Category: Speeches

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.

The speech made by John Hayes, the then Education Minister, at the British Library in London on 7 September 2010.

Good afternoon everyone. It’s a great pleasure for me to join you all today in welcoming the launch of Transforming Lives. I also want to take this opportunity to congratulate NIACE and indeed everyone involved in the Transformation Fund projects from which the report has sprung.

Of course, this project began last year under the previous government. But as many of you can confirm, I’ve been an advocate of informal adult and community learning for long enough to know that any initiative that improves our understanding of adult learners and their needs must be welcomed, irrespective of whose idea it was.

What matters most is what the project has achieved and what lessons we can learn from it as we look towards the future.

For me, you don’t need to look further than the front cover of the report to find the key to what follows.

That’s because, as I hope all of us here today know, learning is capable not just of changing lives, but of completely transforming them.

I’m not just talking about the fact that learning brings the qualifications needed to get a higher- rather than lower-paid job. It seems to me horribly reductive to express, as I know some do, the benefits of learning only in terms of lifetime earnings differentials. And it seems to me just plain wrong to measure everything that a person acquires during the learning journey only by its effect on the thickness of their pay-packet.

It makes me sad when, for example, I read about the new graduates who’ve been unable to find the sorts of jobs they’d hoped for this summer and last. And I can assure them that my colleagues and I are working hard to ensure that they can get a foot on their chosen career-ladder sooner rather than later. But at the same time I hope that those young people also recognise how their years of study and the experiences these have brought have transformed them as individuals.

Since John Henry Newman at least, I think there has been general recognition that a real university education must be about far more than just acquiring a passport to a white collar and a tie, that its value lies also in how much it does to enrich the content of students’ characters.

That same effect ought also to be evident in patently vocational forms of training. Now some people refuse to recognise that vocational training can have anything other than employment-related benefits. But I’ve certainly seen for myself as I’ve gone round the country over the summer how, for example, apprentices develop not only practical skills, but also a sense of their own achievement, of pride in what they have accomplished, and of self-worth.

That’s not just good for themselves and their employers. In the long run, it benefits all of us and the society in which we live.

So the transformational power of learning is shown both in how learning spreads opportunity and in how it spreads civilisation. But it’s also shown in the element of personal choice, personal responsibility and personal empowerment that learning entails. And that’s especially true of the less formal types of learning.

That is something of which the Transforming Lives report reminds us very forcefully.

There are three other important messages that I’d like to draw out from it.

The first is that in this area, a little money can achieve a lot, particularly if we are prepared to innovate and to trust people at the front line to organise learning in ways that suit their needs rather than conforming to some centralised model.

It’s hardly a secret that money is going to be in short supply, even in priority areas like education as the Government works to bring the public spending deficit under control. And we all know that cuts will have to be made, although details of where they will fall won’t be finalised until George Osborne and Danny Alexander publish the outcome of the Spending Review next month.

This isn’t a government that believes, like Aeschylus, that “he who learns must suffer”. But it would be idle to assume that some spending decisions won’t have an impact on education, including on informal learning.

And it follows that, unless we are prepared in future to contemplate a choice between the Scylla of learning for the few and the Charybdis of learning on the cheap – which I for one am not – we should look urgently for more creative ways to engage both learners and providers.

That implies, for one thing, making much better use of the local resources we have, engaging a wider range of partners in facilitating learning at community level, and making it easier for grass-roots initiatives to flourish. A good example of the sort of initiative I’m talking about was launched only a couple of weeks ago. The Cafe Culture campaign aims to encourage employers to offer informal learning opportunities at work to their staff. So far, it has involved some 64 companies covering almost two million workers.

The second important message from Transforming Lives that I want to highlight is that there remains enormous demand for informal learning. And I take comfort from that, because a nation that wants to learn is a nation that is going forward rather than backwards.

