Category: Education

The speech made by John Hayes, the then Education Minister, on 17 November 2010.

Thank you Kirsty [Wark] and good afternoon everyone.

WB Yeats said that education was “not the filling of a pail, but the lighting of a fire”; I know you share my burning passion for practical learning and that is why we can feel proud and excited about the Government’s new strategy for skills.

Let’s together light the fire of learning across the nation. The documents that Vince Cable and I launched here yesterday are among the most important documents that the coalition Government has so far produced. Because they are about making sure the power of learning counts.

And the first thing I want to do this afternoon is to pay tribute to Vince’s unstinting support in my work. We share – along with Michael Gove – a common vision of the value and the potential of further education and skills.

We believe that, unless they are strong, it will be far harder to build a fairer, more cohesive and more prosperous Britain. And we all see ourselves, not just as the temporary political custodians of further education, but as active members of a diverse further education movement with a great history and a glorious future.

In the past too few policy makers have understood sufficiently that F.E. is bigger than a certain number of buildings with a certain number of teachers and learners and a certain amount of money attached. Further Education is the lighting of many fires. From brightly burning ambition to the warm glow of achievement.

I firmly believe that, just as I believe that the system’s success or failure is best measured not according to how many learners it recruits, but how many jobs it builds; how many communities it enhances; how much it inspires.

Although learning is vital for economic success, it’s also about providing greater opportunities, breaking down the barriers that create and perpetuate disadvantage. It’s about invigorating people to think about how they can make more difference in their communities and how they can play their part in renewing our society.

Vince spoke about this yesterday and it’s also the theme of much of what I want to say to you today.

But I want to start not with the work of the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills, but with that of the other department in which I’m proud to serve, the Department for Education. Because I am delighted to be here today in my capacity as joint Minister.

Firstly, I was delighted that, despite difficult circumstances and tough decisions, we were able to confirm in the Spending Review that we will maintain our commitment to full participation of 16 and 17 year olds in education and training, and to raising the participation age to 18 by 2015. That is crucial if we are to make opportunity more equal and reverse the widening gap between rich and poor.

I know that the Education Secretary, Michael Gove, also sees the role of FE and Sixth Form Colleges in meeting that ambition as crucial. That is why we have already taken steps to ensure that you have the freedom to determine your curriculum offer and mix of provision to meet the needs of the young people who choose to attend your college.

And that is complemented by a vastly simpler funding system, cutting out the protracted planning that bedevilled previous systems; instead creating a responsive, demand led sector, in which funding follows learners.

I know you are anxious to know what the 16-19 spending settlement will mean for you and I can confirm that the Education Department will announce details before Christmas. Alongside increased freedom for colleges I want to emphasise the importance of collaboration. Working together for nation’s future, for the common good.

That’s about working closely with local authorities in promoting opportunities particularly for the most disadvantaged, but it’s also about increasing opportunities to work in school and college collaboration to develop cross-institutional approaches to vocational education.

I am delighted to be able to announce the Growth and Innovation Fund to which Government will contribute 50 million pounds with many more millions coming from business. This fund will support greater collaboration between employers and colleges. There are many fine examples of this already and we need to understand how that best practice can be encouraged.

There are also many examples of colleges sponsoring academies and we want to see more of that too. And I want colleges to grasp with both hands the opportunity offered by Lord Baker’s excellent work on UTCs.

Let’s build new technical schools across Britain. At last fulfilling that part of Rab Butler’s 1944 Act.

I welcome warmly Michael Gove’s invitation to Professor Alison Wolf to carry out an independent review of vocational education for under-19s.

I know that Professor Wolf has talked to many of you in the course of her work so far, and has been impressed by your commitment to making high quality vocational provision available to young people including through your collaborative work. I certainly look forward to reading her report, which the Department for Education expects to receive early next year.

Establishing a more coherent approach to qualifications will also help young people and their parents as they make choices about what and where to study post-16. Key to this will be young people’s access to expert, impartial and independent careers guidance.

I made a speech the week before last to the Institute of Careers Guidance, where I set out my vision for an all-age careers service.

Colleges will be able to work with the new all-age service to build on that the great work they already do. And we will make clear that we expect schools to take responsibility for securing access for their pupils to impartial, independent careers guidance, working with the all-age service or another licensed provider. For as W.H. Auden said “It takes little talent to see what lies under one’s nose, a good deal to know in which direction to point that organ.”

I know as well as you do that the history of post-compulsory education over the last half-century has been one of chop and change. Nowhere has this been more disruptive that in 16-19 education. That has meant that too often, post-19 education and training has been treated as if its primary purpose was to pick up the pieces of the failures of other parts of the system.

That’s not good enough. Indeed, it’s counter-productive. For, as I said earlier, real learning is inspirational.

The doors of a further education college should open the way towards a place at life’s top table, not a seat at the back of the class. They should make real the prospect of a more fulfilled life; a better job; or the opportunity to deepen knowledge by progressing to higher learning.

It’s that vision which underpins our strategy for skills.

At the heart of how we will put this into practice is our plan for apprenticeships; 250 million pounds more for 75,000 extra apprenticeships. An ambition to create more apprentices than ever before.

But, pivotal as they are, apprenticeships are not all we will do. They are just one aspect of a more equitable approach to sharing out the costs and benefits of training. Our plans also provide for fully subsidised provision for basic skills, training for young adults, and skills to help unemployed people to get and stay in sustainable work.

We will also part-fund training for people 24 and over at level 2 while also giving access to loans for those individuals aged 24 and over who wish to study at level 3, and higher. Devoting resource to where it’s needed most. With your help, we will get this right, we will ensure that the most vulnerable get the financial support without which they could not gain new skills.

Perhaps most importantly of all I want you to help me tackle the scandalous fact that one in seven of our young people is not in education, employment or training.

I’m know, too, that a lot of lip-service has been paid over the years to employer involvement in training. And we know where that led: Train to Gain with its immense deadweight cost.

What we must do now is to take a more realistic view of what’s needed and what’s worth paying for. The sort of realism that recognizes that those who reap the benefits of training must be prepared to share the costs. The sort of realism that graps that small employers are likely to need more help than larger ones to train their staff. And the sort of realism that, even when overall spending is falling, still fights for funds to create a new growth and innovation fund to support fresh employer-led skills initiatives..

Learners’ choices will be underpinned by the new Qualifications and Credit Framework, which gives much greater flexibility through new credit-bearing qualifications, helping learners to progress, and giving them, and employers, access to training in a way that meet their immediate needs.

We will also develop Lifelong Learning Accounts, encouraging individuals to learn, and keep on learning.

I want the accounts to drive a national community of learners with the desire to seek out knowledge and skills. Sharing their successes with others; and I want you to play your part in building bigger lives.

Another change will come with the intensification of colleges’ role as community assets. To help make sure that this happens, we will both protect and reform he budget for adult safeguarded learning.

