Sub-Committee on Education, Skills and the Economy
Oral evidence: Responsibilities of the Minister for Skills, HC 704
Monday 25 January 2016
Ordered by the House of Commons to be published on Monday 25 January 2016.
Members present: Neil Carmichael (Chair), Ian Austin, Lucy Frazer, Ian Mearns, Amanda Milling, Amanda Solloway, Michelle Thompson, Craig Tracey, Chris White, Mr Iain Wright.
Questions 1 – 62
Witness: Nick Boles MP, Minister for Skills, Department for Business, Innovation and Skills and Department for Education, gave evidence.
Q1 Chair: Good afternoon, Nick, and welcome to this joint Committee. It is aimed at dealing with the challenges to improve our productivity, and you are very much in the spotlight when it comes to productivity, because, across both Departments, we think that skills are a hugely important part of the remit to improve productivity. We are going to be asking you a series of questions for the next 90 minutes or so, because I know you have to go before 6.
Nick Boles: I thought we were going for an hour, but I will stay as long as the Committee would like me to stay.
Chair: We will see how we get on, because we have 10 good questions. If the questions are brisk and the answers are precise, then we could be finished within an hour, which I think would be good. Now, you are a Minister in both the Department for Education and the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills. How do you make that work?
Nick Boles: Thank you very much, Mr Chairman, and can I say the fact that there are two chairmen of this Committee is a sign of good co-operative working, which I hope that I emulate? It is incredibly welcome that you are doing this, because, just as it would be crazy if we were making policy separately in two Departments, so it would be crazy to be holding us to account separately. While there is obviously a role for the BIS Committee to do its thing and for the Education Committee to do its thing, when it comes to skills, this initiative is very welcome.
I genuinely believe this, so much so that I literally do not know, in my meetings, whether an official is in the DfE or BIS. They come to meetings; we discuss things we are doing, ideas we have had, problems we have encountered; I have no idea whether it is a DfE official or a BIS official, because they are entirely integrated. Meetings might have three of one and six of the other. My private office has some people from DfE and some people from BIS. I do not know which is which, because my view is this is a completely integrated portfolio, which needs to have reform programmes operating across the 16 to 19 end and then the adult end.
Incredibly little comes across my desk—whether it is a PQ, a letter from an MP, a policy issue or a budget discussion—that does not affect the technical, formal responsibilities of both Departments. When approaching the spending review, as you can imagine, because each Department is conducting its negotiations with the Treasury, sometimes Departments like to hold their cards close to their chest. I made clear—and both the Secretary of State for Education, Nicky Morgan, and the Secretary of State for BIS, Sajid Javid, completely agreed—that, in the development of all our proposals, we should work jointly across BIS teams and DfE teams. It was in only the very final stages of that negotiation that it became a separate conversation.
I am sure we can always do more, and it is always interesting to hear about other people’s experiences. I sit in one place; other people may have a different experience. From my perspective, though, I think it is very well integrated.
Q2 Chair: Why do we not just have one Department and get on with it?
Nick Boles: There is an interesting question here. Funnily enough, it is an issue that I had given some consideration to before becoming a Minister and before getting involved in this particular area. There is a peculiarly British obsession with the musical chairs of what is known in the jargon as machinery of government changes. Nick Herbert had been doing some interesting work with John Healey, before he went back on to the Front Bench, on civil service reform in other countries. I believe they looked at New Zealand, and maybe some other countries, where, rather than endlessly reorganising Departments, they decide what the big issues are, appoint a Minister to cover each issue, and that Minister effectively controls both the budgets and the people working on their issue, whichever Department they are in.
For my money, that is what we are doing here. I think that is a more constructive approach. If any Prime Minister—and this is way above my pay grade—starts fiddling with the machinery of government, that just becomes an excuse for inaction. It becomes a distraction from the policy, because suddenly everybody is worrying about where they are going to sit and whether they are going to keep their job. It is not a good thing to do. Unless I am presented with conclusive evidence to suggest we are not working in an integrated way, let us forget about the bureaucratic musical chairs.
Q3 Chair: London Councils told the House of Lords Social Mobility Committee that they did not think the two Departments thought about each other, in connection with the issues about which they were talking.
Nick Boles: It is interesting: you could ask whether London Councils necessarily practise what they preach on this particular matter, in their own level of integration between different boroughs. Having been a London councillor, I have some experience of the level of integration between the borough I was on and neighbouring boroughs. It is fine for them to make a claim, and I am always happy to consider any evidence, but I would like detail. I have been the Minister since eight months before the election, and nobody has ever written to me and said, “I have this problem, and the problem is not being fixed because the two Departments do not join up together.” I just do not see this in the actual business of the Departments.
Q4 Chair: People operating in the post-16 area might take a different view, because of course there is an awful lot of overlap there, with schools going up to 18 and FE colleges starting much earlier. That territory is quite confused, certainly for operators having to deal with two Departments, two cultures, two budgets and so on. We will come back to this, because it is an important subject and we must do that. Before I move on to a completely different subject, what is your view about university technical colleges, and do you fully support them?
Nick Boles: Yes, I do. They offer the prospect of a completely different kind of education, offering people different kinds of opportunities than our current traditional school system does. Like all innovations, there is some risk involved, because you are trying something new. There is no question that some UTCs have found it hard to recruit, because they are recruiting at an age that is not a natural age to be changing from one school to another. You can imagine having the conversation. I am not, but I suspect many of the members of Committee are parents, and, if somebody came to you and said, “We think you should hoik your son or daughter out of this school they have been in for a couple of years and put them into a completely new and innovative setting,” you can see that is a tough sell.
They have faced difficulties, but it is really important that Governments are always willing to innovate and try new things. The good ones are really offering something quite remarkable. The Reading UTC, which is outstanding, is an extraordinary institution, and there are some early signs from—the other jargon phrase—destination data, where people end up going, that they have much stronger performance than the institutions from which some of these young people came. We are determined to press on, but that does not mean we will not always be trying to think of ways to improve them, to slightly adapt the model to make them stronger and more robust.
Q5 Chair: You mentioned destination data, so will you be pursuing that as a way of measuring the performance of schools and colleges in the long term?
Nick Boles: Absolutely, and we are already doing that, as you will know. We want to go much further in being able to include the detail, for instance, of apprenticeships in the measurement of schools. We have taken a first step, but, if we could get into something much more detailed, that would help parents make choices. UTCs, interestingly, would then probably have a slightly easier time of recruiting than some of them currently do.
Q6 Mr Wright: Following on, Minister, from what Neil was saying, there are no policy examples where things fall through the cracks between the different Departments. Is that fair?
Nick Boles: I am not going to suggest that nobody out there has had an experience that they could describe in that way. I am saying that I do not have frustrations on that score. I look at all the reform programmes, which no doubt we will come to talk about. We have some fairly substantial reform programmes in almost every part of this area, and they are all across both age groups. I am very willing to respond, if the Committee has specific examples. You can see why it might happen, because, for all that they are only 100 yards apart or less, they are nevertheless two separate institutions. I am just not aware of anything substantive where it is happening.