It’s a nation that’s already, by virtue of its people own free will, taking its future into its own hands. Sometimes the State can play a useful role in that, but most often the impetus comes from individuals.

There’s literally no limit to the range of forms this can take. From the pub landlord who provides space for the local book club to the employer who makes a room available for the lunchtime learning circle. From the housebound person whose isolation is reduced when they discover email or Facebook to the person with depression who finds relief through art or photography.

These sorts of activities and many others like them make our society a happier and healthier place, and this country a better one in which to live.

The third and final point from the report that I want to highlight follows from the first two. And it’s that the strength of informal adult and community learning stems precisely from its diversity.

Like nature itself, in Pascal’s definition, informal learning is “an infinite sphere, the centre of which is everywhere and the circumference nowhere”. Like the internet, with its profusion of interconnected yet free-standing networks, informal learning might have been designed to survive even the biggest catastrophe.

And that’s perhaps a good point on which to close, because my own long experience of informal adult and community learning has taught me above all else that it has an enviable ability not just to survive, but to adapt and grow. As if to spite those governments that have tried to kill it with neglect as well as those that have tried to kill it with regulation, it not only lives on, but thrives.

Transforming Lives reminds us of all this and of the essential role that adult and community learning must play in creating a better, more inclusive, more content, more confident and, indeed, bigger society.

Thank you.

 

The speech made by John Hayes, the then Education Minister, on 14 July 2010.

The speech made by John Hayes, the then Education Minister, at City and Islington College on 17 June 2010.

Thank you and good morning everyone.

Arthur Hugh Clough wrote that: “if hopes were dupes, fears may be liars”. And it seems to me that the words of this unjustly neglected poet are a particularly apt place to begin my remarks on what has been an unjustly neglected sector.

I know that many of the hopes that the last government raised for further education ultimately proved illusory.

And perhaps the most important thing I want to say today is that the fears which you may have for the future will prove equally misplaced.

But before I try to justify that bold statement, I must first thank you all, and especially Frank and his staff, for accommodating my request for an early start this morning.

For being here for me.

I have to go to Parliament shortly for a debate on the importance of skills in building and maintaining a strong economy and, of course, that’s closely linked to what I have to say now…

Even before Lord Leitch published his compelling analysis of the problem, it’s been no secret to most of us that skills are economically vital. And that doesn’t apply just to the manufacturing and industrial sectors, but right across our economy, to the service and retail sectors, and the public sector too.

Employers can’t stay in business without people with the right skills for the job. While people can’t hope for a good job without the skills employers are looking for. Without the right skills, inward investment will dwindle because we can’t compete for jobs on the grounds of cost with countries where low wages are the rule. And of course we wouldn’t want to. We are thankfully beyond dark, satanic mills.

But we can still compete effectively in ways which would have been unfamiliar to Mr Gradgrind. Through the business environment that the government creates. And, crucially, through the skills of our workers; skills which are still vital in the high-tech world in which we live than when William Morris majestically celebrated the joy of craft.

Few people, and very few politicians, would disagree with any of that. Indeed, I know that you’ve heard members of the previous government say similar things, albeit with less style.

But the similarity of aims should not obscure absolute difference of view about mean. You see my own analysis differs fundamentally from theirs, and the good news for you and particularly for me it that both the Prime Minister and Vince Cable agree with me, not my predecessors.

I believe, like Ruskin, that “industry without art is brutality”.

Too often in the recent past, the strength of the economic case for skills has been portrayed as the only case for skills, creating an implicit and in my opinion wrongheaded divide between learning that is useful and learning that is useless. We emphasise the economic and overlook the social and cultural benefits of learning at our peril.

The previous government’s concentration on the utilitarian aspects of learning excluded too much valuable activity and too many people. I see learning as a single whole, not a series of separate silos. Learning a skill to do a job should lead into learning for pleasure or self-fulfilment, and vice versa. But more the acquisition of practical skills is virtuous for its own sake as it instils purposeful pride. We enjoy what we learn to do well.

