Government Record on Education, Employment and Welfare
House of Lords · Lords Chamber · 16 Jul 2026 · 32 speeches · Official Report
Motion to Take Note
Moved by
To move that this House takes note of the Government’s record on education, employment and welfare since July 2024.
My Lords, I am delighted to open this important debate on the Government’s record on education, employment and welfare, as we reach the end of the Starmer premiership and move to the Burnham one. Over the past two years, an unfortunate pattern has emerged across the Government’s policies on these issues. Whether intended or not, their interventions have too often served to restrict opportunity rather than broaden it. Opportunity is the foundation of a free, prosperous society and economy. It is what allows a child from any background to succeed in education, a young person to secure their first job and an individual to build an independent life through work. Yet across education, employment and welfare, the Government have appeared increasingly determined to substitute individual aspiration and institutional freedom with central direction and state intervention. The result is not only a larger state-we just have to look at the eye-watering levels of government spending-but a society in which the pathways to fulfilling an individual’s potential are increasingly constrained and, in too many cases, cut off entirely. At a time when Britain faces economic and technological change, that is the wrong direction in which to travel. I begin with education. The central question for any education system should be simple: are we giving the next generation the greatest possible opportunity to succeed? For much of the past two decades, the academies programme has helped answer that...
My Lords, my text for this simplistic opposition attack on the Government is simple: I will point out the legacy of the noble Baroness who has just spoken. She was in the Cabinet for six years. On 20 January 2025, the Economic Affairs Committee of your Lordships’ House produced a 42-paragraph letter to the Secretary of State for Work and Pensions. This followed a short inquiry to understand what was driving the massive change to incentivise benefits and inactivity under the Tories. Time permits me to mention just two paragraphs. Paragraph 1 read: “Spending on incapacity and disability benefits has risen by more than 40 per cent in real terms since 2013 … This is around 20 per cent higher than the UK defence budget and equal to 22 per cent of the total health budget. Spending on incapacity and disability benefits is forecast to rise to £100.7 billion … pushing the total welfare bill above £370 billion. The latest figures show that around 3.7 million people of working age receive the health component of Universal Credit … 1.2 million more than in February 2020. As the Office for Budget Responsibility note, since before the COVID pandemic this rise has been uniform across age groups. This is in the context of there being 1.51 million people registered as unemployed”. In Paragraph 7 of the letter, the committee said: “While it is difficult to unravel the data to provide a clear picture of the level of economic inactivity, administrative data show that spending on health-related...
My Lords, I thank the noble Baroness, Lady Evans, for securing this important debate. I looked at the list of speakers and thought this was going to be a fantastic debate about our children’s future. I do not want it to be about how bad one side or the other was, because that will not help any young person. I have always been passionate about young people-I will return to that-and I will always fight for them. I did it before I arrived in your Lordships’ House and I do it now. Earlier this month I spoke about helping young people gain work experience in your Lordships’ House by coming in to assist us. This week, a fantastic A-level student from north London, Oliwia Pietrusa, helped me draft my speech and did some of the research for it. A lot of speakers will follow me, so I will restrict my speech to two bits: NEETs-young people not in employment, education or training-and primary schools. As we have seen from the recent Milburn review, young people are being devastated by the side-effects of a lack of government intervention. Research by the House of Lords Library showed recently that 1.012 million young people aged 16 to 24 are not in employment, education or training. As the noble Baroness, Lady Evans, reminded us, Alan Milburn warned of a rising “lost generation”. The real issue now is about the system. Is it obsessed by ticking boxes? Are we just pushing our young people to chase qualifications but not finding destinations for them, by which I mean long-term, secure...
