Thank you for that opportunity. Jennifer Craw was not actually on the commission, but she was an incredibly valuable participant in the commission’s work. Jennifer has worked with me on a number of projects and has provided support and advice throughout, so I am delighted to have her here. She will help in a range of areas.
The committee’s paper for the meeting is very good, and I thank the committee for sending it to us. It identifies, fairly succinctly, the key issues and the progress that has been made, which is very helpful. It has been suggested that, initially, we might cover briefly the four or five key issues that the commission identified.
First, there is what I call the neglected 50 per cent. I wanted to call the report “The neglected 50 per cent”, but I was told that that was not the right thing to do, so we called it something else. We visited a lot of schools, in which we were very well received and looked after. In essence, the first 10 minutes of those visits was taken up with the schools telling us all about their academic achievements and how well they were doing in, for example, achieving 80 per cent higher passes.
We would then say, “That’s great. Can you tell us about the non-academic youngsters who are not doing highers?” We never found the right words—I do not like using “non-academic”, but it is either that or “vocational”. In a number of cases, after we had asked that question, there was an embarrassed silence and we then asked whether those schools had any figures for how many qualifications those young people were leaving school with. That hit us straight away, and everyone has picked up on it.
Alongside that, there is a culture of university being the be-all and end-all, with anything that is not university tending to get secondary consideration. Early on, we had it in our heads that we need much more focus on providing meaningful qualifications for non-academic youngsters who are leaving school. There is no point in a kid staying on at school unless he or she has something to aim for. That was very much at the front of our minds, along with employability.
There is also the issue of parity of esteem. Parents are at fault, teachers are at fault and some schools are at fault—frankly, we are all at fault. My mother was desperate for me to be a professional person, and that was all that she really wanted. That involved going to university.
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We went very quickly from there to the concept of college partnerships and the question of how we can get vocational teaching capacity as quickly as possible. It was not difficult to work out that the colleges had a lot of vocational facilities, resources and lecturers and that building a strong bridge between the schools and the colleges would be one way of expanding that capacity significantly. We got a number of things wrong, though. We thought that that capacity could expand into the first year of the higher national certificate and the first year of the modern apprenticeship, but neither of those expansions has come about yet. We were looking for meaningful qualifications that would take a youngster on some kind of pathway when they left school. However, I do not think that there are any youngsters in school right now doing an HNC, and I do not think that schools have graduated yet into doing modern apprenticeships with youngsters.
In fact, the focus just now is on foundation apprenticeships, which are a great idea but do not help the neglected 50 per cent. The qualifications and the level for foundation apprenticeships are above what the youngsters that we were concerned about achieve. Nevertheless, foundation apprenticeships are a great concept and I will not denigrate them.
We had a concern about careers advice, which is not easy to get on top of. The quality of careers advice is hugely mixed and the work experience provision is poor. There is no better way of preparing kids for employability than giving them some real work experience, but, frankly, for a number of reasons, that provision just was not there.
We greatly valued apprenticeships—particularly what are now called modern skilled apprenticeships—for a number of reasons, although we all need to understand that modern skills are changing fast in front of our eyes. The digital environment will change how we design the appropriate way to get youngsters ready for what is going to be a very different world. We therefore greatly value modern apprenticeships.
The second part of our report focused on business and industry. Reasonable progress has probably been made in that area, but there is still a very disappointing lack of youngsters being employed directly from education into business. There is very poor take-up of apprenticeships, and small and medium-sized enterprises have a particular problem there. We suggested that there should be some financial incentive for SMEs to take on apprentices. That is probably the only significant recommendation that we made that was not taken up; nonetheless, we felt that there are particular problems for SMEs in taking on apprentices. If 20 per cent of our SMEs took on apprentices, that would solve all kinds of problems. We thought that that would be worth while, but the suggestion was not picked up.
I will stop there on that look back. As the meeting goes on, we can give our thoughts on how much progress has been made on the various recommendations.