I understand that colleges will say, “We have to have two funding arrangements, with the Education Funding Agency and the Skills Funding Agency.” That is true, but, frankly, most institutions in life have more than one customer, and that they are negotiating with and sending invoices to two customers rather than one is not impossible to imagine. I hope that the Committee welcome one of the first steps I took after my appointment, which was to recommend to the Secretary of State for BIS that the chief executive of the Education Funding Agency should become chief executive of the Skills Funding Agency as well, because that would ensure there was better integration between the two.
Q7 Mr Wright: You pre-empt my question, which is about the EFA and the SFA. You will be aware of the Public Accounts Committee’s report on further education funding. They say, “While the introduction of the Further Education Commissioner has been a positive development, oversight of the sector is overly complex, leading to confusion over who is responsible for intervening and in what circumstances.” In order to be lean, efficient and avoid duplication as far as possible, and given that there is a single chief executive for the organisations, should the EFA and the SFA not be essentially merged into one organisation? Would that not be more efficient?
Nick Boles: There is certainly a case for it, but I do not think you should rush into these things. We certainly have not made any decisions on that.
Q8 Mr Wright: Are you actively looking?
Nick Boles: You can make a good case for it. In a funny way, it refers back to my point about bureaucratic musical chairs. In a sense, the most important thing is what is happening to the money and how it is getting to providers. You will be aware that the Education Funding Agency’s money is lagged by a year, whereas the Skills Funding Agency’s budget is not. You could merge the institutions, but you have to think through the deep issues before necessarily rushing into that. I certainly do not exclude it. I just think that I do not want to jump to a conclusion before we have really thought it through. In truth, there is a lot of important work going on around area reviews and everything else. I do not want a restructuring to distract everybody from that work.
Q9 Ian Austin: We talked about UTCs a moment ago. Why are UTCs and sixth-form colleges not included in the area review process?
Nick Boles: There may be a slight misunderstanding. Sixth-form colleges are, but sixth forms—
Ian Austin: Sorry, school sixth forms.
Nick Boles: Yes. It is a pragmatic judgment. I tried to explain this in the House, but it is always easier to explain in a Committee than it is in the Chamber, where everybody is shouting at you. The analysis of the provision of all institutions post-16 is the fundamental starting point of every area review. Which schools are providing which A-levels to how many people where? That has to be part of the starting analysis, and that is why the involvement of the regional schools commissioner—who is the overseer, as it were, of quality in those schools—has been written in from the start.
As a matter of practicality, in every natural economic area, which is what we are trying to arrive at to undertake the area reviews, there are going to be dozens, maybe even hundreds, of schools with sixth forms. It is hard enough trying to get institutions to think about their future, whom they might combine with and how they might specialise. In reality, that is more of a conversation between colleges than it is ever going to be between schools, with one important exception, which is why it is so important that the regional schools commissioner is there. The Committee will be aware that we have made provision for sixth-form colleges to convert to academy status, either as part of an existing multi-academy trust or potentially as the founders of a new multi-academy trust.
In making that proposal, which we want to be part of an area review, they will have to talk to the local schools commissioner and, indeed, maybe to local multi-academy trusts and other schools. So there are no hard boundaries, but once you have started pulling in another 150 decision‑makers, you can imagine how long it will take to reach a decision on which everybody can agree. We need to get a move on; we do not want to be endlessly consulting. We want people to be able to make these decisions and then have strong institutions to go forward with.
Q10 Ian Austin: In terms of getting a move on, how confident are you about the timescales? FE Week has said that the first reviews are already behind schedule. The Black Country is in wave 3; I do not want to ask a personal question, but I thought I would throw it in there. How confident are you about the timescales being adhered to?
Nick Boles: I am more concerned about the quality of the outcome than whether it hits the month in the year that I initially signed off on as the plan. What we are trying to do here is put in place an institutional landscape that has some sustainability. We have managed to give people much greater certainty on the funding streams for this Parliament than I think anybody had expected in the spending review. If the institutions are strong enough to take advantage of that, then they can go off and prosper independently. These are independent institutions. They have to arrive at these decisions; they have to consult with their local community; they all have governing bodies. Let us not impose false time constraints, but, nevertheless, we want to get a move on, because we want everybody to be clear about their future within the next few years.
Q11 Ian Austin: On the funding issues, the Education Secretary said that the reviews are not about saving money, but your guidance says that you expect them to deliver net savings.
Nick Boles: The difference there is that it is not about saving money for the taxpayer directly. We are not looking to cut budgets. We already have, in the difficult circumstances we all face, a relatively positive settlement. But we want them to be able to save money internally, so that they are spending less on overheads and more on provision. I think the area reviews will enable them to do that, although that is not the only reason, because specialisation has its own value, leaving aside the cost. There will be fewer finance directors—
Q12 Ian Austin: But fewer sites as well. Do you expect the review process to result in the closure of college sites?
Nick Boles: Possibly, but there is no target at all. In cities, it is perhaps easier to see how you can maintain access to provision and have fewer sites. I represent a very rural area, and it is a much harder thing to see. I am not saying that I want to see this many sites withdrawn, at all. It is simply, “We want you to be stronger and better. We think you will be if you combine in ways that enable you to do that.”
Q13 Ian Austin: Can I ask one quick further question on the UTC issue that came up earlier? You said that persuading kids to move at 14 was a hard sell, and I completely see that, but is that an argument for greater specialisation across the board at 14? If you are persuaded that the UTC model is a good one, should there not be greater specialisation, perhaps academically, vocationally or whatever it might be, at 14? That is Ken Baker’s argument, isn’t it?
Nick Boles: That is absolutely Ken’s argument. If he was sitting here, as he has often done, in a more senior position than I, he would say, “Yes, as soon as possible.” I think it would be dangerous to rush into that conclusion. Most external observers of the British education system tend to think we specialise too young, not too old, relative to other systems. Secondly, just because UTCs are providing a special kind of education that is very valuable to certain people, it does not necessarily mean that the whole system should be changed to make that normal. We need to find a way of making sure that any young person who could benefit from that education is not discouraged from doing so. You will have seen an announcement the Secretary of State made at the weekend about requiring schools to open up for alternative providers to come and present. UTCs should be included in that.
Of course, schools will want kids who go on to university to do a full-time degree. If they want to stay and are going to benefit from staying in the sixth form, I completely understand that the school wants to do that, but they must not prevent other options from being brought in front of young people at the age where they are making decisions.
Q14 Ian Mearns: I would like to follow up, Minister, on the issue about not including school sixth forms and UTCs in the area reviews. We had an announcement recently—unless I was dreaming about this—that there was going to be an expectation from hereon in that head teachers would have to provide a menu of advice and guidance to young people, so that, in that post-16 progression, they were aware of what was available in local FE colleges, sixth-form colleges, etc. I am sure that that happened recently.
The fact that Ministers and the Department have said that means there must be an understanding or acceptance that, in some places, that was not already occurring. Is it not the case, therefore, that, where we have a suspicion that that is happening and youngsters are not getting the full range of advice, guidance and options presented to them, the area review there should be paused to see what the outcome of this new guidance would be? You might find within two years that an awful lot of youngsters who currently stay in sixth forms, with a fairly narrow range of options, are moving on to other providers in the locality, because they have had the advice and guidance that that range of options was open to them.
Nick Boles: I understand the argument, but I just do not believe that pausing helps anybody at all.
Ian Mearns: Have you told the Department for Transport?