Above all, in future the emphasis will be on the primacy of the relationship between colleges and their direct customers – individuals and businesses. Accountability will pass from Government to colleges’ local communities.

I am serious about devolving real power to get things done. So we intend to give greater freedom to colleges.

Freedom from the unnecessary bureaucracy and regulation that inhibits your ability to frame what you do to suit local learners and employers.
We seek to remove a raft of unnecessary regulations that dictate what you do, and how you should do it.

We intend to remove the legal necessity to promote economic and social well-being of the local area, and have regard to prescriptive guidance about consultation. Because what college worth its name needs a law to tell it to promote well being? Social and economic well being are your stock in trade.

And we are looking to make it easier for you to borrow to invest. We want to move towards creating a dynamic skills system which is lead by the colleges, who in turn work with learners and business to deliver the education and training provision they need.

I don’t pretend that change on this scale will be easy, nor that it won’t make demands on you. It will require new and creative thinking.

Representative bodies like this one will need to take collective responsibility for sector improvement, working through the Learning and Skills Improvement Service. I believe strongly in the professionalism of the sector, the importance of a qualified workforce, and power of peer to peer approaches in supporting quality improvement.

It will also mean colleges working together to reduce costs, for example through more efficient collaboration in the delivery of front and back office functions.

Though let me be clear there is a role for smaller, rural and specialist providers too. So rest assured I don’t see mergers as the only solution.

And the Government devolving power will not mean the Government absolving itself of its responsibilities. Where colleges are failing, we will act, opening up opportunities to others in the independent and private sector to get involved.

I don’t want to leave you today merely thinking that the Spending Review wasn’t as bad as some people expected – although it wasn’t.

Reform would have been desirable even if we hadn’t inherited an unsustainable fiscal deficit.

We have been planning change for years. And we built change on we learnt from you.

The strategy we have launched at this conference was not just the result of a long consultation over the summer, though many valuable submissions, including from the AoC, (more than 500 in all) have helped to inform our thinking.

As many of you know it is as much the result of a much longer period of consultation, of discussion, of deliberation, which began when David Cameron appointed me Shadow Minister, five years ago next month. Five years to build my understanding of the invaluable contribution made by FE to our economy and our society.

I know there is immense human capital in the sector. Yet the last Government infantilised FE. It directed, micro-managed and encumbered FE.

It’s time to treat you as grown ups. To set you free. Free from the technocrats; from full utilitarianism; from the stifling bureaucracy.

I want you to leave Birmingham excited by the prospect of change.

Know that at last there is a Government that understands Further Education, that prioritises skills. A Government that trusts you. My trust; learners trust.

Play your part in taking our movement forward. Be worthy of that trust.

Let none of us be content until everyone embraces our creed that, wherever you begin, whatever your background and whatever your circumstances, learning can make a difference; can ignite a fire.

Learning brightens lives and warms hearts.

So leave this conference with the glow of professionals at last trusted to do your best; to be your best.

Thank you.

 

The speech made by John Hayes, the then Education Minister, on 4 November 2010.

Good afternoon everyone.

For anyone who feels as passionately as I do about the value of practical skills, it’s a pleasure to be here in Belfast. This is a city in which skill has always been honoured, whether it’s the skill needed to build a ship or to produce the perfect Ulster Fry.

And it’s a city whose people are, in consequence, more vividly aware than most of how important it is for the young to gain the skills that will serve them well when they try to find their place in the local jobs market. So I congratulate the Institute warmly on their choice of venue for this year’s conference.

Of course I’m fully aware that the different parts of the United Kingdom each have their own approaches to careers guidance. But no one has a monopoly of wisdom in this area and one of the reasons why this conference is so valuable is that it offers the chance for us to compare approaches and learn from each other.

Differences only go so far. What I hope we all have in common is a recognition that even the best skills system in the world can’t deliver half its potential unless it is supported by a structure that helps prospective learners to take well informed decisions.

Like me, many of you will no doubt recall the Everyman Library. The library’s still going strong after more than a century. But I guess most of us still know it best from the pocket-sized red hardbacks that can still be found in any second-hand bookshop.

J M Dent’s original and very laudable aim in establishing the series was to make 1,000 of the classics of world literature available to ordinary working people at a shilling a time.

There are those, no doubt, who would dismiss that aim as an example of Edwardian paternalism. But at a time when compulsory schooling ended at the age of twelve, there was nevertheless a great deal of truth in the epigraph that opened every volume:

_Everyman, I will go with thee
and be thy guide,
In thy most need to go
by thy side.
_
There’s certainly no doubt that, a hundred years ago, most adults needed guidance to help them progress down the road to self-improvement through self education. Just as it’s true that today, in the 21st century, many people need extra help to get onto the ladder that leads to success in life.

I’m not speaking only of people from disadvantaged backgrounds, though it is for them that the stakes are perhaps highest. Because, if navigating the canon of world literature can be confusing, so can mapping a path through the seemingly inexhaustible range of career options and qualifications routes that are available in the modern world.

Because we are determined to eradicate unfairness and disadvantage from our society, to create an environment in which the only limit on any person’s ability to go far is the extent of their own efforts. We must first identify and then overcome the barriers which currently hinder people from progressing.

So what I want to say to you today is not just about careers guidance but about what good guidance can achieve. Careers guidance makes a difference. It’s in the engine room of social mobility; a vital part of the machinery of social justice.

Good advice doesn’t just transform lives. It transforms our society by challenging the pre-conceived ideas about what each of us seeks. And what all of us can achieve.

I take it that no one here would disagree that one of the biggest barriers that many people face today lies in the inability to match the right learning opportunities with the right employment choices to achieve their aspirations. Unless we inherit great wealth, this is an obstacle that virtually all of us have to face.

And to face it successfully, there are few people who would not do better with good, professional advice of the right kind, at the right time. If we believe in fairness and if we believe in social justice, then we must also believe in the value of advice and guidance in helping people find the right path.

The evidence clearly supports that conclusion.

We know that young people who stay in education or training post-16 are more likely to find employment, and that guidance in the final year of compulsory schooling is an important factor in their decision to stay on. We know that many young people drop out of post-compulsory education or training because it does not meet their expectations, or because their chosen course was unsuitable.

The right guidance is no less important to adults. 82 per cent of adults receiving careers guidance say that it is instrumental in their decision to learn or seek training. And over 20 per cent say that a lack of information is a significant barrier to learning.

Guidance is also an important key in unlocking access to learning and progression for those facing disadvantage, helping them become socially mobile.

Early career decisions can have the most important impacts on mobility through the course of people’s lives. Failing to progress can have a damaging effect on social confidence, which can hamper mobility. There is also evidence that guidance of insufficient quality can create barriers to learning for young people who face significant disadvantages.