My Lords, I am grateful to the noble Baroness, Lady Evans of Bowes Park, for bringing this debate today, and it is an honour to follow the noble Lord, Lord Mohammed of Tinsley. I want to focus my comments on opportunity and social mobility. In assessing the Government’s record on education, employment and welfare since July 2024, we cannot ignore the growing loss of humanities provision across higher education. Universities are autonomous institutions, but their decisions are shaped by the wider financial and policy environment. A successful education system is measured not simply by qualifications or apprenticeships but by the breadth of opportunity it offers. The Social Mobility Commission’s State of the Nation 2024 reminds us that opportunity remains profoundly shaped by geography. When courses disappear from universities across whole regions, it is often students without the financial means to relocate who lose more opportunities first. Those from more affluent backgrounds can frequently move elsewhere or absorb the additional costs of studying further from home; those from less advantaged backgrounds often cannot. As a result, talent is constrained not by ability but by circumstance. Social mobility depends not only on opening doors but on ensuring that those doors exist in every part of the country. If whole disciplines become concentrated in a handful of institutions or regions, educational choice increasingly becomes a privilege rather than a right. That risks...
Baroness Shephard of Northwold
My Lords, I congratulate my noble friend Lady Evans on her excellent introduction to this important debate, and it is a pleasure to follow the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Newcastle. I will concentrate on NEETs: that is, young people who leave school without entering sixth form or FE, employment or training. They are at the centre of Alan Milburn’s interim report on Young People and Work , which reveals very bleak prospects for NEETs. There are nearly a million of these young people-that is, one in eight of our school leavers-and the numbers are rising. Nearly 60% of them are economically inactive, which means they are detached from the labour market and not looking for work. The Milburn report describes this as a “moral crisis” with “economic consequences”. The economic consequences are that the annual cost to the taxpayer for the present numbers is £125 billion. All other EU countries, apart from Romania, are doing better than us on this issue, and, alarmingly, over the past decade, the number of NEETs citing health problems has risen by 70%, four out of 10 citing mental health problems. I accept that the position has developed under successive Governments. We now have the aftermath of Covid, war, and a volatile world. We need economic growth. I can do no better than quote the noble Lord, Lord Walker of Broxton-I think he is not in his place today-who said in the welfare debate on 11 June that “we will cure the problem” of NEETs “only by growing the economy … the...
My Lords, the level of youth unemployment in England today is 16.2%. So many youngsters are leaving school at 18 without any employability skills, and that is a disgrace for the fifth-richest country in the world. It is also an indictment of the failure of the education policy of Conservative and Labour Governments since the year 2000, because they have created 1 million people now between 16 and 24 who are unemployed, which is an absolutely shaming figure. The colleges that I have been trying to stimulate over the last 15 years, university technical colleges, have an unemployment rate of lower than 3%: 20% of our students become apprentices, 50% go to universities to study STEM subjects, and the rest get jobs locally because they have worked with local employers for four years. That is what is needed. We need a revolution in education. I think that it will be introduced by our new Prime Minister, Andy Burnham, when he is appointed on Monday. He has made many speeches on the importance of technical, practical and vocational education. No Prime Minister since Thatcher, from John Major to Keir Starmer, has made any speech on technical and practical education and learning by hand. No Prime Minister has done it. Search as you will, you will not find them. I think that Andy Burnham will introduce significant changes. About two years ago, he made a statement in Manchester that he wanted to scrap the EBacc, which has an academic curriculum, and replace it with the MBacc. Since...
Baroness O'Grady of Upper Holloway
My Lords, I thank the noble Baroness, Lady Evans, for introducing this debate. It is a pleasure to follow the noble Lord, Lord Baker, who always has important and interesting things to say about vocational training-and, it seems, about ministerial appointments. I am very proud that this Government’s mission is to reindustrialise Britain, make work pay and lift living standards. There has been real progress. The UK is now the fastest-growing economy in the G7. Better job security and higher wages through stronger employment rights incentivise workers and reduce turnover costs for business. NHS waiting lists are falling, delivering a healthier workforce. That benefits business too. The Resolution Foundation reports that this year the lowest-income half of families in Britain will see a significant improvement in their standard of living. Let us remember that the single greatest contribution to social mobility in this country has been this Government scrapping the two-child benefit limit, lifting half a million children out of poverty. That is the kind of schooling that I am interested in, because it will transform not only their lives but the lives of their families and communities. To generate fair growth, we must tackle Britain’s record of low investment and poor productivity. Government action to accelerate clean energy production shows what can be achieved. The CBI reports that the net-zero sector now supports over 1 million jobs and over 23,000 firms whose productivity is...