Nick Boles: Fortunately, I am not a Minister in the Department for Transport. I want there to be a stronger set of institutions competing for those kids, bluntly, and I want them to be stronger soon, so that they can compete more effectively. I want more people who would benefit from a technical, professional education to be given really good advice about it, but also to know that, in their area, they have a first-class institution that is really strong in its specialism and is implanted in the local employer community. If we have FE colleges that have made some difficult decisions, they will be more able to do that.
Q15 Ian Mearns: I want to get to the very bottom of this. Are Ministers accepting that there are some schools where that range of options is not being presented to the young people under their control?
Nick Boles: Absolutely, and it should not happen. We hope that the combination of things we are doing will stop that happening. I think that the Committee is looking into careers advice and guidance.
Chair: We are.
Nick Boles: You are, and no doubt you will be speaking to Sam Gyimah about it. He has reiterated today that he and the Secretary of State will be publishing a careers strategy in the spring, which will probably be informed by the work that you do.
Q16 Chair: We are having a very significant inquiry on careers, so you can be sure that it will.
Nick Boles: There is lots of room for improvement, as we can all agree.
Chair: I am glad you said that, because we all think it, too.
Q17 Amanda Milling: Thank you, Minister, for attending this afternoon. Devolution is obviously a hot topic at the moment, and many of the devolution agreements want local areas to have more responsibility for skills and funding. I am just wondering to what extent we will see this devolution of funding and skills over the next four years.
Nick Boles: At the adult skills end, very substantially. There is a reason why I say “at the adult skills end,” because it is at that end that you have people who do not have a job that is taking them anywhere; they are perhaps 22 and they are thinking, “Okay, what am I going to do?” We want to have the local economic forces, whether it is the local authority, a combined authority or the LEP, coming together and saying, “Our employers tell us that we have a desperate need for more of some kind of technician,” and then commissioning relevant skills provision in their area.
We took a first step towards this when we devolved the capital end of the skills budget to local enterprise partnerships, which we did a few years ago. Then you will have noticed that, in some of the devolution deals, we said that the whole non-apprenticeships adult skills budget would also be devolved. That is very much the direction of travel. It slightly depends on how quickly all these devolution deals and other combined authority proposals come through, but our message to local areas is, “If you get yourselves organised and you want to make the commissioning of adult skills provision in your area a core part of your new functions, we will absolutely be up for it.”
Q18 Amanda Milling: There is an argument to say that we are pulling in two different directions, because the skills agenda is being devolved, but from an education perspective, it is becoming more centralised, with the regional schools commissioners. Is there a bit of a danger that this becomes not very joined up and we find ourselves in a situation where things fall between the cracks and local needs are not met?
Nick Boles: I understand the argument; I do not really accept the thrust of it. We now have participation up until the age of 18 for everybody. That is what we are seeking, and we are nearly there; the latest figures are very positive. We are basically saying to people, “We expect you to be in education or training until your 18th birthday,” and that is a universal requirement. We want everybody in the country, wherever they are, to be given that high‑quality education and training up to the age of 18.
Of course, yes, for some of them it might take the form of an apprenticeship after the age of 16, which is provided through a local employer that has a job it wants to give them, but generally the skills provision they are offered should be pretty much universal. We want everybody, whether they are in Cornwall, Worcestershire or Lincolnshire, to know that they could go and do a course in engineering at college, or a course in care or business administration, and have some confidence that that course is one that employers in that sector, wherever they are in the country, value and respect.
You have to then pick your point of transition. Because the requirement for full-time education stops after the age of 18, we pick that moment, but there comes a point where the very variable local need for further skills training into adulthood becomes something that is best understood locally. As you can imagine, if you are in Lincolnshire, you have needs in relation to food processing, farming, tourism, and of course you also have the base that everybody needs hairdressers and a whole lot of other things. There is, nevertheless, a strong difference. In the centre of Birmingham, I suspect there is not much need for people to know how to pick fruit.
You have to pick a moment where you go from the universal to the more local. We have decided that 19 is probably the right point to do it. Ultimately, they will still have to be living up to the statutory requirements, so local areas will not be able to go off on a complete frolic of their own and commission just what they are very excited about, because those young people will have statutory entitlements that they must fulfil. But they will be allowed to vary it at the margins, to make it more locally fitting. Also, they will be able to say, “This institution is going to be our engineering centre of excellence,” or, “That institution is going to be our childcare centre of excellence.” They are closer to it than we are.
Q19 Amanda Milling: On this point about being local, a lot of the larger multi‑academy trusts operate nationally rather than locally. How effectively are they engaging with local businesses and communities, bearing in mind that you used “local” so many times in your response there? Are smaller MATs more effective at local engagement?
Nick Boles: It is not my area of expertise, but my layman’s observation is that the best multi-academy trusts tend to have quite a strong regional focus. While they might not be within any particular local authority area, they nevertheless build a reputation in a region. You can see the advantages of that. Say, in a school setting, you are teaching the EBacc subjects, other GCSEs and, if you have a sixth form, A-levels. University entry is the most likely destination for those doing A-levels, and the requirements of universities do not vary through locality. They might vary through the universities’ specialisms, but they do not vary through locality. So, as with everything—with health, with social care, with transport—you have to decide at what point the paramountcy of local interest overwhelms the paramountcy of national interests and individual rights. I think that move out of full-time education into adulthood is the right point at which to do it.
Q20 Chair: Before we move on to Lord Sainsbury’s work, you contrasted Birmingham with Lincolnshire in terms of skills requirements and so forth, which raised an interesting point in my mind. We need data at the local level to know where the skills are really needed, how businesses interface with the world of education, and to effectively condition the choices in the right direction so they lead to career opportunities. Who should take responsibility for knowing more about the labour market at which level?
Nick Boles: That is a very interesting question. I do not want to stumble blindly into other people’s territory within the Government, but it has always seemed to me the obvious role for a local enterprise partnership to gather the data and translate it into various conclusions, whether it is about skills and the improvement to college facilities that they are going to fund, or whether it is about infrastructure, transport links or whatever. Obviously, there are parts of the country—the northern powerhouse, most famously—where you have a new combined authority and a mayor who, as the Mayor of London does, considers that to be an absolutely crucial part of their responsibility.
I do not think it will necessarily always be done at the same level in every part of the country, but, in those parts of the country like mine, which do not yet have a combined authority and a mayor, and may never have a mayor, the local enterprise partnership is the obvious actor to gather that information and turn it into useful lessons.
Q21 Chair: In short, if there is not an LEP responsible for it or already doing it, you would say that LEPs should get on and do it?
Nick Boles: Yes, I would have thought so. I would have thought it was a good use of their time and budgets.
Q22 Ian Mearns: Quickly coming back to Amanda’s question about multi-academy trusts, Minister, you mentioned that there are good examples of multi-academy trusts, but there are other multi-academy trusts that have their estates spread around the country. Some of those do not even have local synergies where the local school estates they have are complementary to each other and working together effectively. We have to deal with the situation as it is, rather than as we want it to be. Do you think we might need to dismantle some of those arrangements and reassemble them in configurations that work more appropriately together?