Guidance is also essential in helping people aim as high as they can. Alan Milburn recognised this in his report on access to the professions, noting that “guidance is crucial in helping young people to develop ambitious but achievable plans, which are more likely to lead to positive outcomes.”

Sir Martin Harris’s report on widening access to Higher Education reinforces this picture, noting that students with similar qualifications from disadvantaged backgrounds are less likely to apply to and attend the most selective courses or institutions than their more advantaged peers. He also notes the impact of good quality advice on social confidence.

And most recently, Lord Browne has made very clear recommendations in his review of Higher Education. In his view, “[careers guidance should] be delivered by certified professionals who are well-informed, benefit from continued training and professional development and whose status in schools is respected and valued.”

So whether promoting social mobility, or helping people make educational and training choices, the importance of high quality careers guidance cannot be ignored.

Alan Milburn’s report was titled “Unleashing Aspiration”, and that is exactly what I believe high quality careers guidance has the power to do, for young people and adults everywhere.

There is also another important reason why we need to act.

The impact of changing economic circumstances means that skills demands will increase at every level.

As Leitch put it, better skills will be needed at higher levels “to drive leadership, management and innovation – the key drivers of productivity growth”, at intermediate levels to implement investment and innovation, and basic skills are “essential for people to be able to adapt to change”.

The OECD stresses that as emerging economies start to deliver high skills at moderate cost, the OECD countries must themselves reform their skills policies. High quality advice and guidance is key to this development, but as Leitch pointed out “the current system in England is fragmented and fails to integrate advice on learning with careers advice”.

We have to respond to these challenges.

In whichever part of these islands we live, if we seek to promote social renewal by enabling more young people and adults to realise their aspirations of getting on in life; if we seek to support growth and productivity at every level; then effective, high-quality careers guidance is indispensible to our cause.

At present, in England, we are falling short of that ideal far too often. We have not moved on far enough from the days when, to quote Disraeli, “To do nothing and get something formed a boy’s ideal of a manly career”.

So let me outline what we propose to do about it.

Of course, we must start from the position that the coalition Government inherited. And that’s by no means all bad.

But while I recognise that there are examples of the Connexions service providing good careers guidance, the quality of careers advice for young people has not been consistently high. The universal aim of the Connexions service has meant, in practice, a dilution of its capacity to provide high quality, expert, impartial careers guidance.

So I am clear that we need to restore a focus on specialist expertise in careers guidance for young people.

Meanwhile, for adults, I appreciate that the Next Step service is an important achievement. But I want to go further still.

Many of you know that I have long argued for the creation of a single, all-age careers service.

A single, unified careers service would provide major benefits in terms of transparency and accessibility. And a single service with its own unique identity would have more credibility for people within it as well as users than the more fragmented arrangements that are currently in place.

There are a range of other benefits, including the ability to support young people more effectively during their transition to adulthood. And that’s why creating an all-age service will be one of my and my Departments’ most important tasks over the coming months and years.

As we go about this, it’s important to recognise that we’re not starting from scratch. On the contrary, we will build on Next Step, and on Connexions because we must not lose the best of either.

In advocating this, I am certainly under no illusions about the Spending Review settlement. But if we are going to create the sort of comprehensive guidance service that I and many others think we need, then we will simply have to do more with less.

That’s by no means an impossible task. Not if you approach it with pride in the importance of the task and with a willingness to use innovation and creativity where money is in short supply.

So we will find new ways of providing face to face guidance that give young people, adults and communities what they need, and get the best from careers professionals

Bringing careers advice for young people and adults together will help us to achieve some savings. But we will need to go further, and become much more imaginative in the way we make use of resources.

We have a golden opportunity to build a service that will endure and the sector must rise to this challenge. There are always a hundred reasons to delay action until times change.

There are doubters who will argue that we should wait until the financial situation is easier. Or until other reforms have bedded down. Or because it’s just less bother to let sleeping dogs lie.

But I am a doer not a doubter, I believe that reform is needed now. Both to meet our national labour market needs better and to widen individual opportunities.

We must build a path to a fairer and more open society.

My vision for that future rests on two core principles:

The first is that independent advice must be underpinned by professional expertise. That implies both strong leadership and a workforce of the highest calibre.

Whatever good careers advisers achieve – and it’s a great deal – their public status too infrequently matches the importance of their job.

So we will revitalise the professional status of careers guidance, looking to the Careers Profession Alliance to establish common professional standards and a code of ethics for careers professionals.

We will implement the recommendations of the Careers Profession Task Force. In doing so, we will consider the Taskforce’s recommendation on levels of qualification, particularly the speed at which we could move towards establishing Level 6 – equivalent to an Honours degree – as the minimum standard for practising careers advisers within the service.

We will also work with the Careers Profession Alliance and with awarding bodies to ensure that careers qualifications include an appropriate focus on the essentials of careers guidance.

And we will insist that the all-age service meets demanding quality standards. Competition will be important in avoiding the complacency that can cause quality to slide.

But most importantly, whether the public comes to recognise a culture of excellence amongst careers advisers depends mainly on you.

On your ability to embrace the opportunities that reform offers. On your willingness to step up to the task of raising the status of your profession. On your determination to deliver the change we need to make individual dreams come true as they fulfil their potential.

The second core principle of reform is independence.

Young people and adults need impartial advice, which is independent of any organisation with a vested interest, and which is underpinned by objective and realistic information about careers, skills and the labour market.

Just as I want to make sure that everyone has access to professional, independent advice, I also want to make sure that institutions know where that advice can be found.

We will discuss with the sector how best to do that, perhaps by establishing a register of providers who meet the highest standards, and by a kite-mark, and by awards for excellence.

I want all careers advisers to take pride in their profession, and to take their own professional development seriously. They must be seen to be the experts in their field and the most trusted source of advice.

I want the professional organisations to lead the process of continuing to strengthen the status of advisers. That’s in their own interests, just as it’s in ours to empower them to play that role

Because with greater independence comes greater responsibility.

The rationale for change and the basic aims for reform are clear. So we need now to get on with the job.

It is never too soon to fight the battle for social justice. We must not delay.

So I can announce today that we will put in place as much as possible of the basis for an all-age careers service by September next year. And building on that, we will push ahead so that the all-age service is in place by April 2012.

An indispensible part of that work will be gaining the confidence of educational institutions at all levels.

Individual schools and colleges know their own learners and are better placed to assess their needs than anyone else. So it follows that on them must fall the responsibility for ensuring that all learners get the best advice and guidance possible.

That should, of course, include information on vocational options like apprenticeships, as well as on academic options.

I know that many schools do this very well already. They work effectively with their local Connexions service, and I have no doubt that they will continue to work effectively with the all-age careers service.

But we ask too much of our teachers when we expect them to be excellent pedagogues and professional careers advisors. So too many schools are not equipped to provide young people with a full understanding of the options open to them. As a result, the ambitions of some are prematurely limited.

That’s a waste that we just can’t afford.