Baroness Bottomley of Nettlestone
My Lords, I also most warmly congratulate my noble friend on a brilliant speech in which she said all that needed to be said. Many of us will repeat the same message, but that is what you do in church-as the right reverend Prelate will understand-and you learn the message in the end, so I hope that I will be forgiven for doing so. Education, employment and welfare cannot be judged in isolation. Together they determine whether people can build secure and independent lives. Much of what the Government want to happen is commendable, but too much of what has actually happened is deplorable. Mission is not the point. I have always had a great regard for the noble Baroness who just spoke, but lifting the two-child limit is not the point. This Government are so good at doing easy things. They do not seem to have any stomach or courage to introduce unpopular measures, yet most of us know that to achieve success you have to do difficult things. I had to shut hospitals. The noble Lord, Lord Heseltine, had to shut mines. If you want progress, you have to do extremely tough things. This Government too often play to the gallery and are not prepared or do not have the courage to tackle what must happen. I will say a bit about teachers and lecturers, who provide such a vital service. It again shows commitment that 4,000 of the promised 6,500 additional teachers have been delivered, but the real problem is retention. How can we make teaching a more worthwhile activity? I have just returned...
My Lords, I am grateful to the noble Baroness, Lady Evans, for introducing this debate at a time when over 1 million young people are NEET. In 2009, I was appointed Employment Minister in the teeth of the global financial crisis. The Prime Minister was clear: my job was to prevent the scarring effect of long-term youth unemployment and to get the headline rate to fall in time for the 2010 general election. When I told the then Permanent Secretary at the DWP that this was my task, he told me that to do so would defy history and was impossible. He was wrong. We rapidly rolled out the future jobs fund to give young people who had been on benefits for more than six months real paid work, rather than a life on benefits. It created some 150,000 jobs, and the department’s later evaluation found participants far more likely to be in unsubsidised employment two years on, and a net benefit to society of around £7,750 for every young person who took part. With determined focus, we can tackle impossible problems. The future jobs fund was, of course, scrapped by the incoming Government in 2010 before they published the evidence that it had succeeded. This Government inherited 872,000 young people-more than one in eight-who are NEET. The number is rising much faster today. The Milburn review tells us that the cost of NEETs is £125 billion a year, which is more than our entire schools budget. The attainment gap between poorer children and their peers stood as wide as it did three decades...
My Lords, I too congratulate the noble Baroness, Lady Evans, on calling this debate. One can sense in the interventions from all sides of the House the deep disappointment and frustration that we now-once again, shockingly-have 1 million young people who are NEET. It is particularly frustrating, as tackling the problem is not a deeply mysterious intractable issue that cannot possibly be addressed; it is absolutely solvable. The noble Baroness, Lady Evans, set out in her excellent speech the wider policies that are necessary to bring down the number of NEETs. I will focus on specific policies aimed at those young people who, tragically, are already NEET or may be about to become so. The evidence from a range of initiatives under successive Governments, including those going back to the 1980s and 1990s, is that some combination of the following is needed: direct support for building up employability skills, so that employers do not think that it is high risk to take on someone who is NEET or about to be NEET; plus some lowering of the costs to employers of taking them on, either through a general reduction or specific incentives and rewards. There have been lots of initiatives over the decades. They work, but the trouble is they cost money, partly because there is a dead-weight cost. Some young people get off benefits and into work anyway and the Treasury does not like expensive schemes, so to win the argument for more of these programmes they have to be as well targeted as...
My Lords, I congratulate my noble friend on introducing this debate so well. I am conscious that a lot of statistics have been thrown around. I was genuinely surprised to hear the figures given by the noble Lords, Lord Rooker and Lord Knight, and I am curious as to where they got them from, because they are not what the ONS says. The ONS says that in 2001, seasonally adjusted, which is the preferred figure being used, there were 833,000 NEETs. By March 2010, that figure was 1.128 million. In June, it was 1.074 million. When the Conservatives left office in May 2024, it was 935,000, and by that June it was 921,000. We have seen a disaster in what is going on, a lot of which is due to the policy, sadly, put in place by this Government, thinking that it would do more to help jobs, which has in fact killed off growth and jobs. Let us give them some credit: there are more people working now than before. That is true, and I am not surprised, given the rise in population. I support most of the changes that have been made to the apprenticeship schemes and the apprenticeship levy. I welcome the fact that a lot has been moved out of education, which showed no interest in young people and what they would do in the future once they had left school, and is now with the DWP. That has been a good move. But let us not shy away from this: unemployment is up and NEETs are up. We need drive. I was very proud of my record at the DWP during Covid. Working with my noble friend Lady Stedman-Scott,...