Nick Boles: No, I do not, because, as I said, I think that the expectations we have of mainstream schooling are pretty universal. We want every child, wherever they are in the country, to have access to high-quality teaching towards GCSEs, or towards A-levels if they are going to stay on in sixth form in the school. What is not acceptable, which is why this step that the Secretary of State announced over the weekend is significant, is for any school, school group or multi-academy trust to prevent alternative institutions and providers of alternative opportunities from getting to talk to young people when they are making their choices. We will be expecting all schools, including national and local multi-academy trusts and maintained schools, to give the opportunity to local FE colleges, apprenticeship providers and UTCs, if they have them, to come into the school and talk to young people about what alternatives there are outside the school.
Q23 Ian Mearns: In a nutshell, we therefore need an approach centred on the needs of the individual young person rather than any institution.
Nick Boles: Yes.
Q24 Ian Mearns: The Government have set up the independent panel, chaired by Lord Sainsbury. Has it met, and, if so, can you tell us what progress it has made so far?
Nick Boles: It has met, several times. I saw a document sketching out its early conclusions, and I was very encouraged indeed that it was getting to grips with exactly what we had hoped. If it is helpful, I will just give a bit of background as to why we set it up and what we are asking it to do.
In the last Parliament, the key reform on technical and professional education, in terms of its content, came out of Alison Wolf’s review. She recommended, and we decided to implement, the idea of a study programme, so that, rather than having a faintly random combination of courses that young people might be put on at age 16 when they arrive at an FE college, there is a greater sense of a programme, which has to have English and maths, if they do not already have Cs at GCSE, a bit of work experience or work placement, and then some substantial qualifications. That was, in a sense, phase 1 or step 1.
If you go to most other European countries—certainly the Scandinavian countries and the Netherlands, and I think it is also true in Germany, Austria and Switzerland—you discover that, at age 16, if you decide to go through a technical and professional career route, rather than an A-level route, you are expected, and the college is expected to help you, to make the choice about very broadly which direction you are heading in. It is not specifically what job you want to do, but whether you are broadly interested in engineering, care or retail and business services. Countries vary; they may have 12 or 20 alternative routes, but they do not have 200 alternative routes. The key thing is that, at the age of 16, you should have an idea of where you are heading.
In your second year of college, if you stay in college and do not immediately start an apprenticeship, you might specialise a bit more. You might go from saying, “I want to do engineering,” to saying, “Now I know enough to know that I am interested in electrical engineering.” The idea is that you are being guided towards a destination.
What we have asked them to do is look at: what routes should we have? How many of them should we have? How should they be specified and devised? One of the questions, getting back to the central and local issue, is whether every part of the country has to provide access to all the routes. It is slightly my prejudice, but I am waiting for them to come back, because, in some parts of the country, a route may be borderline irrelevant, as there are no employers locally offering it. They are looking into those sorts of questions, but I think this will be a very positive step towards ensuring that people who leave school and go to college with a technical or professional ambition are guided towards a destination, rather than being left to find out for themselves which way they are heading.
Q25 Ian Mearns: Youngsters will end up in different institutions for different reasons, with different motivations. Given what we know is the patchy nature of advice and guidance available to them, are these young people going to be given an opportunity to change if they find out that they are actually on the wrong course?
Nick Boles: Yes, absolutely. There must always be that option. But we need to be careful—and this is true now, not least with sixth forms—that the incentives are clearly and well designed to ensure that an institution does not benefit if it puts somebody into an inappropriate course that they do not complete. I am not totally satisfied that the current incentives do that. That is something we will also be looking at—not through Lord Sainsbury’s panel, but we will be looking at that—because I think it is important.
Of course, we all accept that people are allowed to change their minds and institutions cannot be expected to guarantee that every student who starts a course will complete it, but it needs to be clear that they are not financially better off if somebody starts a programme and does not complete it. There needs to be a strong bias in favour of giving people good advice up front, and then encouraging them and supporting them to succeed in whatever they have chosen.
Q26 Ian Mearns: At the same time, if they really are on the wrong course, we do not want to have the wastage of them dropping out of the system altogether.
Nick Boles: No. The other thing to say is that I do not want people to think, if you have decided to start a technical or professional route, that it implies you have decided you are not going to university—absolutely not. It is just deciding that you are not doing A-levels. You might decide you want to go to university, and there are plenty of universities offering quite technical degree courses. Equally, you might do an apprenticeship that becomes a degree-apprenticeship. There is no sense of you somehow cutting yourself off from the other options, but you are at least clear about what this would lead to if you stuck with it.
Q27 Ian Mearns: Over my time as an MP, which is relatively short, since 2010, I have met lots of company directors and managers who started off on the shop floor but went through an apprenticeship and ended up with a degree, a higher national diploma or something of that nature, having progressed up through the ranks.
Nick Boles: You see more of that.
Q28 Ian Mearns: We do not want to see that being cut off to young people in the future. Now, will the new routes implied within the Sainsbury review lead to the demise of two-year college courses, or are we not thinking like that?
Nick Boles: No, far from it. The ideal is that you start with the destination, which is a really worthwhile job that uses your skills and rewards you well, and work backwards. You say, “If you want people to be able to end up with that kind of a job, let us say in engineering, what sorts of things should they be doing at every level or every age?” Not everybody is at the same level at the same age, so you need to look at both those things. You want to make sure that everything they do makes it more likely that they will be able to progress.
Within that, and this is where the Dutch and other Scandinavian countries—not that Holland is a Scandinavian country—also have an interesting system, you have this idea that there are then two very broad alternative paths that can lead you to that same destination. One is work-based, effectively an apprenticeship, but of course an apprenticeship has to involve formal training, too. The other is college-based, but it also has to involve work experience. It is just about the weighting, as it were: are you mainly with your employer and getting paid for doing a job, or are you full time in college? There will be two-year college courses, for those who have not yet found an apprenticeship that will take them towards their target destination. The key thing is that they both need to lead to the same place, so there cannot be a sheep and goats thing going on. They have to lead to the same place: “I want to become a registered technician in X, and I could do it through college or I could do it through an apprenticeship.”
Q29 Ian Mearns: Given that, in answering that question, you accepted that young people achieve different levels of chronological development at different stages, what would happen to learners who may not be ready for an apprenticeship by, say, age 17?
Nick Boles: That is one of the reasons I resisted the suggestion that somehow we should measure the success of the apprenticeship reforms based on whether we see a dramatic increase in the number of 16 to 18 year‑olds doing apprenticeships. We are all going to be working for a bloody long time, and we have this idea that everybody should be staying in full-time education until 18, so I want apprenticeships to be an option for people between the ages of 16 and 18, but many people, especially if the course on offer at college is taking them intelligently towards an apprenticeship, might think, “No, I will go to college for a year, possibly even two, and then I will try and get an apprenticeship.” I do not think that that is a bad idea at all.
We may see some shifting. We may see even fewer 16 year‑olds doing apprenticeships, and those numbers may, in a sense, shift into 17. But, if they want to wait until they are 18 or 19, the funding is there. They are just as much encouraged to do that as they are to do it earlier.
Q30 Ian Mearns: We also have a group of people who have potentially missed out on earlier stages of learning, and now we are in your area of remit: older learners, especially those who want to reskill through an FE course or gain qualifications for the first time. Will the review Lord Sainsbury is doing help facilitate that, do you think?