And that’s why I am clear that close partnerships – whereby schools work together with expert, independent advisers – must be at the heart of our new arrangements.

I’m acutely aware that, with so much already expected of them, it would be asking too much to expect schools to keep up to date with all the latest developments in the labour market. So I want them to recognise the importance of independent, impartial, professional careers guidance, and to invest in it.

I am confident that schools will want to secure the best for their students.

For our part, we will provide them with the information and tools to secure independent and impartial guidance that empowers pupils make informed decisions about their future.

With over 40 per cent of young people progressing to higher education these days, there’s an important role for universities too.

Universities will continue to provide their own advice and guidance. But we will still encourage use of the all-age service and encourage its quality standards to be widely applied.

I recognise that all this represents a significant shift for many within the careers sector, and, in particular, for local authorities, who are currently responsible for ensuring all young people receive careers guidance through the Connexions service.

So let me make it clear that they will continue to have a vital role to play. Without them, we could not meet our target of achieving full participation by 2015.

Local authorities in England will continue to be responsible for helping vulnerable youngsters to move forward in their lives and to participate in education, employment or training.

They will need to maintain – as they do now – accurate data on young people’s participation in order to target support effectively on those who would otherwise suffer disadvantage.

All this amounts to a serious programme of work. But my ambition, and that of the Coalition Government, does not stop there. Over time, I want to create an environment in which English careers guidance is recognised for the important public good it is, in which young people, adults, schools, colleges, universities and whole communities see its value, use it and invest in it.

That’s a big task and it will require us to make some important changes. And I wanted this conference to be the first to hear them.

I can confirm today that:

First, we will ask the schools inspectorate to carry out a thematic review of careers education and other information, advice and guidance services for young people;

Second, we will ask relevant national bodies to work with the careers sector to help schools, colleges and training organisations to learn from and share examples of good practice.

Third, we will collate and publish clear evidence of the benefits and uses of careers guidance.

Fourth, we will look at ways of recognising success and excellence, for example, developing awards for careers guidance professionals and those who have benefitted from it.

And finally, we will consult you, the careers sector, on the scope for introducing a License to Practice for careers guidance, and the role it might play in securing quality.

I will be asking the members of the Careers Profession Taskforce to monitor the progress we are making across this range of work, and intend to follow their recommendation to ask them to do so via two reports to the Government, one in March 2011 and one in March 2012.

Careers guidance is often an important part of the journey for each individual. Very often when advice is bad, so are outcomes.

But provided at the right time and in the right context, good advice from a trusted source can make the difference between sustained engagement in education, employment or training and a lifetime of disappointment,

Engaging, inspiring, increasing social mobility – the job you do is the stuff of dreams.

My plans aim to a radical and challenging programme of change. Delivering it successfully will require not just the efforts of those directly involved in providing careers guidance services, but of the wider education and training sector, too.

Nevertheless, I know that the will for change, and a recognition of the benefits it can bring to millions of people’s lives, thrives here.

And I know that the Institute will welcome the announcement of an all-age service for England.

You called for it. We promised it in opposition. And we will deliver it in Government.

In our hands lies the chance to change peoples prospects. What greater privilege, greater challenge can there be than the chance to change the future.

I trust that you will have questions for me.

Thank you.

The speech made by John Hayes, the then Education Minister, to the Royal Society for the Encouragement of Arts, Manufacturers and Commerce on 26 October 2010.

Good afternoon everyone. Thank you for coming.

The Royal Society for the Encouragement of Arts, Manufacturers and Commerce, is probably the most appropriate setting possible for my speech today.

The RSA is a body founded on the ideal of progress, exemplified in James Barry’s series of paintings in the Great Hall.

The RSA is also a body that has, right from the start, rejected artificial distinctions between art and craft, while upholding the particular value of each.

Over more than 250 years, from mounting Britain’s first contemporary art show to organising the Great Exhibition, the event in our history that, more than any other, astonished the world with the beauty of British craftsmanship, the RSA has insisted that art needs craft, and vice versa.

And it continues to remind us the joylessness of attempting to separate one from the other.

Indeed, the more pleasure we take in our work, manual or mental, the more of ourselves we invest in it, the more we to get from it in return, financially perhaps, but most importantly aesthetically. What we do is what we are.

Matthew B Crawford’s book, Shop Class as Soulcraft: an inquiry into the value of work, published in America last year, underlines this. Actually it is one of the things that inspired me to give this speech.

The book describes how Professor Crawford, an academic political scientist and a former executive director of a think-tank, in Washington DC, discovered that his greatest satisfaction lay not in abstract political thought but in the practical skills needed to mend motorbikes.

The argument he makes is not anti-intellectual – the author has not given up scholarship. But he charts the route to personal fulfilment found by combining his academic career with running a small motorcycle repair business.

There are precedents for this sort of approach. I recall in particular a large painting by the Victorian artist Daniel Maclise, which can be seen in Royal Holloway College’s administrative buildings at Egham.

Maclise’s work adorns the Palace of Westminster – notably two enormous representations of Waterloo and Trafalgar, which I return to admire time and time again. But the particular painting at Royal Holloway recalls Tsar Peter the Great’s visit to Britain in 1698.

Peter of course has a good claim to be the founder of modern Russia.

He built from nothing its first Western type city, St Petersburg.

He founded Russia’s first university and its first formal civil institutions.

He created its first modern army and its first-ever navy, conquered much of its present-day territory, sowed the seeds of its first industries.

The inspiration for much of what he went on to achieve came from his Grand Embassy to the West, much of which was spent, not in political negotiations, but working as an apprentice shipwright in the dockyards of Amsterdam and Deptford.

Maclise’s painting shows King William III visiting Peter at work at Deptford.

The dapper king looks on in astonishment as the Tsar, in shirt sleeves, saws away contentedly at a lump of timber alongside other workers, helping to build one of the first ships of the new Russian navy.

In fact, throughout his life Peter’s greatest pride lay in acquiring and using practical skills. Besides shipbuilding, he was highly-skilled at turning wood on his lathe.

He also made rather less successful forays into dentistry and even surgery, much to the anguish of his courtiers.

Of course, Peter was by no means alone in combining success in public life with pride in practical skill.

Closer to our own time, Winston Churchill was both a skilled amateur artist and an accomplished bricklayer.

Last month, I had the pleasure of attending a speech by my old friend and new colleague at the Department for Education, Michael Gove.

On that occasion, Michael spoke persuasively about the urgency of reforming and revaluing practical education in this country, starting in schools.

It’s true, as Michael said, that for decades practical learning for children has been seen by the educational establishment as a poor second-best to academic study.

In recent times, lip-service has been paid to it with the creation of new school qualifications which seem useful but too often prove to be anything but when a youngster goes from school into the harsher realities of the job market.

The growing availability of apprenticeships for young people has been of much more value, but again, the route towards high-level skills to which they point has all to frequently stopped short, at Level 2, rather than taking a person forward to Level 3 and beyond.

