The government should amend the Skills and Post-16 Education Bill to include funding for maintenance costs and training for adults who need to gain level 2 qualifications, several lords have said today.

In the second reading of the new skills bill, many from the House of Lords raised concerns about the legislation and suggested changes.

Introducing the bill, Baroness Berridge, parliamentary under-secretary of state, said: “We can all agree that skills and post-16 education needs its moment in the spotlight, both here in Parliament and in communities across the country. We talk about the forgotten 50 per cent of people who don’t go to university...today, we are giving this policy and the people it affects the attention that they deserve.”

Need to know: The Skills and Post-16 Education Bill

Jo Johnson: Lifetime Skills Guarantee ‘too restrictive’

Skills for Jobs White Paper: What does it propose?

Adult maintenance support and universal credit rules

Many lords raised concerns over the lack of maintenance support for adult learners. The bill proposes a flexible lifelong loan entitlement - the equivalent of four years of post-18 education - from 2025, but many speakers said adults needed a maintenance loan alongside funding for courses, and the government needed a rethink on universal credit rules.

Currently, those participating in full-time work and training cannot receive universal credit. Baroness Wilcox of Newport said: “We are concerned that the detail of the lifetime loan entitlement is yet to be confirmed and it appears it will only cover tuition costs for higher-level courses. 

“Labour believes that the system of loans, and particularly means-tested grants, should be extended to support adult learners’ living costs and that universal credit conditions should be reformed, so that the people who would benefit from attending college or accessing training while still employed or in part-time employment do not lose out.”

Lord Storey added: “Many adults will be unable to take up these opportunities because there is no support for living costs while they’re taking a course, and thus these people will be prevented from transforming their life chances, and being part of the skilled workforce in the country and the economy. We also need to look at the entitlement rules for those people unemployed and on Universal Credit.” 

The Lord Bishop of Leeds said: “The bill outlines structures and organisation required for delivering training but it doesn’t suggest how such people actually get to the training in the first place. Clearly, the welcome commitment to a reintroduction of maintenance grants is a significant part of this, yet the need to cover basic living expenses while studying is an immediate and powerful potential barrier to learning. 

“This could be an opportunity situation or time to reconsider the 16-hour-a-week work rule for those in receipt of Universal Credit, with proper safeguards in place to prevent abuse of the system. Great training is pointless if the people who need it are not incentivised to access it.” 

The lifetime skills guarantee and those it misses out 

The bill also contains the prime minister’s Lifetime Skills Guarantee, which gives adults who have not gained a level 3 access to a fully funded college course. Adults can choose from 400 qualifications across the country.

However, Lord Johnson called the list “too restrictive” because it did not contain any creative arts courses and Baroness Wilcox called for all adults, regardless of their level of qualification, to have access to the courses. 

Lord Storey added: “Many adults achieved their level 3 many years ago, and maybe want to pursue a new career or re-skill; support could facilitate this. Should we not be making funding available for these learners?”

Lord Shipley said: “I welcome national skills funding to help adults have free access to level 3 qualifications through some 400 courses now. But there is no mention of any qualifications below level 3, yet it is these which promote progression to higher levels. 

“Six million adults were identified by the Augar review as not having qualifications at level 2. Yet the total number of adult learners has been falling in recent years. If we want people to reach level 3 and above, more need to achieve level 2 and I wonder if the government has a plan?”

The exclusion of metro mayors and combined authorities

The lords also criticised the absence of metro mayors and local authorities in making local skills plans.

Baroness Wilcox said: “Councils have direct functions to plan post-16 skills, support young people with specific needs and deliver adult and community earning, and other related functions. Mayoral combined authorities have devolved responsibility for the adult education budget, which they have used to reshape the local further education offer, working with employers, FE providers and constituent local authorities. There is, however, an overt emphasis on an employer-led approach to develop local skills improvement plans alongside training providers in this bill. 

“We will seek to amend the bill to empower the metro mayors and combined authorities to co-produce the plans in recognition of the crucial role they have to play.” 

The importance of careers education 

The bill includes proposals on careers education and says there should be “clear information about career outcomes through occupational maps, wage returns data and ensuring providers give pupils information about all options”.

Lord Storey said the bill was an opportunity to change the mindsets of pupils, parents, and society that vocational education is something to be regarded as the right route for a large number of our students.

He said: “The other key ingredient must be a first-rate careers guidance and careers education. Every pupil should be given regular face-to-face support by a qualified careers teacher or officer to understand the pupils’ abilities, and interests and passions, to to let the pupils see the opportunities available - not trying to push them into the sixth form when other opportunities might be more appropriate. 

Lord Bichard called on the careers and enterprise company and the National Careers Service to “work more effectively together to create an all-age career system better able to support learners seeking to navigate what will be a much more complex system following the implementation of this legislation.”

In quotes: what the Lords had to say

Baroness Berridge

“This reform is long overdue but it’s only one step on the longer journey. We will work to ensure that the 50 per cent of people who do not go to university will no longer be called forgotten, stuck in what are wrongly called forgotten towns. Instead, we will make skills and jobs available to everyone, wherever they are.” 