Nick Boles: It is mainly focused on what opportunities we are offering and what information we are providing to young people about their course through life. The key thing is that that information has to be equally relevant if, having had a tough few years, aged 22, you decide you want to go back and get those qualifications. The routes will become the guide as to what should be offered to older people. They are not just for 16 to 18 year‑olds, but it is all about the destination working back. Wherever you are and whatever age you are, if you come and say, “This is where I want to get to,” we can advise you, “This is the course that you should do to help you get there.”
Ian Mearns: As anybody in an FE college will tell you, having some older learners on a course for younger people is very stabilising and a positive influence.
Nick Boles: I am sure.
Q31 Chris White: Good afternoon, Minister. Apprenticeships have been seen by some to be less prestigious than the university route. How do you think you are going to change that perception?
Nick Boles: You hear a lot in the public debate, though I suspect pretty much confined to people in the bubble, about parity of esteem. I must say that I admire the underlying motivations of those who talk about it, but rather wish they would stop talking about it. If you start from that end of the telescope, you are never going to get there. I do not care about the parity of esteem. I want this to be a fantastic opportunity for every young person making their way in the world. I want every parent to think, “Yippee, my kid has come back and they are getting this apprenticeship.” I want teachers to think, “God, I wish I had done one of those things, because that would have put me in a much better place in my life.” Frankly, if they are like that, do I care whether they have parity of esteem with universities? I want them to be terrific, and for everybody to know that they are terrific and to advise young people accordingly.
At the moment, we often find that young people have a much better idea of what modern apprenticeships really are like, and it is their parents and teachers who have this very old fashioned idea that it is all about becoming a car mechanic. For some it is, but for very many it is something very different. We will end up with a really good system that offers everybody the opportunities that are best designed for their character and personality if we focus on just making them really high quality and not worrying about whether people compare them with degrees.
Q32 Chris White: You are obviously very passionate about that.
Nick Boles: Sorry. It was a bit of a rant.
Chris White: It is fine. But you mentioned the parents and teachers. How are you going to change their minds? Young people are seeing that these apprenticeships are changing, but how will you persuade the people who are going to help them make those decisions?
Nick Boles: There are lots of bits of this. I think it is beginning, but there is still a long way to go. It is made up of a whole lot of things. The first is broadening the range of occupations and levels of occupation that you can get into through an apprenticeship route. That is why the whole Government, but particularly Sajid Javid, are so focused on degree apprenticeships, because, although they will always be a relatively small proportion of the overall number, we want anybody who is starting a level 2 or 3 apprenticeship to know there is a degree apprenticeship that they could do if they discovered in themselves the ambition and the ability to do so.
That will begin to change it, because, once parents start seeing that people are getting first-class degrees, running companies and becoming lawyers and accountants through an apprenticeship route, they will change their attitudes towards apprenticeships very quickly, particularly when they add to that the fact that you do not have to borrow money to do a degree through an apprenticeship; the employer pays for the degree and pays you a salary while you are doing it. That will help change it.
We have a responsibility in terms of marketing. We do not often get sign‑off for marketing budgets in Government anymore, but we do for apprenticeships. We had a big campaign last year and will have another campaign this year, which is very much about changing the mind-sets of teachers and those who advise young people. Another element, which I think will be very powerful, is getting people who have completed apprenticeships to go back to their school and talk about them, because, ultimately, the people they are talking to are much more likely to listen to someone three years older than they are than to us. That is something we are very keen to encourage.
There probably are other elements, but the final element is data. The data of what people are doing and how much money they are earning three to five years after they have completed their apprenticeship will be the most powerful thing of all. We had a reception for the Apprenticeship Delivery Board in No. 10 last week. The Prime Minister said that he had been to an engineering business apprenticeship and asked them what they were earning when they completed their apprenticeship. These were 20 to 21 year‑olds, and they were earning 32 grand a year. The PM said, “How many graduates on their first salary, aged 21, are going to be on 32 grand a year? Not many.” As more of these bits of information get out there, perceptions will begin to shift.
Q33 Chris White: Can we shift slightly to the 3 million target? Are you on the way to meeting that? Are you on target for that target? Do you think that trying to establish a number that is 50% higher than we achieved before 2015 will have an impact on the quality of our apprenticeships?
Nick Boles: We are making good progress. Nothing keeps me awake, but that target nevertheless preys on my mind, because it is ambitious. But do you know what? In some ways, it is not that ambitious. Look at the number—and I do not have the figures with me, but I know that officials will be able to provide them—of apprentices per thousand of population. Even if we hit that target, we will still be way down against most of our European competitors, so it is not that much. It is a big distance to travel, but, overall, it is not an inappropriate target for a country that wants to improve its technical skills.
The bit that I completely do not worry about, although I understand why people make the argument, is this idea that somehow, if you are going for volume, you will undermine quality. I would be worrying about it if we had not done some of the other things we are doing; if we were trying to do many more with the same amount of money and had not worked out how we were going to fund the growth. That is why we have done the apprenticeship levy, which is a controversial step but will ensure that literally twice as much money is spent on apprenticeships in 2019‑20 as was spent on them in 2010‑11. Find me another Government budget that will double over 10 years.
If you have the money and you also have the work on the standards to ensure the standards are high quality and relevant to employers, funnily enough, I think the quality will end up supporting the numbers. If employers think, “These are really, really good qualifications; they give me exactly what I need for the future,” I think you will find even those employers that are not paying the levy being more ready to come and hire apprentices.
Q34 Chris White: You raised the levy. As I am sure you know, the CBI suggests this might result in significant job losses. How would you respond to that?
Nick Boles: I do not accept that. I understand that there is a technical argument that you put up the cost of employment, and it is a tax on payroll, but the truth is that we have taken many other measures. We have relieved apprentices of national insurance. We have introduced the employers’ allowance, which means you can hire lots of people without paying any national insurance and you will not pay any national insurance on apprentices under the age of 25 in future. There are lots of countervailing measures. There are substantial and continuing cuts to corporation tax.
It is pointless to look at one intervention. You have to look at all the interventions the Government are making. Are they, on balance, supporting employment or undermining it? I think the evidence is pretty strong from the recent past that we are supporting employment in a way that most countries envy.
Q35 Chris White: Just one last technical question: do you know how many apprenticeships will be taken up by 16 to 19 year‑olds, as a percentage of the 3 million?
Nick Boles: I am not very good at remembering exact figures, but I am not projecting a huge increase in the percentage. It will mean an increase in the absolute number, because the total is going up, but I am not asking officials to plan for, and I do not think we should be looking to strive for, a big increase in the percentage, for the arguments I made already. We want people to be doing things that take them further. It is not about that first job; it is about the career. If they could benefit from a year or two in college before starting an apprenticeship, we should encourage them to do it.
Q36 Mr Wright: Minister, is it the Government’s policy that the apprenticeship levy will be a ring-fenced fund that can only be drawn on by levy payers to fund apprenticeship training?
Nick Boles: Most of that is the Government’s policy, but I will pick out the bit that is not quite right. Yes, the money is ring-fenced for apprenticeship training, but, no, it is not just ring-fenced for the apprenticeship training by those companies that have paid the levy. We want those companies that have paid the levy to have first dibs on it. If you have made a levy payment, you will get an amount in your digital account that you will then be able to spend on apprenticeship training for your employees.