.Of course, it’s a Level 3 that qualifications really start to have a big effect on a person’s future prospects and earning potential.

I went from school to university and from there into a job. For people of my generation, this was the modern equivalent of the Roman cursus honorum. And to an extent it still is, even though over the last three years graduates in some subjects perceived by employers as soft have felt the chill blast of recession.

And I don’t believe, as some seem to, that Britain, once the workshop of the world, is doomed to dwindle to a race of pseudo celebrities and merchant bankers.

On the contrary, I believe that it is British manufacturing and the practical skills that underpin it that must lead us into renewed economic growth.

For decades, people have been calling for greater parity of esteem between academic and vocational qualifications.

Those calls have invariably fallen on deaf ears. As Instead, we’ve seen a dilution both.

Too many things that are fundamentally practical have been given an academic veneer. Not because it’s needed to produce a better craftsman, but simply because it seems to legitimise craft for those who are fundamentally nsecure about practical learning.

Ironically, many such people have done academic study no favours. But regardless, the academic route continues to enjoy greater esteem.

Parents and grandparents will proudly display photographs of their offspring in graduation garb, whatever has been studied, wherever. Such is the power of the degree brand.

Of course, university qualifications have an unbroken European history of nearly a thousand years. The Bachelor-Master-Doctor structure is relatively familiar to most people. And, even in an age of 45 per cent participation, they retain an aura of intellectual and social exclusivity.

But the same can be said of few practical qualifications, because many come and go with alarming frequency and certainly before even employers in the sector concerned can work out exactly what they mean..

Of course, that’s not universally true. Yesterday evening, I attended a reception to celebrate the City & Guilds Institute, which was established in the 19th century by a consortium of 16 City of London guilds and which remains a notable exception to that rule.

But even so I think it’s impoverishes our culture that even apprenticeships, which have been around as a form of training for at least twice as long as universities, do not confer a particular title.

That’s just one reason of many that things need to change. People speak of the intellectual beauty of a mathematical theorem. But there is beauty, too, in the economy and certainty of movement of a master craftsmen.

I believe that both kinds of beauty must be recognised on their own terms.

And that implies not that the stock of academe must fall, but that the stock of craft must rise.

Change of the kind I seek would colour our national life in the three ways.

The first is economic.

The comparative orthodox esteem in which vocational and academic qualifications seems to have relatively little to do with earning potential. Indeed, at times like these with many traditional graduate recruiters cutting back, a practical skill may often be more marketable.

The essence of the value of a skill lies in the fact that not everyone has it, assuming a skill has a market value. Which is why people like me, make an embarrassed judgement about what it’s worth to hire a man with the tools and know-how needed to do what we cannot.

The same process applies, though with less embarrassment, when a factory-owner is willing to pay qualified machine-operators more than unskilled labourers.

The higher and more sophisticated the skill, the more value it is likely to add to a product.

And, as Lord Leitch and others have argued, the higher the skills levels available in an economy, the more they add to the value of products and services, the more profitable the economy as a whole is likely to become, the more jobs it will support and the more business we will win from other countries.

And raising skills levels brings social as well as economic benefits, like better public health, lower crime-rates and more intensive engagement by individuals in the sorts of voluntary and community activities that fuel the common good and power the national interest.

Where there is disagreement about this it tends not to be about the principle of needing to build a high-skill economy, but about how the cost of developing the skills in question should be shared between individuals, employers and the State.

The second area where elevating the status of craft would bring benefits is social.

Sadly few these days are described – or describe themselves – as a master-craftsman.

In part, that is the consequence of social change.

Within living memory, the butcher, the baker and the candlestick-maker enjoyed significant social status, alongside the bank manager, the lawyer and the schoolteacher.

But these days, in most of Britain, the hard-won skill of individuals has been subsumed by brutal, impersonal ubiquity. Butchers, bakers and others reduced to anonymous shop assistants in soulless megastores.

But history shows us that there is an alternative.

When industrialisation was reaching its zenith here, it provoked a

reaction which eventually became known as the Arts and Crafts movement.

This movement, too, recognised the unbreakable link between satisfaction in work and quality of life. Its proponents considered the dehumanising effects of mass production in their own time and sought to recreate what they saw as a happier period for working people. A period when their skills were recognised, valued and freed to produce great art.

One of the leaders of the movement, William Morris, wrote that:

“the Middle Ages was a period of greatness in the art of the common people. The treasures in our museums now are only the common utensils used in households of that age, when hundreds of medieval churches – each one a masterpiece – were built by unsophisticated peasants”.

Of course, nowadays much of the chattering class would to mock such idealistic attitudes.

Those of us who’ve been watching Michael Wood’s current series of programmes on BBC2 know that life in the Middle Ages for many people was nasty, brutish and short. And that the world from which the Peasants’ Revolt sprang much less pleasant for the lower classes than Morris’ novel about the period, A Dream of John Ball, suggests.

Even the great craft guilds, which people like Morris lauded as the guardians of skills and the upholders of standards of craftsmanship, were not always wholly positive forces. There was sometimes a thin line between upholding traditions and imposing what were once referred to darkly as “Spanish practices”.

That very duality is found in the most famous 19th-century celebration of the guilds, if not of Merrie England then at least of Merrie Bavaria, Wagner’s Die Meistersinger von Nurnberg.

Nevertheless on some points especially, I think that such a romantic view of an earlier age has much of value to teach us.

The world that past fiction characteristics is one in which membership of a craft guild, and consequently the skills required to qualify, was something to which ordinary people aspired.

It’s a world in which bakers and builders are proud to be what they are, and to be admired as such by others.

And it’s a world in which people can realise the satisfaction that practicing a skill of proficiently can give.

In our age that satisfaction can, in principle, be available to anyone. It should be available to more.

Such a spirit inspired the teaching institutions that sprang from Arts and Crafts – like the Guild of Handicraft, the schools in Newlyn, Keswick and Chipping Camden and several colleges that are now numbered among our universities.

The benefits to individuals of acquiring new skills, whether for work or for private satisfaction, are reflected throughout society.

I certainly don’t mean to idealise hard work. Let’s be clear that there’s nothing necessarily dignified about some jobs. Jobs that are physically hard and dirty or just boring and repetitive.

But neither should we underestimate the dignity of labour – the satisfaction of a job well done. For to do so is to undervalue those who labour.

It’s a dignity we must rejuvenate, because many, though not all, practical skills are undervalued in our society.

Yet interestingly that does not mean that, as a society, we necessarily look down on skill. After all the 150 applicants for each BT apprenticeship place certainly don’t. And think of the popular fascination with skills of celebrity chefs and professional dancers or the popularity of T.V and radio shows about architecture, engineering or fashion design.

The instinctive value we feel for craft must be reflected by our education system.

The third area where we need change is cultural.