Likewise, the line between further and higher education should be a permeable membrane, not an iron curtain.

As soon as people start to treat the various styles and levels of learning as discrete entities, they also begin to erect the sorts of arbitrary barriers that stop learners moving from one to another, barriers that are the antithesis of the ideal of lifelong learning. And, of course, the people worst affected by these barriers are the most disadvantaged in our society, those furthest from learning and with fewest chances for progression.

These are all reasons why, in my view, no learning should be treated as if it were without point and every new element added to our collective stock of knowledge and skill should be applauded. Everything any of us learns adds a new brick to the edifice of civilised life. Those with the will and commitment to learn, however they do it and whatever they choose to study, should be admired and encouraged. None should be disparaged as one of Browning’s “picker-up of learning’s crumbs”.

The services this college offers to its community – services the excellence of which has repeatedly been recognised – are a case in point.

I recently took a look at your summer courses and was pleased to see intensive ceramic-throwing in there alongside more obviously vocational options like beginners’ computing and level 3 perming effects.

I think the author of The Stones of Venice would have approved.

But it’s the economic rather than the social or cultural case for skills that has been used by some not just to downgrade learning for its own sake, but as an excuse for the centralised command and control arrangements that have been foisted on adult educators over the past decade and more.

Now we must finally acknowledge that this approach, even in the terms of its own narrow criteria, has failed.

As the UK Commission of Employment and Skills reported in the Ambition 2020 report published last year, on recent trends, we are likely to slip from 18th to 21st in OECD rankings for intermediate level skills by 2020.

On recent performance ‘we will not be in the top eight countries of the world at any skill level’ in ten years time.

The highly centralised and bureaucratic system that developed over the course of the last Government meant that funds that could have been used on teaching and training, to dirve up skill levels, have, instead been devoted to formulating detailed plans and complying with targets.

Bean counting, hoop jumping, form filling – these were the skills my predecessors most admired.

Instead of enabling colleges and other providers to respond to needs of businesses and learners in their areas, Ministers, isolated in their Whitehall Offices, thought that they had a better idea of what these needs were.

Excessive bureaucracy sapped precious energy from our education system.

And, even worse, it led to systemic failure in the form of a F.E. capital crisis from which the sector is still reeling.

The LSC encouraged bids that would have cost 10 times more than the available funds.

144 capital projects were frozen.

79 of these projects had already received agreement in principle, and many colleges incurred considerable costs .as the result of what the Foster Review into the crisis described as ‘mismanagement’.

The top-heavy target driven bureaucratic system failed, as it was bound to. As Andrew Foster concluded, the LSC was too slow to respond: ‘there were straws in the wind, early storm warnings, but the problem was not crystallised fast enough.

There has to be a better way. An increasingly dynamic economy necessitates a dynamic skills system. If we are to build a highly skilled, high tech economy Colleges and independent providers need to be able to respond quickly to the needs of learners and employers.

That is why this government must and will offer further education a new beginning. – From satanic mills to bows of burning gold in one speech.

Before being appointed as Minister I was fortunate enough to have enjoyed a long Apprenticeship as Shadow Minister for Lifelong Learning, Further Education and Skills. Over the past five years I have held countless meetings with College Principles, their representative bodies and others from the sector.

I visited innumerable colleges across the country.

Everything I said in Opposition, and everything I say now in Government has been informed by the relationship I have built with FE.

I’ve listened to what you have had to say.

Which is why we came into government with the promise to set colleges free.

Now is the time to start delivering on this promise.

That’s why I’ve to come here, to a college, to announce publicly that we’re starting today. This is not the end of a process, but only the beginning.

Vince Cable has written this morning to the Chief Executive of the Skills Funding Agency setting out our ambitions for the Agency’s in 2010-11.