My Lords, I congratulate the noble Baroness, Lady Evans, for securing this debate and for her excellent opening speech. Britain’s economic problems did not begin with this Government. That would be an unjust accusation. I am afraid Governments of all parties have laboured diligently over many years to produce today’s situation. The fundamentals can be summarised in one simple set of figures. Since 2008, productivity growth has consistently fallen back. The ONS tells us that, before the financial crisis, multi-factor productivity grew at nearly 2% annually. It is now growing at about 0.5% or less and has recently stagnated. In 2025, per capita GDP was lower than in 2022. No party in government over this period can regard this record with satisfaction. All three-that includes the Liberal Democrats, of course-to varying degrees regulated, taxed, subsidised and drove energy costs up and industry out. Then came Covid, Ukraine and inflation; each inflicted genuine damage but also provided Whitehall with that most renewable of resources: a convenient explanation to hide bad policy. Now, there is perhaps a glimmer of something better. Maybe artificial intelligence will finally raise output per worker. Indeed, the ONS’s experimental measure on productivity suggests that it has risen by 4.2% since 2019, rather than 2.3% under the old measure. So, perhaps something is going on. But at precisely this delicate moment, the Government have chosen to test whether a green shoot can survive...
My Lords, I am grateful to my noble friend Lady Evans for securing this debate and it is a pleasure to follow the noble Lord, Lord Frost. The Government’s stewardship of the economy over the past two years has been little short of catastrophic for our labour market. When the Government took office two years ago, they inherited a labour market that had recovered from the pandemic, although it still bore some of its scars, and what did they do? As my noble friend Lady Evans so powerfully explained, they immediately taxed employers for the act of hiring. Unsurprisingly, as we have heard, unemployment has risen rapidly ever since and now stands at just under 2 million, with over 1 million young people unemployed. If business had not had enough already, the Government then introduced their business-busting Employment Rights Act, which their own impact assessment forecasts will cost employers at least £5 billion a year, with smaller businesses bearing much of the burden of course, further harming the prospects of the very people the Government claim to champion. Noble Lords opposite usually mischaracterise our arguments against the most damaging aspects of this Act as that we are somehow against workers’ rights. This is absolutely not the case. The simple fact is that the most fundamental right is to have access to a job in the first place. The argument we advance is that extending rights to the moment a worker enters the building for the first time, removing the flexibility that...
My Lords, I have been reflecting on why the lifelong learning commitment matters: the world of work has changed and continues to do so. People will need new skills throughout their working lives. We need to help people get into and, just as importantly, stay in work as jobs and industries evolve. So I share the Minister’s ambition, but there is a simple question we have to ask, and forgive me for putting it plainly: what is the point of helping people gain new skills if there are no jobs for them to move into? If 32 years of helping people get and keep a job has taught me anything, it is this: opportunity depends on business being willing to hire. What do we see? Unemployment rising, vacancies falling and a diagnosis that the labour market is not at all well. A job needs two things: someone who is ready and willing to work, and an employer who is ready and willing to hire them. Too often, the Government talk about the first and forget the second. For a business employing somebody full-time on the national living wage, employer national insurance costs have risen by around 68% over the past two years. At the same time, the cost of employing a full-time 20 year-old has risen by around 26% since 2024. When it becomes more expensive to employ people, businesses hire less, opportunities become scarcer and more people end up relying on welfare instead of wages. My noble friend Lady Coffey put it very well: there are too many incentives to stay on benefits rather than get off them....