The men who built and beautified the cathedrals were not by and large academic. Even now, they challenge our prejudices about what culture is and who creates it.

The same could be said of many of the great artists.

Giotto, according to Vasari’s Lives of the Artists, started life as a shepherd-boy.

The name of the master who painted the Wilton Diptych was not even thought to be worth recording.

Their art and their craft beautifies the world still.

The craftsmen who built Georgian and, especially, Victorian London were both numerous and anonymous. But they, too, created an environment where the effects of craft enriched ordinary people’s lives. All that we build should add quality, as the Victorians knew.

That celebration of life in a Victorian terraced house, Noel Coward’s This Happy Breed, celebrated something else, too. The bonds of neighbourliness, friendship and shared experience that held working-class communities together. The social glue that helped them to weather hard times in the 1920s and 1930s.

Craft skill also beautified our public spaces. Of course, much of that beauty has been swept away, partly by the Luftwaffe, but mainly by much more ruthless urban planners. And our lives are poorer for it.

So let one example stand for all. The Euston Road has its brighter points. Above all, the high Victorian fantasy of St Pancras, itself so nearly lost to the wrecker’s ball.

It also has its low points. Notably leaking warehouse set amid the crumbling concrete that is Euston Station.

But it wasn’t always thus. The gaping entrance to the station and its depressing bus station was once guarded by a vast Doric arch, built of stone in 1837. Its size and neoclassical simplicity were a powerful symbol of national confidence at the dawn of the railway age and the start of Queen Victoria’s reign.

A Conservative Government approved its demolition in 1961. The stones which had brought pleasure to the lives of millions were taken away and dumped in a river.

Those who ordered that deed should never be forgiven. Because it wasn’t just a symptom of environmental brutalism. It was a symptom of post-war contempt for the skills and craftsmanship of the people who built it.

In my view, the skills of a bricklayer are in no way less admirable and certainly no less hard-won than those of a stockbroker. And admired is what they should be. For each feel value, all feel valued.

So let me digress for a moment to wish the Euston Arch Trust well in its efforts to persuade the Mayor of London to rebuild it.

When we look at something beautiful, it’s not just the object that we admire, but the skill that went into producing it. That’s why Maclise’s fresco of The Death of Nelson will always be more admirered than Marcel Duchamp’s urinal.

My point is that admiration for skill, even when it doesn’t involve production of an object, is an integral part of our culture.

I remember watching the 1970 world cup final on television. The next day at school was a Monday. And all that any of my schoolmates or I wanted to do in the playground was to replicate the outrageous dummy that we’d seen Pele sell to Albertosi, the Italian goalkeeper.

It didn’t matter that Pele didn’t score. It was his skill and the vision that fired our imaginations.

Of course, all children admire skill in sport. If my schoolmates and I wanted to play football like Pele, we also wanted to bowl like John Snow, bat like Colin Cowdrey or play tennis like Rod Laver.

But it’s not just sporting skill that children admire. How many children do not dream of learning to drive a car or fly and aeroplane, to do a card trick, or juggle?

And admiration for a physical prowess and physical skill doesn’t end with the onset of adulthood. It’s part of our wiring; part of that complex bundle of impulses that, together, make us human.

The sort of revaluation I’m calling for won’t be easily accomplished. But I think there is a general recognition right across the spectrum of political and educational opinion that one is needed.

So what can we do?

There are five things I’d like to suggest.

The first is to continue and intensify our efforts to re-establish apprenticeship as the primary form of practical training. We will create more apprenticeships than modern Britain has ever seen.

And not just in the traditional craft sectors but in the new crafts too – in advanced engineering; IT; the creative industries or financial services .

It’s not just that apprenticeships works – though they do.

And it’s not just that apprenticeship is probably the most widely-recognised brand in the skills shop-window – although it is.

It’s also about what apprenticeships symbolise. The passing-on of skill from one generation to the next and the proof that this offers that learning by doing is just as demanding and praiseworthy as learning from a book.

As I said earlier, we need, with the help of sectoral bodies, to seek out new and more effective ways of recognising apprentices’ achievements.

It was in an effort to begin to address that disparity that my colleague David Willetts announced at the recent Conservative Party conference that apprentices in the construction industry would in future be given the title of “technician”.

But we will go further; I plan to reinstate fellows and masters too. The aesthetic of craft must be no less seductive that that of academe.

And with the number of apprentices set to rise by 75,000 during this Parliament, we will to extend that sort of thinking to trainee craftsmen across sectors.

Let me be clear this new aesthetic will not only offer the emblems of achievement to individuals but also provide business with important commercial advantages. Firms that invest in training deserve recognition and will be able to use the achievements gained by their staff as marketing tools.

Second, we must re-evaluate and indeed redefine what a sectoral approach means.

It’s been clear since even before guilds and livery companies existed that different sectors require specific skills, and that it therefore makes sense for sectoral bodies to be closely involved in designing training and qualifications and in setting standards.

In some sectors, that link has been obscured, although it remains clear in others. The Goldsmiths and Fishmongers Companies are good examples of that, as indeed is the Royal College of Surgeons, which presides over the highest-stakes practical skill of them all.

And, though my discussions with City and Guilds, I know that the livery companies are keen to build on the good work they already do.

And there is also, I think, an opportunity for the sector skills councils to grasp.

“Sector skills council”; it is hardly a label to stiffen the sinew and summon up the blood”. And that is a symptom of a deeper problem. Here, too, we have become stuck in a dreary technocratic language which limits imagination and inspiration.

I want SSCs to dare to rise to the challenge of going beyond the strictly utilitarian, of becoming guilds for the twenty first century, creating a sense of pride in modern occupations, and giving individual workers a sense of worth and purposeful pride.

Third, we must not forget the role that informal learning also plays in teaching skills.

Acquiring skills make our lives, not necessarily wealthier, but definitely fuller. It raises our self-esteem and often also the esteem in which others hold us.

Even a depressive and tubercular D H Lawrence found respite from contemplating man’s alienation from the modern world by applying practical skills. He once noted that:

“I got the blues thinking of the future, so I left off and made some marmalade. It’s amazing how it cheers one up to shred oranges and scrub the floor”.

The desire for skills can be accompanied by frustration if there is no clear way in which to gain them. But if they are available, what a difference they can make to individuals and communities.

How many householders’ lives are enriched by watching Strictly Come Dancing? A programme about a group of celebrities and alleged celebrities acquiring practical skills by instruction and practice. How many learned the basics of gardening, that most satisfying of pastimes, from watching Geoff Hamilton or Alan Titchmarsh?

What a force for social cohesion, and for every kind of practical skill, the formidable ladies of the Women’s Institute remain. What an introduction to manual skill the Boy Scouts and Girl Guides have given to millions of children. What pleasure it can give to the whole community to see the local gardening club come together once a year to pit their blooms and brassicas against one another.