Baroness Wilcox of Newport

“We urge the government, in tandem with the introduction of this bill, to prepare and publish a cross-departmental 10-year national strategy for education and skills to deliver on a wide policy agenda. Consultation must be wide so that the strategy and oversight of meaningful collaboration can be carried forward towards a better tomorrow, for the people who have done so much during this past year to demonstrate the dependence that we have upon their skills and their hard work in running our services and our industries.”

Lord Storey 

“[The] key ingredient must be a first-rate careers guidance and careers education - every pupil should be given regular face-to-face support by a qualified careers teacher or officer to understand the pupils’ abilities, and interests and passions, to let the pupils see the opportunities available, not trying to push them into the sixth form when other opportunities might be more appropriate.”

Lord Bichard 

“The bill rightly focuses on supporting colleges and further education, but independent training providers at best can be more fleet of foot and more responsive to employers and local skills needs in my local area down here in Gloucestershire. Many of them feel that the skills bill could make their existence more perilous.” 

Lord Willetts

“You can do academic courses in further education colleges and you can do the vocational courses in universities. If they are, instead, used to create conflict between these two both very important parts of our education system, then the cause which the minister rightly supports will be put back, rather than advancing.”

The Lord Bishop of Leeds

“This could be an opportunity situation or time to reconsider the 16-hour-a-week work rule for those in receipt of Universal Credit, with proper safeguards in place to prevent abuse of the system. Great training is pointless if the people who need it are not incentivised to access it.”

Lord Puttnam 

“I cannot be the only person dumbfounded that the word ‘creativity’, having featured in the secretary of state’s introduction, failed to reappear in either the bill or the Skills for Jobs White Paper that preceded it. Could the minister please explain the submission or possibly tell me that I need my glasses tested?”

Lord Shipley

“The Lifetime Learning entitlement could be a boost, both to individuals and to employers, but I hope that the government will not try to bolt it on to the current system of funding but will, instead, make it part of a reformed system of financial support.”

Baroness Black of Strome

‘It will take the combined will of a joint-community ecosystem to break the current cycle and educate those young people into skilled jobs. My lords, I would simply request that as we progress this bill and focus, as we inevitably will, on a particular sector of our education system, that we’re mindful of changes that may need to be effected elsewhere.” 

Baroness Coussins 

“The bill refers to FE colleges but local skills improvement plans should also seek to build links with university-based training opportunities, and I think that university language centres rather than the modern language faculties are the best placed to make connections with community colleges.”

Lord Johnson of Marylebone 

“That list of 400 qualifications [in the lifetime skills guarantee] is too restrictive still. It doesn’t include, as far as I can see, any creative arts courses, for example.”

Baroness Stowell

“We still have work to do ourselves in the way we think about technical education or those who didn’t go to university.”

Lord Blunkett

“In the meantime, don’t defund courses that are valuable for learners. In the meantime, don’t claw back funding from further education, as is happening at the moment. In the meantime, don’t claw back money from residential colleges like the Northern College. Instead, actually join together to make this a really exemplary piece of legislation.”

Lord Addington

“It doesn’’t matter what you are giving, if it becomes a secondary option, it is down played. End of.”

Lord Patel

“Simply offering more further education and training courses alone will not deliver on the levelling up agenda. Key to all is high-quality careers advice.”

Lord Taylor

“Employers will guarantee that the resources, the training and the teachers are in the right place.”

Baroness Morris

“The bill is written almost as a customer-provider relationship. There is an invitation to employers to lead the show. It is not imaginative or creative, and it is not the sound basis of meaningful partnership.”

Baroness Morgan

“What is being asked is perhaps not always new but it being pulled together for the first time.”

Baroness Lane-Fox

“We must make sure that people are enabled to take sideways leaps, forward leaps, but also upgrade their skills but downgrade what might be seen as their natural career prospect.”

Lord Knight

“What is this bill doing to support more innovative skills training that is hardwired into delivering the shortage skills we need to grow successfully across the country?”

Baroness Wolf

“A system which offers all adult citizens the chance to get high-quality education and training is not just central to our economy, it is central to a country - committed, I hope, to opportunity, to second chances, to openness and to making the whole idea of shared citizenship a reality. I believe the measures incorporated in this bill are an important step toward such a system.”

Lord Stunell

“While I hope this skills bill succeeds at last in joining up, noble lords will perhaps forgive me that my hope is not entirely matched by my expectation.”

Lord Baker

“I am very concerned that the bill could lead to the separation of technical education from academic education.”

Baroness Greengross

“This bill will give employers greater input into skills development and ensures there is a stronger regulation and consistency in qualifications.”

Lord Layard

“By, say 2025, all colleges and other providers should receive automatic, in-year funding for any student covered by the Lifetime Skills Guarantee.”

Baroness Sheehan

“Although the minister mentions the green revolution, she failed to note that there is not a whisper of reskilling to meet the challenge of climate change in the bill itself.”

Baroness Blackstone

“Their funding has been insufficient, they need more and they need longer-term funding settlements. It becomes even more salient when their funding is compared to that of schools and universities.”