My Lords, I welcome this opportunity to take stock of what I am sure the Minister will demonstrate is a pretty positive record. I will focus on social security-called “welfare” in the Motion-but first I shall mention the education reforms that have contributed to the child poverty strategy by reducing the costs of education: action on school uniforms, free breakfasts and free school meals. On the last, I will quote Davina, a member of the Child Poverty Action Group’s youth panel, on why they matter so much: “It’s not just about food, it’s about dignity, equality and belonging. Hunger makes you tired, embarrassed and left out. A hot meal gives you the energy to focus and the confidence to feel like you belong in the room”. The Government can take pride in a number of measures on social security, including the modest real increase in the real value of universal credit, the fair repayment rate that reduces the overall level of UC deductions and, most significantly, the abolition of what the noble Lord, Lord Freud, described as the “vicious” two-child limit. A self-described mother in a hard-working family of five writes that, “it feels like a heavy weight has been lifted off our shoulders; we can finally breathe”, after the “devastating financial impact” of the limit. Of course I was not happy about the cuts, but at least the worst of them was averted by the establishment of the Timms PIP review, which was co-produced with disabled people. This is such a positive initiative, as...
My Lords, I congratulate my noble friend Lady Evans on securing this debate and on her excellent opener. We are at an end-of-term moment, not least because the PM who promised us economic growth in his manifesto has clearly failed and, somewhat extraordinarily, the Labour Party has not found one MP in its ranks who put himself or herself up for the job. The mess we find ourselves in as a nation is due largely to actions and words from the current Government. The Minister should not underestimate the huge damage done in the early days of this Government, when we were misled about a £22 billion black hole-yes, misled. Not one credible economist supported that contention-
Noble Lords
Oh!
I would welcome an intervention from anyone who can claim that there was such an economist who did support the contention. There is none. The negativity that ensued was disastrous. I understand the tactics, perhaps emulating George Osborne, but the response was to break a manifesto commitment and increase taxes, which killed any chance of economic recovery and, of course, jobs growth. It was not just the retrospective taxation, such as the IHT on pensions, but the NI increases which sent the economy and youth unemployment into a tailspin. I put down amendments to exempt charities, care homes or even hospices. The CEO of a hospice, no Tory supporter, told me that she would have to cut jobs as a direct result, and consequently people would die in greater pain and agony than need be the case. I am not sure that Labour were proud of that, because it was unnecessary. Even worse, the increase in NI has failed. We were told that it was going to raise £25 billion a year, but the OBR figures reveal that it will be nearer £16.6 billion. I am happy to be accused of being a siren voice, as the noble Baroness, Lady Lister, referred to, but all the Prime Minister and the Chancellor had to do was to stand up to their own colleagues and bring welfare back to a reasonable level, and that would have been avoided. They will now pay the price. Unfortunately, as a result, the cost of employing an 18 to 20 year-old rose by £4,095 between 2024 and 2026. As the former Labour Education Secretary...
I congratulate my noble friend Lady Evans on this timely debate and on her excellent remarks. It is always a pleasure, too, to follow my noble friend Lord Leigh. The first duty of government is the national security, including economic security, of our country. By that, I mean delivering a functioning economy which creates jobs, underpins our national services and provides a safety net of welfare. It also means living within our means and protecting the right for future generations to do so. Education, employment and welfare are the topics of this timely and well-chosen debate, and key to all of this is growth. Today, I will focus my short remarks on employment and welfare. The legacy of the last two years of the Labour Government has seen unemployment up, hirings down, a welfare bill through the roof and growth flatlining. The OBR’s latest Fiscal R isks and S ustainability report made for sombre reading by pointing out: first, that the fiscal problem is mainly spending-led and will likely worsen with the pressures of an ageing population; and, secondly, that debt is rising to unsustainable levels and the tax burden is already close to historic highs. On the eve of a new Prime Minister, I have a plea for Mr Burnham: we simply cannot afford more poor policy which will only make our country worse off and less able to deliver good schools and good jobs and support those who cannot support themselves. What is Mr Burnham’s plan for growth? We hear that he wants to put taxes up,...