Show me a society where everyone has the opportunity and desire to seek out new knowledge and new skills and I’ll show you a society that really deserves to be called “bigger”.

That’s why last week, as part of what’s probably the most hard-nosed cull of Government spending there has been in modern times, the budget for informal adult learning was protected.

Learning for the common good protected. And on my watch it will remain so.

My fourth point follows on from the previous three. We must do much more to facilitate progression.

Under the last Government, we heard a great deal about creating ladders of learning. But their approach was fundamentally flawed because it was based on identifying problems and then trying to nail a few more rungs on the ladder to compensate.

In fact, what the learner got was not so much one ladder as a game of snakes and ladders.

Our task must therefore be to break down the barriers to progression that have been progressively erected. And to reject artificial distinctions wherever we find them

For example, I don’t know how many of you could give us a comprehensible explanation of the difference between Level 3 and Level 4, and why it matters. I certainly know that many of those that administer the system couldn’t, and I doubt whether I could either.

We must also make the barrier between HE and FE more permeable. If we want learning to be really lifelong, the road for any individual from basic skills to higher learning – not necessarily provided in higher education – must be as smooth as we can make it.

My fifth point is about Further Education providers. FE Colleges are the great unheralded triumph of our education system. But their capacity to innovate has been limited by the target driven, bureaucratic, micro-management which characterised the last Government’s approach to skills. This Government could not be more different. We will free colleges to innovate and excel. In fact we have already begun rolling back the stifling blanket of red tape and regulation and we will go further.

Our mission is to free colleges to be more responsive to learner choice and employer demands. This is vital to build provision sufficiently nimble to respond to dynamic demand. But often and understated product of this will be to drive up the status of FE Colleges, their teachers and learners, at last recognised as the jewels in learning’s crown.

There were doubters when I first said that I wanted to give this speech. I think that was partly because it’s not about a particular piece of public policy, and perhaps partly also because it was bound to include unfashionable words like pride, beauty and dignity.

To those doubters, I make no apology. Just as I make no apology for believing in the power of learning.

I look back to the Englishmen who first raised the standard of craft skill as a force in the modern world – to Morris and Ruskin, Rossetti and Burne-Jones – and I think it’s high time to create a new aesthetics of craft, indeed, a new Arts and Crafts movement, for Britain in the 21st century.

That won’t be done overnight. But I can announce today that we are making a start.

I am considering backing high quality in the craft traditions by lending the Government’s support to a new award for excellence in the crafts. Details are at an early stage, but I think it is right that excellence should be rewarded and the Government will work over the next few months with those working to support the crafts, including the various charities under the Patronage of His Royal Highness The Prince of Wales, to encourage and reward excellence in this area.

I hope I’ve shown this afternoon that I am not merely one of those who yearn for a mythical Merrie England,

I don’t wish to idealise manual labour but to understand its intrinsic worth.

The village blacksmith did not develop arms like iron bands by reading about how hard it is to swing a hammer.

The price of the potter’s ability to throw was long hours of effort followed by failure, and several hundredweight of wasted clay.

Art, said Hippocrates, is long, but life is short.

But craft is about new industries too. Its about being as software designer and a network engineer; craft is as much about learning to be a film technician as furniture maker; as much about learning to be a fashion designer as a fishmonger.

And what I want to show above all is that our society will benefit greatly when those that make policy understand what popular culture has always known –

That skill, craft and dexterity give our lives meaning and value.

They are at the heart of our society.

Craft should be honoured and those who master it revered.

So while we work to encourage the learning of practical skills, we must also work to build demand for and recognition of them.

Craft to feed the common good. Skills to serve national interest.

Ours will be – must be – the age of the craftsman

Thank you.

 

The speech made by John Hayes, the then Education Minister, to the Institute of Directors on 29 September 2010.

Thank you David and good morning everyone.

Group Training Associations England’s role in ensuring that GTA’s collective potential is harnessed right across the country is evident from the audience in front of me. That contribution is of enormous value in helping us to deliver the skills outcomes that will be so vital for the prospects of this country and its people.

I know that the work of the GTAs has not been sufficiently recognised in recent years by the Government and its agencies. I know, too, that this neglect cannot be allowed to continue.

Many GTAs have been established for half a century and they consistently deliver successful programmes of work based learning with above average completion rates. They offer, moreover a very special learning experience and have been developing and delivering outstanding training to industry for over forty years. The fact that GTAs are governed by and influenced by employers helps to ensure that you deliver meets real business needs.

I’m particularly glad to see that some of your apprentices have been invited along this morning and are making their own contribution to your conference. Indeed, the truest measure of the success or failure of our work will be found in how well-equipped or otherwise today’s young people will be in future years to face the shifting challenges of life and work.

To be successful in that, we must create a radically new model for workplace training with Apprenticeships at its heart and with partnership between Government, employers and individuals as its motive force.

I’m sure that these young people are already well aware that, these days, none of us can afford to let our knowledge and understanding stand still because the world around us never stands still. They have grown up in an age that is driven by technology to an unprecedented degree. For them, it’s not just the ubiquity of mobile phones that appears normal, but also the fact that the latest model becomes obsolete almost as soon as they’re taken out of the box.

But the need to come to terms with change doesn’t just apply to the young. As the years pass and we grow older, the world somehow seems to change more quickly than it used to. So we must carry on learning new things in order to adapt to it. That’s not always easy.

For those of us who have reached, let us say, a very early middle age, the pace of change, like one of the new Boris bikes in London, can seem giddying, especially when we realise that it’s something we can’t stop or even slow down.

For many it’s hard sometimes not to feel, like Dicken’s Mr Dombey, that “the world has gone”. Tradesmen are not the same as they used to be, apprentices are not the same, business is not the same, business commodities are not the same”.

There are, however, compensations. If experience has perhaps taught many of us not only that change is not always for the better, then it has probably also shown, as Euripides wrote, that “there is in the worst of fortune the best of chances for a happy change”.

That’s a thought to which anyone here who’s worried about the forthcoming Spending Review, about which I’ll have more to say later, might do especially well to hang on.

But we can also take comfort from the fact that not all insights are modern, and that there remain truths which are immutable.

Take, for example, the earliest and probably most-imitated of all great public speeches, the funeral oration, given by Euripides’ contemporary and countryman, Pericles. In it, he said that the best memorial is “graven not on stone but in the hearts of men”.

If that remains as true today as it was two and a half thousand years ago, and I’ve no doubt it does, then young people like those here today and the changes that learning is making to them now, and will continue to make in the future, are the most important monument to the work that many of the rest of us here this morning do.

Of course, I fully accept that it’s important to have figures in a ledger to show we spend the public’s money with which we are entrusted wisely and that we do good for the many and not just the few.

Indeed, that’s something on which my friends at the Treasury tend to insist. And they have little alternative as they deal with the consequences of a decade in which the Government spent money it did not have with as much regard for financial prudence as a boatload of drunken sailors.