Q37 Mr Wright: How much will that be?
Nick Boles: What do you mean by “how much?”? It depends.
Q38 Mr Wright: Will it be a certain amount per apprentice?
Nick Boles: You are anticipating a lot of what we will be telling people in a slightly more systematic way, but the point is that the money will relate to the amount of levy you have paid. As to how you can spend it, you are right, of course: as is currently the case, different apprenticeship standards attract different levels of public funding. That will continue to be the case.
Q39 Mr Wright: The more you put in, the more you will get out.
Nick Boles: Let me just try to answer the question. You will not be able to spend an unlimited amount on any particular apprenticeship. There will be limits on each kind of apprentice, but you will be able, as a levy-paying company, to spend all the money that you have paid in on apprenticeships.
Q40 Mr Wright: What about employers that are not big enough to pay the levy? That is about 98%. How are they going to have appropriate training funding for apprentices?
Nick Boles: While it will be possible for any employer that pays the levy to use its contribution on its own apprenticeships, across the whole economy, we do not expect that every employer will use up all of its money, because there are a lot of employers that do not currently. Now, I hope that many of them will. That is one of the positive impacts of the levy. But you can imagine that there are some kinds of business—I will not mention any names—that have very high salaries and very high qualifications required of new recruits, and therefore will probably be unable to employ that many apprentices, but they might well be paying a huge amount of levy, because the levy is based on the total value of their payroll bill.
The levy money that is not used by those employers that have paid it will effectively be recycled—and I cannot go into detail about how, because we will be bringing forward announcements on that later in the year—to support the apprenticeships of employers that do not pay the levy. The total amount of money is increasing very substantially, as you know. We currently spend about £1.5 billion on apprenticeships. By the end of the Parliament, it will be up to £2.6 billion.
Q41 Mr Wright: My final question on apprenticeships is: there may be professions and business models that currently have very good high‑quality training schemes that are not classed as apprenticeships. As a means of getting to the 3 million target, will you put pressure on those professions to rebadge them as apprenticeships?
Nick Boles: I am not putting any pressure on them, but I think their finance directors will be putting pressure on them to make good use of the levy they have paid, which they can do if they have relevant apprenticeship standards. The way that the standards system works now is that a group of employers can come forward and say, “We need a new standard. There is not one out there that is relevant to this occupation.” If they can get that standard approved, which in future will be done by the new Institute for Apprenticeships, then they will have a standard that they can then recruit people into. That is the process. For any employer that wants to do apprenticeships, it should be possible to ensure that there is a standard relevant to their business and their occupations so they can then invest in apprenticeships with the money they have paid through the levy.
Q42 Michelle Thomson: Thinking about devolved nations, how much clarity do you have as to how the apprenticeship levy will work specifically in Scotland, in terms of its population share?
Nick Boles: I am very much looking forward to going to Edinburgh next week, I think it is, to meet with Roseanna Cunningham and the Skills Ministers from Wales and Northern Ireland. It is important that we work to make it as easy as possible. Ultimately, as you know well, this is a totally devolved matter, while the tax, like all these sorts of taxes—not all taxes, I am glad to say, but all these ones—is UK-wide. The Scottish Government will receive—I think this is the jargon—a Barnett consequential payment, as part of their grant funding, which they can choose to spend on anything, but obviously they can also choose to spend it on apprenticeships. There will not be any direct relationship in Scotland between an apprenticeship and the way it is funded, and the levy. It will just be a contribution to the general budget of Scotland.
Q43 Michelle Thomson: I am pleased to hear that you are going to meet with them, because it is about the surety that it will be done on a partnership basis. There will be unintended consequences, where certain types of apprenticeships are different. You obviously have a level of confidence that that will be the case.
Nick Boles: There are always going to be tricky issues, but the key thing about them is to try to anticipate them and talk about them openly. We really want to support apprenticeships in Scotland, apprenticeships in Wales, apprenticeships everywhere, while recognising the reality that our own system, a digital system of accounts funded by the levy, is not one that any of those Governments are currently planning to emulate.
Q44 Chair: We have heard about your sleeping capacity, so, just before you turn in, do you ever worry about league tables and how they might discourage schools from letting their pupils head down routes that will to take them to apprenticeships, because league tables are put in the best light through doing A-levels?
Nick Boles: I do not worry about league tables, but I guess I would worry if we were happy for league tables to be the only information that parents get or rely on to help make their choices about the school that people go to. If you can have league tables—because, frankly, they provide essential information—but also have other information about the destinations people are going to, about what happens to them a few years after they have completed their studies, that will mean people can make a rounded choice. This is why we have been doing so much work on destination data. It is perfectly fair to say, at the moment, that it is a bit lopsided, because there is so much granular information in the league tables and there is not enough currently about destinations. That is being brought forward, as you know, and in the next few years the quality and the quantity of that information will go up a lot.
Q45 Chair: The Home Office looks at skills we might need for the purposes of regulating immigration. Does that list have any correlation to your policies in connection with skills and apprenticeships?
Nick Boles: It has a connection, because it is another snapshot of a picture in which we all accept we have some grave needs that we are currently not satisfying internally, so they will be looking at the same information. It does not directly inform our commissioning, because, if you think about apprenticeships, apprenticeships are jobs and you need to have employers wanting to create them. We are not saying we want to have more engineering apprenticeships and fewer of another kind of apprenticeship. We are responding to the demand out there in the market.
With the rest of skills provision, as we have said, we would like to move in the direction of effectively having a universal offer for anybody under the age of 19, and then a locally more targeted offer for people over the age of 19. There is also a question of different timeframes, because anything in that information that might inform the Home Office’s decisions about how many visas to issue to a particular sector is dealing with the immediate need. With the best will in the world, however much progress we make in skills reform, we might solve that problem in five years’ time, but we are not going to solve it for this year, because it takes a bit longer to get people into technician status.
Q46 Chair: One quick final question from me on this area: what is the institute going to be doing?
Nick Boles: The Institute for Apprenticeships?
Chair: Yes.
Nick Boles: It has a very important role, and I hope it is going to become a very important institution that people will recognise as, in a sense, the guarantor of quality in the apprenticeship system. To give you a prosaic answer, it is going to take over from the Government the role of approving apprenticeship standards, of approving the assessment regimes that operate for apprenticeships—the end point assessment, it is called—and of guarding the quality of the apprenticeship programme. It will have a much more arms’ length relationship with Government and politicians than normal Government agencies. It will be much more akin to the Bank of England in discharging its interest rate policy or NICE in discharging—
Q47 Chair: Will there be a governor?
Nick Boles: That is rather a nice idea. I have not yet thought that one through, but there will be a board, which will be mainly business leaders, though there will also be other important representatives on the board. The key point is that it is not just an advisory body; it is not just publishing reports saying, “Woe is me.” It has a very deep responsibility. It will be relatively untrammelled in its task of approving standards, approving assessment regimes and quality control, and we will have quite a formal relationship with it. We will give it an annual mandate, and it will then publish an annual report saying what it did, what it did not do and whether it agreed with what we suggested.
We are introducing this new levy, so it is very important that businesses feel they are in control of what they are being required to invest in. That is the deal.
Chair: We have to speed it up a bit. Ian, you are going to be talking about careers in the context of the Government and delivery.