In parallel, I have also written today to colleges and other training organisations. My letter announces a number of ways in which the burdens on them will be lightened:

First, I am removing the requirement to complete Summary Statements of Activity, with a resulting reduction in performance monitoring of employer responsiveness.

Second, the Government has already announced the removal of Ofsted inspections for schools with outstanding performance – I will work with Ministerial Colleagues to introduce the same way approach to the FE sector removing inspections for Colleges with outstanding performance’.

Third, I will also remove the regulatory requirement for college Principals to undertake the Principals’ Qualifying Programme. That is not because I do not want appropriately qualified principals, but because I know that there are a range of development opportunities and qualifications which can enhance principals’ capabilities to run colleges.

Individuals and their institutions should be free to decide what package of development is appropriate to suit individual circumstances.

We will, of course, work with the Learning and Skills Improvement Service to ensure that there are high quality development opportunities available to prepare for and carry out leadership roles in the sector. This will allow governors to reassure themselves about the skills and capabilities of those seeking to take up leadership positions or to develop further in those roles.

And fourthly and most importantly, I will enable all colleges except those which are performing poorly to move money between adult learner and employer budgets, because you know best how to help you learners’ fulfil their potential and meet employer needs.

I hope that these are all changes which you welcome. But they are not an end in themselves. They are only a beginning, a first indication of this government’s determination to deliver on the promises it has made to providers and learners alike. To draw a line under the mistakes of the past and deliver a better future.

With this Government FE is no longer the poor relation. Cinderella is going to the ball.

With freedom comes a fresh challenge, as the costs of compliance is reduced I will be looking for colleges to find efficiencies. This may be, for example though the use of shared services and new approach to procurement. And colleges freed from constraints will also find new, better and more efficient ways of responding to local needs.

It won’t have escaped you that there are other things that the government has promised, too. And that chief among them is to tackle the public sector deficit and secure our economic recovery. You may therefore suspect that, as I have come here today with some goodies for colleges in one hand, I’ve probably got a big stick in the other.

So now you’ve at last got a Minister who is going to treat the FE sector as grown ups lets talk frankly. Members of the government from the Prime Minister down have striven to be completely frank with people about the scale of the savings that will need to be made to bring the public finances back under control and the pain that will inevitably result.

I certainly can’t pretend that further education will be excluded from those challenges. But I can give you some indications about how it will be managed.

So for the rest of my time this morning, I want to turn my attention to an area where we announced that there would be changes: the £1 billion Train to Gain programme. I know that there has been a lot of comments about this in the sector and among employers and it’s important that I should make our intentions clear.

George Osborne’s budget announcement a couple of weeks ago saw £200 million from the Train to Gain budget, refocused where we know it is needed most . £50 million of that money is being recycled into new capital grants for colleges, while the remaining £150 million will pay for 50,000 extra apprenticeship places this year.

The main point I want to make is that the money saved was not taken from further education and skills. A quarter of it is going to help alleviate a serious problem for many colleges; a left over from the capital crisis I spoke of earlier, while the rest will continue to support training in the workplace.

In that context, those of you who have followed the debate around further education policy over the last few years will know how much store this government sets on apprenticeships. There are many good reasons for that. First and foremost, the apprenticeships model is not only work-based, but work-focused. It passes on the practical skills needed to do a particular job in a way that is widely appreciated and understood.

The evidence also shows that apprenticeships add more to a person’s earning-power than any other form of practical training. Someone may begin an apprenticeship unable to do anything that might fit them for a skilled job. But they emerge as – and I’m not afraid of the word – a craftsman. I am as proud of medieval stonemasons, who build so many of our cathedrals – and an apprenticeship can still rightly involve learning how to use a mallet and chisel – as I am of the software designers, film technicians, aeronautical engineers that emerge from today’s apprenticeships.

Demand for apprenticeship places is growing and one of our priorities is to encourage more employers to participate. Apprenticeships are both a route to key competences for employees and a vital way to help employers build highly skilled, efficient businesses.