The struggle to turn that situation around goes right across Government, and the contribution that the skills system must make its contribution. That is clear from my Department’s Strategy for Sustainable Growth, in which we have set out, among other things, the role that skills must play in creating the conditions needed to reduce the deficit and stimulate growth.

And that’s one reason why we have promised to re-shape the Apprenticeships programme to ensure that it provides more high-quality training opportunities. We have already begun to deliver on that promise by redeploying £150 million to provide an extra 50,000 places.

We are also taking an overdue look at how the costs of Apprenticeships and other forms of workplace learning are divided between Government, employers and individuals.

Hard times always focus people’s attention on the balance-sheet. But at the same time, if numbers were the only reliable indicator of worth, John Nash, in whose astonishing building we find ourselves this morning, would be in the debit rather than the credit column. He would have gone down in history as an apprentice who failed to complete his training rather than as an architect who, by marrying opulence with good taste, changed the face of Britain.

No. Real success for us must lie in the difference that the new knowledge and skills that learners acquire will make to their lives and to Britain as a whole. And not just at work but at home, too.

It will lie in the contribution, both economic and social, that learning emboldens them to make in their local communities and in the part they play, individually and collectively, in creating a bigger, more open and more humane society.

It will lie, perhaps most significantly of all, in the tradition of taking pride in knowledge and skills that they will in turn pass on to the next generation.

And whatever the challenges we have to cope with, however different the skills landscape may look on the far side of the Spending Review, the objectives towards which we work and our determination to reach them must remain.

The most important objective of all is to make Apprenticeships the primary, though I must stress not the only, means for people to gain skills in the workplace. GTAs have demonstrated over the decades their ability to work with employers to provide different forms of skills training as part of a wide programme of workforce development.

But the primacy of Apprenticeships does not necessarily mean that they can be allowed just to continue as they are. They can, and should, be improved.

Change is coming to how we educate adults, whether it’s in the classroom, in the community or at work. Some of that change we choose and it will be change for the better. Some is forced upon us by circumstances and we’ll have to make the best of it that we can.

But this is an area that has never stood still.

It’s certainly true that apprentices are not the same as they were even a few years ago, never mind in the Victorian era which many people still see as the golden age of apprenticeship.

If memory serves me right, the conditions in which apprentices worked for much of the nineteenth century were determined by the Health and Morals of Apprentices Act of 1802. And the young learners who are with us this morning might like to reflect on some of the more humanitarian changes that this put in place.

For example, it required apprentices to be given an hour’s religious instruction every Sunday and to attend church at least once a month. In my view, that’s a rule whose time might well come again. But that’s a fanciful thought, not a Government policy.

So, too, could that of the even older, Elizabethan statute under which any apprentice guilty of “default” – which would be subject to whatever punishment the local mayor or justice of the peace thought appropriate.
Apprenticeships have certainly changed over the many centuries during which this form of training has existed. And they will continue to adapt to the modern world’s changing training needs.

Yet as with so much else, their essence has not changed. Above all, they remain perhaps the most effective way of passing on complex practical skills that has ever existed.

And that’s why, even when money is short, the Government is committed to increasing the supply of Apprenticeships, and improving the quality of the training offered, to make them better suited to the needs of employers and learners alike.

Indeed, we believe that the current Apprenticeships programme could be improved significantly in three main areas.

First, many of you know from your own experience that British employers currently face a workforce with insufficient skills at intermediate technician and associate professional level, which are critical to many industries on which our future growth potential will depend and to our international competitiveness.
I know that’s something on which you’re due to hear more from KPMG later on today.

For the Government’s part, we want to create a clearer ladder of progression in the Apprenticeships Programme. There should be greater emphasis on progression to Level 3 and beyond.

And this is why we are committed to expanding, in particular, the number of Apprenticeships available at more advanced skills levels. The Apprenticeship programme, newly refocused to prioritise progression to Level 3 and higher will help deliver the technician- level skills on which the jobs and industries of the coming decades will depend.

Second, we wish to establish more firmly what the appropriate contribution for employers to make towards Apprenticeships should be. You can help in that because Group Training Associations are already a concrete example of how public -private learning partnerships can work successfully.

The wealth of evidence on the return to both employers and individuals from investing in skills provides a compelling argument in this respect.

Third, we want to make it easier for businesses of all sorts to take on apprentices and gain access to the benefits they bring. It is important that employers take up these opportunities and offer Apprenticeship places to secure a new generation of highly skilled employees and we will be encouraging them to do so. Group training models have an important role to play in this.

For example, small businesses are the cornerstone of our economy and high quality training opportunities like Apprenticeships are key to supporting their growth and success. And group training models mean that we can reach more small and medium sized employers.

In the past, many small businesses have been discouraged by the administration and the costs and risks of employing Apprentices. Group Training Associations help spread these costs and risks and create new jobs and training opportunities.

This approach means smaller businesses, who may not have felt able to offer Apprenticeships before, can get on board. Group Training Associations help employers and apprentices alike, providing greater security for the Apprentice and flexibility for the employer.

For further education, like everything else, the seasons are changing. But to make the most of, in Keats’ words, this time ‘of mists and mellow fruitfulness’ we must both reap the harvest provided by the hard working, dedicated staff within the sector, and prepare the ground for a new beginning.

Securing a bountiful future will involve making difficult choices. I believe that we can deliver more and save money. But we will only achieve cost effectiveness by challenging the orthodox assumptions about what skills are for, how they are funded and what role Government should play.

This is why I’m pleased to tell you that we’re bringing in-house the expertise of UKSkills, the charity responsible for championing skills and recognising home-grown talent through awards and competitions. UKSkills’ activities and staff will be transferred to the Skills Funding Agency who will lead a coherent annual programme of competitions and awards to promote skills and apprenticeships, in partnership with the devolved administrations. A highlight will be the WorldSkills 2011 international competition, which is being hosted by the UK in London in October 2011 and will see over 50 counties participate in over 30 skills competitions. My thanks go to UK Skills for their work to date.

As for the future, I am determined to ensure our decisions are the result of proper consultation.

That is why one of our first acts in Government was to publish two consultations on the future direction of skills policy and the simplification of skills funding. If you have not done so already, there is still time for you to contribute your views and your experiences.

We will publish the results of this work after the Spending Review and set out at that stage the detail of how we intend to change and reorganise our learning and skills priorities.

However, I want to go as far as I can – within these constraints – now, which is why I also want to announce that I am asking the SFA today to review urgently what additional financial support they can find to support the invaluable work of GTAs. I want them to find ways to help you reinvigorate your network. Furthermore, I have asked, when we met this morning, for GTA England to identify more ways in which Government can support further the work of GTAs. We will do all we can.

Today, our country needs change and progress in equal measure. I know that you will support me in my mission to ensure that it gets both.

Thank you.