Ian Mearns: I will, but I would like to go back briefly to apprenticeships for one moment.
Chair: One quick, snappy question.
Q48 Ian Mearns: Yes. In the autumn, we got the stats in terms of young people going on to apprenticeships, and it was about 6% of the 16 to 18 year‑old cohort. You said that you were quite cool about them having a couple of years at college. Is there not a danger, though, given the targets the Government have in terms of 3 million apprentices being recruited and put into training regimes, that those young people going on to college courses could be lost to other routes and opportunities by doing that very thing, rather than being recruited at 16 to apprenticeships, the way it used to happen 20 or 30 years ago?
Nick Boles: I do not see that as a danger. It is like the point about parity of esteem: I do not believe that the way to support apprenticeships and achieve our target is to somehow drive people into them. The way to do it is to make them fantastically good and make sure everybody understands how good they are. If young people want to do A-levels and go to university, we have also uncapped university entrance, on purpose, because we think that is a terrific route for many, many people. But we also want to make sure that the other route is clear.
All I am saying is that, unlike a university course, an apprenticeship is a job. A lot of employers do not necessarily find that they are comfortable with the idea of hiring 16 and 17 year‑olds to do jobs that might have quite a strong technical component and might even have some health and safety issues to wrestle with. It has to be for employers to judge the age at which they want to recruit. Nobody will be stopping them from hiring 16 year‑olds. I am just saying that I do not anticipate a huge increase in the proportion of that cohort.
Ian Mearns: The only thing that I would say to that, Minister, is that parity of esteem is not an overnight exercise and cannot be done just by marketing, I do not think.
Nick Boles: I agree.
Chair: Can you give some parity to the next question?
Q49 Ian Mearns: Indeed, of course, Chairman. You are responsible for adult careers guidance, and your counterpart who is currently speaking in the Chamber is responsible for careers guidance for young people. Would having a single Minister for careers guidance help to bring more focus to the issue?
Nick Boles: I do not think so, because the truth is that I was until the election, and this just made more sense. I have relatively little contact with schools, because, although sixth form in schools is a shared responsibility between me and the Schools Minister, most of everything else I do does not take place in schools. Sam Gyimah, who is the relevant Minister, is able to focus on what is actually happening in schools.
With careers advice and guidance, you find that the nature of the need and the most efficient delivery is very different. With adults, it is either through Jobcentre Plus, which often does a fantastic job of giving advice—not just the standard service, but one-on-one careers advice—or through attracting people to websites, which can give them a lot of information, and a telephone service. We all know that there is a requirement and an obligation on schools to provide a lot within the school environment: companies coming in and making presentations; careers advisers sitting down with young people. That is relatively unlikely to migrate entirely to the internet or phone consultation. Sam and I talk about it the whole time, but the delivery of the service is going to be quite different for adults than it is for people who are at school.
Q50 Ian Mearns: Are the services for adults and for youngsters at school going to be part of the same strategy? Mr Gyimah was talking last month about the Government publishing a careers strategy in the coming weeks. Is that all part of the same strategy, or are there two different strategies?
Nick Boles: When I have listened, as I always intently do, to both of these Select Committees, your criticisms and concerns have tended to focus in particular on what is going on in schools, and the strategy will focus in particular on what is going on in schools. That is not to say that it will not include what we are doing on adults, but, bluntly, we do not think that the requirement for improvement is as acute with adult careers advice and guidance as it is for younger people.
Q51 Ian Mearns: I suppose there is a concern about the lack of impartiality with Jobcentre Plus, because Jobcentre Plus has targets to meet in terms of getting people into employment anyway.
Nick Boles: That is why we have the National Careers Service, which has a website, a telephone service and face-to-face advice. It is because of that.
Chair: We need to finish by 6 o’clock, so can you be quicker?
Q52 Ian Mearns: Of course, I will. Should we expect new announcements in the strategy, or will it focus on bringing together existing initiatives?
Nick Boles: You will have to ask Mr Gyimah about that.
Q53 Craig Tracey: One of the keys to delivering on the targets that the Department has set is having business and education partnerships, but recent research from the DfE showed that around half of schools and colleges do not have any formal links with businesses to arrange things like work experience. From my experience as a business member on an employment and skills board, that was the case, and it was almost that the two spoke very different languages. I just wondered, from your perspective, why this is happening and how we address it.
Nick Boles: You are absolutely right. There is great variability in this. It is perhaps the fundamental reason for this policy of enterprise advisers. This was something that David Young came up with and published a report on in the last Parliament, and it is the absolute first priority of the new Careers and Enterprise Company that Nicky Morgan has established. Its funding is going towards enabling local enterprise partnerships to link up each school with an individual, who is either a current or recently retired executive in a local employer, so that there is somebody who is worried only about that institution and is embedded in the local employer market and therefore can act as a conduit for offers of work experience or for employers wanting to come in and do presentations.
That has been lacking in a lot of schools, and, with the best will in the world, many heads will be deluged with offers of all sorts of different programmes, and frankly they are just thinking, “What do I do?” The idea is that they will have somebody they can ask to put together a programme that is relevant to the local area, to help young people understand what opportunities there are.
Q54 Craig Tracey: I am meeting with the Careers and Enterprise Company tomorrow, so it is quite an interesting point, but how do you actually see that working? The initial part was that it was working with the LEPs, but has the take-up been good on that? How do you see them developing the relationships with businesses and, to ask two questions in one, especially with SMEs, who are the major employers in the area?
Nick Boles: A progress report I cannot give you, but I am sure you will find that out tomorrow from the Careers and Enterprise Company. I do not think it should be a bureaucratic programme, whereby only local enterprise partnerships are involved in doing this. Many schools will be able to identify somebody themselves; maybe the local chamber will identify somebody; maybe the local authority will identify somebody. All we are saying is that, ultimately, we want to see every school have such an enterprise adviser who is properly embedded.
You are completely right on this point about SMEs, which bedevils a lot of Government action. When you are trying to involve businesses in developing policy, it is quite hard for somebody who is running a business, as the head of marketing, head of sales, head of operations and head of finance, to find a minute in the day to go to a meeting to talk about an apprenticeship standard, just to give another example. We have a responsibility to make sure that the things we develop work for SMEs. With enterprise advisers in schools, it is more likely to be something that you could imagine SMEs doing, because it will be somewhere local to them. Maybe their kids are at it or they know kids who had been at it. The time commitment will not be during the day with long meetings. It will be more about acting as that interface between the school leadership and the local employer community.
Q55 Craig Tracey: Having been that person you mentioned who was the marketing department and the finance department when I ran my business, one of the problems we had with apprenticeships was finding out what was on offer, so I see this as being a challenge for the Careers and Enterprise Company. How are they going to engage businesses locally, especially ones that are not members of the LEP, if that is the route they take?
Nick Boles: You are right that it is a challenge, but we will get closer to it if we have more local people specialising in it.
Q56 Chair: Apart from a progress report, what steps do you take to make sure that you have got tabs on the Careers and Enterprise Company?
Nick Boles: To be clear, the Careers and Enterprise Company is now Sam Gyimah’s responsibility. The adult career service, which is the bit I am responsible for, is separate, as you know, so I do not directly have accountability for what it is doing.