Lord Curry 

“The Lifelong Loan Entitlement is an interesting concept but to have to wait until 2025, however, is regrettable. We’ll miss an important window where such a facility would be very helpful.”

Baroness Janke

“I hope that the bill will ensure that the providers of post-16 education and training are aligned, and not preoccupied with short-term expediency and quick fixes that do not really take this further forward.”

Lord Kirkharle 

“The bill must be clear about the roles of the Office for Students, ESFA (Education and Skills Funding Agency), Ofqual and IfATE (Institute for Apprenticeships and Technical Education), particularly the latter two bodies - it will appear, unless I misinterpreted the words, that the new roles will create a “rather cumbersome” regulatory approval system. The last thing we need is confusion, duplication and additional load of bureaucracy.”

Lord Cormack

“One of the things I say in parenthesis that disturbs me about this bill is that it doesn’t confront the word ‘apprenticeship’ properly, and the word apprenticeship has been too loosely used in recent years, even attached to flower-arranging courses that last nine months.”

Lord Liddle

“I worry that the whole approach is too centralised - I’ve always been very sceptical of that thing called the Skills Funding Agency, which, I think, holds the whole system in an iron grip, and does not allow for local flexibility and initiative.” 

Lord Bilimoria 

“The government must move faster to support adult learning ahead of the introduction of a lifelong learning entitlement - the CBI, of which I am president, reported learning for life and that report found that nine in 10 people will need to upskill or retrain by 2030 to prevent skills gaps emerging in the UK.”

Baroness Whitaker 

“The basic question is, what scope is there for funded foundation courses to enable access to traineeships, apprenticeships and the rest of further education for non-achievers in English and maths?”

Baroness Verma

“Lifelong learning must mean exactly that: that we see employment needs changing at a pace and must not stop at entry level as that, in itself, stops employment development.”

Lord Bradley

“In Greater Manchester, we are already leading a consortium of employees and colleges to develop new-hire technical qualifications to meet local skill needs, and the university and college sector has already committed to working together, where structures are in place for joint work - do not seek to replace them for the sake of it.”

The Earl of Shrewsbury

“How closely are the skills and business ministers working together to ensure that the bill is supported and inputted to by business? It is vital that business takes the lead in skills training; they know exactly what the needs are at the coalface.”

Baroness Henig

“Students are not clamouring to go to the local FE college…I was talking to my 18-year-old grandson about this issue recently; he attended a sixth form college in the Northeast. I asked him whether any of his former schoolmates went to the local FE college, his reply was swift and telling: ‘Only if they couldn’t get in anywhere else’.” 

Baroness Hollins

“This is a key time to co-design some of this future provision with local employers and other local stakeholders but, my Lords, colleges and providers will be unable to maximise this without an increase in infrastructure support and investment.”

Lord Lucas

“When it comes to local skills, this is a matter of our children, not just businesses. It is not just the interests of businesses that matters, but what our children could become.”

Lord Parekh

“The system means that being good with one’s hands, mechanical skills, are not seen as very good at all. This has been our problem for the last 150 years. This bill is a very sincere and profound attempt to address the problem.”

Lord Aberdare

“ITPs provide a substantial proportion of skills training. They are an essential and valuable part of the system, yet the bill seems focused on constraining them through requirements to meet potentially onerous conditions for inclusion in the list of relevant providers.”

Baroness Stroud

“The way to ensure families who are doing everything right to get out of poverty is to invest in their skill level and to allow them to earn more for every hour they work.”

Lord Rooker

“I fear a further narrowing of the curriculum, and I feel the educator voice is missing. There is clearly no accountability to communities. I am not, however, fearful of employer involvement in courses. But employers are not the same. Today they are more ‘here today, gone tomorrow’.”

Baroness Bennett

“The government is promising a whole range of sector-specific strategies but we see no sign of how these will be joined up with the LSIP (local skills improvement plan). We get from the government a very narrow idea of what skills are needed. There seem to be a lot of hard hats involved and, of course, the ubiquitous digital skills.”

Lord Triesman

“The bill has to achieve vital goals: first, to overcome chronic poor productivity. It must ensure high skills levels are achieved and geographically distributed. That means far more lifelong learning, far better literacy and numeracy. Second, the bill has to respond to the need for work-readiness. The bill must [also] address the motivational barriers from early learning onwards. Finally, a simple switch between university and technical education funding is surely misconceived.”

Baroness Young

“The bill misses a great opportunity: the twin challenges of climate change and biodiversity decline are the biggest existential threats globally. The bill needs to respond to that and take an ambitious approach to developing the wide range of skills to meet our global climate and nature goals and to explore new UK and global jobs these markets are already creating.”

Baroness Garden

“We wish to see [the lifelong loan entitlement] as a grant, a skills wallet, which will surely pay for itself as recipients’ earning power and self-esteem increase. We are also anxious not to lose sight of the value of level 1, 2 and 3 qualifications.”

Lord Watson

“People should have access to training and reskilling throughout their lives and there remain concerns that the [Lifelong Loan Entitlement] will see participants being saddled with substantial debt, especially if the government fails to deliver on the recommendation of the Augar review that maintenance grants should be reinstated for people from low-income household.”