My Lords, parliamentary tradition prevents me using the precise words required to describe the inheritance that the previous Government left behind on the topics of this Motion. Allow me to remind the House of that baseline: a classroom workforce in freefall, an economy addicted to insecure labour and a welfare state that ran up a staggering £2.8 billion bill. Nevertheless, I welcome and thank the noble Baroness, Lady Evans, for the opportunity to set up this Government’s record of achievement. We have had to step in to make good the severe macroeconomic impacts of a botched Brexit deal, the real impact of which has been felt up and down the country, permanently fracturing our supply chains, driving up core costs, squeezing our public finances and giving us the cost of living crisis. They built the crisis on their watch, yet in just two years this Government have systematically reversed their negative trends and delivered measurable progress. Let us look at the hard numbers in education. The noble Baroness’s party oversaw a catastrophic depletion of our classrooms, leaving just under half a million full-time equivalent teachers with real-terms wages slashed by 9%. This Government have not just lamented the crisis: they have fixed the system. They have set an ambitious target to recruit 6,500 new, expert teachers in critical shortage subjects such as maths and physics. In just two years, the data shows that we have already successfully delivered over 70% of that workforce....
My Lords, it is a pleasure to take part in the debate. I express my gratitude to my noble friend Lady Evans for presenting the case against the Government so eloquently at the start of the debate. It has been very interesting to follow a number of distinguished speakers. It is a particular privilege to follow the noble Baroness, Lady Gill, who made a stirring attempt to defend the Government’s record. I hope that Mr Burnham is watching this somewhere, and that he will be able to provide the rewards which are so clearly deserved for that effort. I merely point out that, sooner or later, it will be impossible to blame the previous Government for the current Government’s failings and, of course, much sooner it will be impossible to blame the previous Prime Minister for the current Government’s failings. We will see how things develop. My own experience in this area comes from having been the Deputy Mayor of London, where I dealt with schools, businesses, employment and skills. It is perhaps a slightly unusual spread of experience in the House today: we have heard from a lot of former Ministers. However, as the new Prime Minister takes over, perhaps this will become a more relevant piece of experience, because he has talked a lot about learning things from the regions and applying them to national government. I will be interested to see what he does, and to see whether the Minister can raise the curtain on some of the things that we can expect from the new Prime Minister. There...
My Lords, I thank the noble Baroness, Lady Evans, for securing this debate. I declare my interest as pro-chancellor of the University of Portsmouth and honorary professor of women’s health at City St George’s University of London. Education, employment and welfare are interconnected. When education fails, employment suffers. When secure work is out of reach, welfare dependency rises. If we are serious about breaking that cycle, the ambition must be a country where opportunity is decided not by your social status but on your potential. This is exactly the future that this Government are working towards. I will focus on the education aspect of this debate. Education is where opportunity begins. Research shows that over a third of children start reception not ready for school, and one in four arrive without basic language skills. I welcome the expansion of Best Start family hubs, free breakfast clubs and 30 hours of childcare for eligible families put in place by this Government. These are investments in our children and our country’s future. Education must prepare young people not simply for examinations but to live healthy, happy, productive and informed lives. I have long argued that more health modules, such as reproductive health and women’s health modules, should form part of secondary and post-16 education for all pupils. Too many girls grow up believing that pain is normal. Too many women spend years fighting to have their symptoms believed. Knowledge changes attitudes,...
My Lords, my noble friend Baroness Evans of Bowes Park, in her excellent speech, and many others, have made strong points about the previous Government’s achievements in education. I will not repeat them, except to say that we are in the bizarre position of having delegations from overseas visiting our schools to see how we have achieved so much in education-even as the current Government work to dismantle the reforms that enabled this great progress. I want to speak today about young people and their trajectory from childhood to productive and satisfying adulthood. Our national aim should be to build children and young people’s capacity and resilience on every front, yet the current focus of education and welfare systems is working against that. Government education policies overwhelmingly target disadvantage and low achievement. That sounds lovely, but this policy is built around mechanisms that encourage children and young people to view themselves as damaged or less than capable. Once a child is defined and sees themselves that way, such as through having a SEND label and then perhaps a child disability allowance claim, it is now all too likely that they will become an early PIP claimant, at which point their chances of ever moving into stable employment are increasingly poor. In fact, a decision to grant PIP to a young person who suffers from, say, anxiety or ADHD, may be the single cruellest thing a Government could ever do to them. All too probably, it consigns them...
