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Basic skills

Basic Skills: 25 Jan 2001

Mr. Hilary Benn (Leeds, Central): It is a pleasure to follow my hon. Friend the Member for Middlesbrough, South and Cleveland, East (Dr. Kumar). He has made a powerful point about the challenge that we face to take the money and effort that the Government have invested to try to solve some of the most intractable problems, particularly in our urban areas, and to build in the flexibility for which I think he argued.

The Government have been responsible for the neighbourhood warden scheme and have provided extra funding to combat truancy in schools. A local authority, a community safety partnership or a local community organisation might say to the Government, "Could you let us bid for a bit of money from the neighbourhood warden scheme and a bit from the truancy cash so the we can employ wardens in the community, whose principal responsibility would be to ensure that kids were not bunking off school?" That would be a good way of building on what the Government have done.

It is thoroughly positive that attention is being focused on these intractable problems in inner-city areas--I am speaking as a Member who represents such an area--but we need to trust local communities more and give people the chance to apply their local knowledge and expertise.

I had only one disagreement with the contribution of the hon. Member for Daventry (Mr Boswell). He said that this debate was tailor-made for Westminster Hall, and while that is a testament to the virtues of Westminster Hall, it is a sad reflection on the other Chamber such comments should be felt necessary. It is almost as if we enter a parallel universe when we enter Westminster Hall. In my experience, the quality of the debates in this Chamber has been universally high, and we should be able to say the same of the Floor of the House.

Thus far, we are agreed that we are dealing with a legacy. As my hon. Friend the Member for Middlesbrough, South and Cleveland, East argued with great force, the problem of basic skills is a legacy from an era when it was not necessary in all forms of employment to have a high level of basic skill. Nowadays, the basic skills that employers demand are far higher.

There is also the legacy of previous educational experience. I strongly believe that we are still dealing with the consequences of an era when many people felt stigmatised by educational failure at an early age. I am an ardent advocate of the comprehensive reforms of the past 30 years. One would not have to be a genius to recognise that if 11-year-olds were told at an early stage in their development, "Sorry, you are not up to much, you have failed, go away," they might grow up with a profound distrust of education and see it as not for them. The stigma of those early years is one of the reasons why people are afraid to own up to failure.

Our great success in educating a very small percentage of our people to a very high standard has been the great strength of the British system, but on the other side of the coin is the basic skills problem that we are discussing. I was pleased that my hon. Friend the Minister made reference to that, not least in relation to prisoners. I was interested by the written answer published earlier this week in Hansard that gave the results of a very large-scale study into the writing and numeracy skills of prisoners. Of the 97,000 prisoners tested for their writing skills, 80 per cent. were at level 1 or below, which is the level expected of the average 11-year-old. Of the 89,000 tested for their numeracy, 67 per cent. were at level 1 or below. That tells us all we need to know about the link between educational disadvantage and the extremely low levels of educational attainment among the people in the criminal justice system--I was going to say "criminality", but that is not quite what I mean.

Mr. Allan: I fully agree with the hon. Gentleman. I am concerned about the politics of the debate about education in prison. The hon. Member for Daventry is quite forceful in his comments about it, but it is one of those areas that could be used mischievously in the political context. It could be used to argue that prisoners have advantages or get an easy ride. I sincerely hope that we have leadership across the political spectrum, so that when prison education programmes are developed, such rhetoric is not supported by politicians, who should know better.

Mr. Benn: I entirely agree. I hope that all of us in the Chamber believe in redemption. I certainly do. If we cannot help people in prison to redeem themselves, they are more likely to reoffend when their sentence is served and they re-enter society.

We are dealing with an intergenerational legacy, and it was striking that the Moser report referred to the obvious problem that if parents have poor basic skills, it is much more likely that their children will too. It cited the research by the City university, which found that
" 60 per cent. of children in the lowest reading attainment group at age 10 had parents with low literacy scores; only 2 per cent. had parents with high literacy scores. That illustrates the problem."

This is a challenge for all of us. It is certainly a challenge for the part of Leeds that I represent, which has been incredibly successful in recent years in creating employment. Many jobs are being establishedby new businesses. The problem is that many of those jobs are being taken by people who commute into Leeds from increasingly far away, and many of those whom I represent in the inner cities, where there are pockets of unemployment and deprivation, lack the requisite skills and qualifications. As my hon. Friend the Member for Middlesbrough, South and Cleveland, East said, they are no less intelligent than anyone else, but they do not have the skills. Basic skills are obviously the first step on the ladder.

As I said when we debated the Learning and Skills Bill, we have a problem of both supply and demand. I believe that demand is the biggest problem, as there is plentiful supply out there. We have to generate the demand--it is what makes a person say, "Yes, I need to do something about that." First, we can give people the statistics--as we should do all the time--about the financial benefits of gaining skills. On average, someone with A-levels earns 25 per cent. more than someone with no qualifications. That is one way of illustrating that basic truth.