Q57 Chair: You have described how the two Departments co‑operate so well together, so there must be some—
Nick Boles: Yes, but I do not think you would ask Sam Gyimah how he holds FE colleges to account.
Chair: Fair enough.
Nick Boles: He is the Childcare Minister, so we do individually take our responsibilities.
Chair: We will have to ask Sam that question. We will drop him a line.
Q58 Lucy Frazer: Nick, picking up on some of the things you have said, you said quite rightly that it is important to take destination and work backwards. We know that six or seven year‑olds decide at that stage whether science is for them, according to the evidence. How are we encouraging more young girls to take up STEM subjects?
Nick Boles: You are so completely right. I suspect there is a general theme in education that, if only you could do it earlier, you would be twice as effective as trying to do it later. To some extent, there is an under-recognised problem that FE colleges are often dealing with the failures of earlier bits of the education system, and they do not get enough approbation for what they do in that remedial role.
Specifically on the point you are making, some of the reforms to qualifications and curricula are important, and we should not pretend that they are not going to make a difference, because, if to get an EBacc you have to do English, maths and a science, and you, your teachers, your parents and your primary school teachers know that, then they will be guiding you towards that: “No, you can’t just decide that you are not interested in this or find it too hard,” whoever you are, girl or boy.
That creates a context, but more than that is required. There are a whole lot of excellent initiatives: Primary Futures, Inspiring Women, the various Your Life campaigns and all of that. There has been an encouraging increase, admittedly from a low‑ish level, in the number of women doing engineering degrees and other STEM‑related courses and apprenticeships, but we have a huge way to go. I suspect it is as much about communication that we do not control, because there are messages out there on the telly and social media subliminally signalling to young girls that this is a girl’s job and not a boy’s, or this is a boy’s job.
Q59 Lucy Frazer: You mentioned engineering. We have a lack of 83,000 engineers. Do we have a plan for filling those gaps?
Nick Boles: We are not Soviet Russia. We do not project five‑year plans of needs and how we are going to fill them, but we are trying to do as much as we can to ensure that everybody realises, first, that mastering maths is no longer an option in life. To a certain level, you just have to do it. However much it may be off-putting, you just have to do it. We are requiring anyone who does not have GCSE maths at a C grade to carry on studying it in college; that is part of every study programme. If you go into an apprenticeship and you do not have that grade, you have to go on doing English and maths as part of the apprenticeship. That is part of the cold shower end of communication.
Q60 Lucy Frazer: It is not very inspirational.
Nick Boles: No, but we have to be honest with people. We do not want to delude them. That is what happened in the past. There was a soft‑soaping that went on of saying, “Don’t worry; you can do a subject you like.” The truth is, in life and education, we all have to do some stuff that we do not like but is good for us. Then you need all the inspirational messages, and that is where organisations like Your Life, Inspiring Women and Primary Futures have a role. There is an amazing woman, who was educated in my constituency, who is now the UK senior academic at CERN, with the hadron collider. Send her into a primary school in Grantham for 20 minutes, and she will have an effect on the ideas that those young girls have about the possible future for a girl. It is about trying to get those messages out. I do not think it is about politicians setting targets; it is about independent organisations and companies themselves taking responsibility to go into schools, and not just into secondary schools but into primary schools, before all the preconceptions are cemented.
Q61 Lucy Frazer: The other thing you have talked about quite a lot, which is really important in this area, is data. You have talked about data in the context of apprenticeships and in the context of league tables. When Ian asked you, you suggested that the LEP should be partly responsible for collecting regional data. Is there not a huge task, which we perhaps are doing but certainly should be doing, for universities to collect destination data about what people study and go on to do; and for schools to assess data about which A-levels lead on to what subject? On the apprenticeship levy, we should be in contact with those businesses that are going to be doing apprenticeships. We should be using all that data together, to tell people what they could be doing and can do in the future. If that is right, even if we have a paucity of data at the moment, why are we not using even the limited data we have to encourage people to go into particular careers?
Nick Boles: We are. I bore everybody rigid with my favourite factoid. We did a huge study of more than half a million data points, matching up people who had completed level 2 and 3 apprenticeships and their incomes three to five years later. It was the first time this had ever been available. For some reason, we were able to do it with our data in a way that was not yet—though it is now—possible with education data. We demonstrated that a level 2 apprenticeship, increases your income by 11%; a level 3 apprenticeship, on average, increases your income by 16%—this is three to five years later—and no other college course has more than a 3% to 5% impact. It is probably the only fact that I ever put in a speech, because it is the one I can remember, but also because it is really powerful. It is not an argument; it is fact. That is what is happening out there.
I think it is happening a lot. There have been legal issues that prevented it. The matching up of income data with educational records required a legislative change, which only went through, I think, last year. Over the life of this Parliament, you will see it become much, much more prevalent, but it will ultimately be, as you say, for individual education providers and employers. I want the Institute of Apprenticeships to literally have total transparency: “If you do this apprenticeship course,” and then the subsections, “If you are a woman and you do this apprenticeship standard, this is what you can expect to be in three or five years’ time.”
Q62 Ian Mearns: We have talked about the 83,000 engineers required on an annual basis to get us to where we need to be. I know you are saying that we do not want some sort of eastern bloc-style central planning, but we are in a different situation from where we were 20 or 30 years ago, when big engineering companies had very big apprenticeship programmes. Now the nature of employment is SMEs, which do not have the economies of scale in the same way to have an apprentice electrician, a turner, a fitter, a mechanical engineer and all the rest of it. How are we going to get that together, to get the SMEs to have enough confidence to say, “I want to take on apprenticeships, in partnership with other companies,” and then have the FE colleges supporting that? Otherwise, if we do not get those economies of scale, it just will not happen on its own. There has to be some sort of planning or co-ordination to facilitate that on a local basis.
Nick Boles: That is a really good point. There are two things, very briefly, that I think will directly assist it. The first relates to the levy. We are very, very keen, if you are a major employer, you have spent 5 million quid on the levy, you have 5 million quid sitting in your digital account and you cannot spend it all on your own employees, that you should be able to spend it on the apprenticeship training of employees of your supply chain. There are limits about how far you can go under state aid rules, but within the limits we think that that will create a huge opportunity, because, in some sectors, they do not do much themselves; a lot of it is through subcontracting. The skills shortages that affect them most are the skills shortages in the subcontractors, not in their own payrolls. That would be one element.
The other element is the model of what are called, slightly confusingly, apprenticeship training agencies. They are not really training agencies; they are agencies. They employ somebody and may place them with more than one employer. If you are a sole trader or a very small business, you are a bit nervous: “Do I have enough work to be able to take on somebody for at least a year?”—which you have to, if it is an apprenticeship. They might be reluctant. An agency will employ the apprentice and place them with perhaps more than one employer, which opens up the possibility to SMEs. Where they have existed, they have been really successful in getting much smaller companies to provide apprenticeships. I think those two things will make it easier for them.
Chair: Thank you very much, Nick, for coming along today. You have answered our questions thoroughly, sometimes lengthily, but always with an eye on what we need to know. We will be testing you further on careers when the time comes, because we are going to be doing an in-depth inquiry into that and also, you will be pleased to know, on apprenticeships.
Nick Boles: Excellent.
Oral evidence: Responsibilities of the Minister for Skills, HC 704 2