £625 million to train 60,000 more construction workers. That is all backed up by 29 new technical excellence colleges.

Clean energy, defence, digital, advanced manufacturing, construction—what we need is technical excellence, and that is what our colleges can provide. Through this White Paper we will work with our fantastic FE staff. We will draw on their passion and expertise. We are strengthening professional development in our colleges, partnering with industry, and building on the evidence of what works. We will pair that support with improved performance measures, to bring our colleges out of the shadow of the university route, and to make it a pathway of equal importance, equal value, and equal pride in the eyes of the nation. As the Prime Minister has said, that will be a defining cause for this Labour Government: no longer a Cinderella service, but rather a system of high esteem, matching high support with high challenge, and spreading best practice from across the country to deliver high standards in every college. To seize the opportunities of the tech revolution, this country needs not just lawyers, economists, and scientists; we need wind turbine technicians, video editors, and builders—careers that we on this side of the House respect, and work that pays and lifts up communities.

We are introducing rigorous study pathways, giving young people a clear line of sight into great careers. That includes V-levels, the brand new vocational pathway unveiled in our White Paper today, sitting proudly alongside A-levels and T-levels, and building the skills and knowledge that employers value. We are backing those changes with £800 million of extra investment for young people in our colleges and sixth forms next year, above and beyond what was planned for this year and supporting 20,000 more students. That is why the target for 50% of our young people to go to university is evolving, because to compete in this changing world, we need to nurture a much broader range of talent.

As the Prime Minister has announced, we have a new ambition. No longer just half; we want two-thirds of our young people to get into high-level learning, be it academic, technical, or an apprenticeship. But pro-technical and pro-vocational does not mean being anti-academic. Our universities are a stamp of quality recognised across the world, a source of immense national pride, and a driver of economic strength in our regions. To any young person growing up in England today, I say this: if you want to go to university, if it is right for you, and if you meet the requirements, this Government will back you. That is why we are introducing new targeted maintenance grants for those students most in need, funded by a levy on international students’ fees, because in this country, opening up access for domestic students from disadvantaged communities is my priority.

We also need a system that delivers for working people living busy lives. That is why we are making higher-level learning more flexible and available in bitesize chunks, with break points in degrees, and supported by the lifelong learning entitlement. But it is not only degrees that matter. I want to see our universities working with colleges to deliver more level 4 and 5 qualifications, and to spread that excellence far and wide, making it easier for people to take those vital courses in their local further education college, and delivering the “missing middle” of skills that is so important for our economy and for our people seeking their next promotion.

To safeguard the excellence in our universities for future generations, last November I announced that tuition fees would increase by £285 this academic year. Today I confirm that we will increase undergraduate tuition fee caps for all higher education providers in line with forecast inflation for the next two academic years. We will future-proof our maintenance loan offer by increasing maintenance loans in line with forecast inflation every academic year. To provide long-term certainty over future funding, we will legislate, when parliamentary time allows, to increase tuition fee caps automatically in the future, linked to quality. We will not allow institutions that do not take quality seriously make their students pay more. Charging full fees will be conditional on high-quality teaching, balancing stability for universities with fairness for students and taxpayers.

Within this White Paper is a challenge to our universities to build on what makes them great, drive up access, drive out low-quality provision, improve collaboration and push forward innovation, deliver the research breakthroughs that will revitalise our economy, and feed that energy back into our local communities.

We will support every young person to take the pathway that is right for them—technical, academic or vocational—but I will not accept their having no pathway at all. Far too many of our young people find themselves not in employment, education or training. From there, they become isolated from society, disconnected from success and their hope fading, and that must change. We will strengthen the part played by schools in the transition to post-16 education, we will improve accountability, with a bigger role for strategic authorities, and we will introduce a new guarantee. Any 16 or 17 year-old not in education or training will automatically get a place at a local provider. I will not let opportunity slip away, just as those young people are getting going in life.

The White Paper delivers on that promise to our young people to give them the skills that they need, but the task of revitalising our skills system is not the isolated work of one department or another. It is the collective undertaking of local and national leaders, together with our workforces, businesses and trade unions. It is mission-led Government in action and the prize is huge: opportunity for our young people, growth for our economy and renewal for our nation. I commend this Statement to the House”.

My Lords, I thank the Government for this White Paper, which is an incredibly important and wide-ranging document. It is essential that we build the skills pipeline to turn around the current stagnation in productivity and economic growth. But we also know, on all sides of the House, that this is a tough problem to crack. I read somewhere—I did not double check the data—that there have been 41 attempts to address this issue since the Labour Government were elected in 1997. As with all major reform, the challenge will lie in effective implementation. Delivering the scale of change envisaged in the White Paper will depend on clear accountability and long-term stability of decision-making. I am sure it is an issue that we will come back to in this House in the years ahead.

We are pleased to see that there are elements in the White Paper that build on the work of the previous Government. We are pleased to see a date confirmed for the introduction of the lifelong learning entitlement. We hope very much that this will build a pipeline of skills at levels 4 and 5, which we know are significantly lacking in the economy. It is not clear how this change will be incentivised. It would be helpful to hear from the Minister how the Government intend to create a pull from employers and how they will manage the financial risks to higher education institutions that, understandably, might be nervous about moving from a three-year degree model to a more modular approach.

As the Minister knows, there is a huge marketing task to be done. The pilots that we ran when in government significantly lacked demand—that is a polite way of describing it—so making people aware of these opportunities will be very important. It is also important that the Government can reassure the House that level 4 and level 5 qualifications will retain rigour and labour market currency, and not simply represent partial completion of degree programmes.