Secondly, we must recognise that we need to catch people when they are ready to say, "Yes, this is what I need to do." To be honest, they do not necessarily make that statement when we want them to. A teacher returning home after a hard day at school, as some children just do not want to learn, can imagine them coming back in five, 10 or 15 years' time saying, "I realise that I did not gain the full benefit from the education that was available, but now I want to."

Mr. Boswel: The hon. Gentleman is making a most constructive and helpful speech. We are not falling out about much. From my experience, one of the main areas of self-reference is young mothers with children who are now attaining school age and, as the hon. Member for Staffordshire, Moorlands (Charlotte Atkins) described, cannot handle the communications they receive from the school, whether reports or letters from teachers. They need to get basic reading skills to be able to respond and not to fall behind and embarrass their own children.

Mr. Benn: The hon. Gentleman makes a powerful point. That is just one example of how a lack of basic skills makes life very difficult for some people. We must provide a plethora of ways in which they can be enabled to take that step and receive the support and help that they require.

We are lucky in Leeds as we have many excellent FE colleges, which are heavily involved in outreach. Part of the solution lies in developing other avenues. A number of hon. Members have described how some of those schemes are being exploited. My hon. Friend the Member for Staffordshire, Moorlands talked about ICT. She is perfectly right. People are prepared to say that they are short of IT skills, but they are reluctant to admit that they cannot read.

I had an interesting experience when I visited an educational institution recently. I had gone to the Brook Street Bureau office in the centre of Leeds to talk about the regulation of the employment industry, and was told about the women returners who come into that office. These women--it is mainly women--explain that their children have grown up, that they want to return to work and that they want to start with temporary work. Some of them say, "But I'm not really up on IT".

The office has two or three little workstations, where those women can sit down, put on a set of earphones and be taken through a basic training course in IT. No one looks over their shoulders to find out whether they are competent. So a little bit of basic education--in this case, basic IT education--takes place in the Brook Street Bureau office in Leeds. That is why I describe it as a learning institution. I would not previously have thought of it as part of the panoply of provision, but it is an interesting example. As that case shows, for people considering working in an office, some knowledge of Word is now a basic skill requirement. That is an illustration of how the level of skills required has risen.

Mrs. Curtis-Thomas: I concur with my hon. Friend's remarks about access. Does he agree that the new deal provision for lone parents and young people needs to be reviewed, given the number of people presenting with significant learning difficulties? The gateway programme is adequate for people with the expected, normal levels of understanding and intelligence. However, a significant proportion of people are just below that, and at the moment the gateway is failing them, because instead of being flexible, it is fixed. Many people come out of the programme unsupported. I spoke recently to lone parents, who said that they would like some discretion to be given to providers and trainers in the new deal. I should like to illustrate my point with an example--

Mr. Nicholas Winterton (in the Chair): Order. The hon. Lady's intervention seems to be developing into a second speech. I hope that she has made her point.

Mr. Benn: Thank you, Mr. Winterton. I entirely accept my hon. Friend's point, which I discussed with the Employment Service in Leeds. That is another good way in which we could take the work that the Government have done in establishing the new deal and consider how to build in greater flexibility in the light of experience to give greater help to those who need it most. That is the challenge for us, and we should ensure that we respond to it.

On qualifications and funding, I agree with the point that the hon. Member for Daventry made about the challenge to the funding system in recognising how people want to learn. With the establishment of the Learning and Skills Council, we have an opportunity to change an absurdity in the system as it has operated until now. If someone attending a college tells his tutor in the middle of the course that he will not be coming the following week as he has a job, that is terrific for the individual, but a disaster for the college. Under the funding formula, the college will be penalised for having failed to achieve completion. How we support providers must take full account of how learners want to learn.

Mr. Boswell: Recent experience involving one of the FE providers in my constituency shows that accounting for on-line learning is much more difficult than simply measuring the number of minutes of contact time in a classroom. Some evidence already suggests that further education colleges subject to the existing formula are having difficulty in accounting for that. That is clearly a matter to which the Minister needs to turn his attention.

Mr. Benn: The hon. Gentleman makes a good point about the challenge that new technology creates for us in measuring participation. Towards the end of last year, I was invited to participate in a presentation of certificates at the Beeston site of the Park Lane college. It involved a group of people who had achieved a variety of basic skills. On entering the room, I was struck by the strong sense of community among those who had participated. They literally constituted a community, as they all came from the immediate geographical area. They had gained skill and confidence as a group, and had supported each other in doing so. Their pride in their own achievement was apparent, because every award of a certificate was met by someone jumping up with a camera to photograph their friend.

I particularly remember one woman who was physically shaking as she walked from the back of the room to receive her certificate from me. When she sat down, I leaned over to the course tutor and asked whether she had noticed it. She said that she had and explained that it was the first time in the woman's life that she had received a certificate for anything. It was both a humbling and an uplifting moment for me, which brought home so forcefully exactly what today's debate is about.