We must also seek new ways of guiding people from lower-level engagement into apprenticeships, and from apprenticeships into higher education or other forms of further study.

Academic study should not, and both David Willetts and I are determined it won’t be, seen as the only thing that carries value. Practical skills are often undervalued, but that’s usually by people who don’t and couldn’t ever have them.

As a youngster growing up in south east London, I realised that I was only clever enough to be an academic. I was not clever enough to use my hands to make and do things. And the older I get, the more I revere the practical skills of my forbears, their craftsmanship and the pride they were able to take in it.

But as effective as apprenticeships are, they are not the be-all and end-all of workplace training. That is why we have never proposed, as some people mischievously claim, simply to end funding for other work based training and put all of the money saved into apprenticeships instead. And let me say once and for all that there’s nothing whatsoever wrong with helping people to train whilst in work.

But there’s everything wrong with waste at any time and above all at times like these. Train to Gain was always too blunt an instrument to be efficient, craft the skills we need and its impact was never proportionate to the enormous amounts of money it cost.

Indeed, the National Audit Office found that that the scheme did not provide good value for money.

Apprenticeships have value, for people and for employers. People understand what they are and the benefits they bring. But for some, that won’t always be right. And we’re determined that we won’t repeat the mistakes of the last government by driving towards one arbitrary goal without actually considering what else employees and employers need.

So one of the big questions I’m going to be seeking to answer over the next few months is what are the right things for the government to do to support employers and people for whom apprenticeships aren’t the right answer, as we create a comprehensive, efficient and effective workplace training offer.

One of the key issues is eliminating deadweight – where taxpayers’ money is simply substituted for money that employers would spend regardless. Because every pound that my Department spends to zero effect is a pound that won’t be spent on other public services or in helping to bring down the deficit, or simply left in the pockets of the people who worked hard to earn.

There are clearly also questions around the specific needs of particular economic sectors, and also whether special provision should be made for small and medium-sized enterprises who often find it more difficult than larger organisations to absorb the time and cost pressures that staff training can involve.

Finally, there is the problem of bureaucracy on which I have already touched. Whatever new arrangements to support workplace training are established – including the provisions of information, advice and guidance to employers and learners – must avoid the pitfalls of excessive paperwork that have put so many people off training and frustrated employers.

Those are some of the key issues that we will need to address soon. Others will occur to those of you with direct experience of training in the workplace. And that’s another important point.

I am determined not to sit in Whitehall and remotely form a picture of how things are in colleges or workplaces. As I have done during our time in opposition I will consult, listen, learn and act.

I want to take time to talk to people like you about how things are, and what we should do to make them better.

Lets agree on the clear that action is needed, to build on what is working in the further education and skills sector and set right what is not.

Change is coming and, as Dr Johnson so rightly said in the preface to his dictionary, “change is not made without inconvenience, even from worse to better”.

It behoves all of us here, whatever the inconvenience and however difficult the transition, that the changes that are coming lead to a better deal for the learners whose hopes, in our various ways, we hold in our hands.

I began my speech by quoting a poem by Arthur Hugh Clough. The last line of that poem is quite well known – “But westward, look, the land is bright”. This was once famously quoted by the last leader of a British coalition government before David Cameron. Even at one of the darkest moments of the war, Churchill was inviting Britain to look to the future with confidence. And even amid our current troubles, I invite you to do the same today. Because I firmly believe that the future for colleges is bright. I am determined to work unceasingly to make it so.

Today, we take the first step towards a better, freer, more empowered further education system.

Today we start to unchain the immense human capital in FE.

Today, with the changes I have announced, we have made a new beginning. But tomorrow we must strive together to bring the process of rebuilding to fruition. Let us make sure that looking back we will be able to say that rebuilding started here, today, with us.

And I hope that we will feel able to say, that Cinderella lived happily ever after.

Thank you.