My Lords, when I saw that the noble Baroness, Lady Evans, had put this subject down for a debate today, for which I thank her, I thought I should take a look at the statistics to examine whether I had missed a particularly bad report on education or employment. I was reassured to learn that GCSE and A-level grades in 2025 were slightly better than in 2024 and that, while our employment rates have fractionally decreased over the past two years, the number of those classed as economically inactive had also fallen by over one percentage point. Looking at welfare, the latest ONS data suggests that the number of people claiming out-of-work benefits is just over 30,000 higher than in July 2024, but sadly, we find that there has been a significant increase in the number of people claiming universal credit. However, that increase also came at the same time that working tax credits came to an end and those claimants were shifted to universal credit. My view is that we sometimes get the language around welfare wrong. Moving from a system of working tax credits, predicated on support for those in work, to universal credit, which perhaps suggests a life supported by government, was a serious mistake. I ask the Minister to think carefully about how the Government can better use language to make this kind of government financial support once again appear more supportive of the notion of a hand up to those on low pay. I do not share the nihilistic view of the subject matter of this debate...
My Lords, I am afraid I could have predicted some of the lines of this debate. Indeed, in the first speech, we heard the noble Baroness, Lady Evans, saying how dreadful everything is. The response from the noble Lord, Lord Rooker, reminded me of a guard dog having its tail stood on. He went back, justifiably, because what have we got here? We have the Government doing what Governments always do: reacting to what has happened before. Although we can say wonderful things about various bits of the education system, there are things that did not go right. The first report I received was about off-rolling-a wonderful product of the academy system, where everybody goes out and passes more exams but we also have fewer people in education. That was in 2020, before Covid. The report brought forward by the noble Lord, Lord Johnson of Marylebone, titled Requires Improvement: Urgent Change for 11-16 Education , looks at further education and the fact that, once again, the system is overly academic. There were problems that came with the academisation programme and things that were not embraced. The first one was that not everybody is good at passing exams, yet they were being told, in a very loud voice, “No, that is what matters”. We need to start to address that in the education programme and in the preparation for what comes next, which for many people is further education. There is an agreement, possibly going back to new Labour, that we put too much emphasis on universities, or that...
My Lords, what an excellent debate-the House at its very best. I have lost count of the number of former Ministers and Cabinet members speaking on their areas of expertise. I thank them all. What is striking is how much we agree on. No one here disagrees with the notion that our children should be lifted out of poverty, that they should realise their potential, that they should have productive and fulfilling lives, and that we want to see our country flourish and thrive. Where we differ is about how we get there. We will not agree on all that, but there may be some things that we can learn from today. It is the case that the Government inherited record employment, some of the strongest reading and numeracy results in the western world, a narrowing disadvantage gap in our primary schools and an economy back in growth. It would be wrong, however, not to acknowledge the profound and lasting effects of the pandemic on school attendance, mental health and our national working culture and the fact that the Government inherited those challenges also. The question today is whether they have risen to the challenges. I do not know whether noble Lords are aware of parallel play. It is a phrase used in child psychology to describe how children up to the age of two play next to each other with similar toys but do not actively interact. That is how the Government’s own reviewer, Alan Milburn, has described this Government’s lack of strategy. Perhaps that lack of strategy is itself the...
My Lords, I thank the House for some really interesting and wide-ranging contributions today, and the noble Baroness, Lady Evans, for bringing this debate to the House this afternoon. If it is a Thursday afternoon, it must be a debate on education, employment and young people. As I say, it has been a broad debate, but as a Minister who works across the Department for Education and the Department for Work and Pensions, I know all too well just how interlinked the areas we have covered today often are. Whichever system we are talking about-education, employment or welfare-none operates in a vacuum, and they all have an important role to play in extending opportunity so that everybody can fulfil their potential. This is key to raising living standards and boosting economic growth. Sadly, though, as my noble friends Lord Rooker and Lady Gill identified very robustly, we inherited a broken system that too often did the opposite and held people back. If we are examining the record of this Government so far, it is important to consider the starting point when we took office. Education was not working for all children, school attendance was at an all-time low and local authorities were being bankrupted by the rising costs of special educational needs and children’s social care. The number of children growing up in poverty had increased by 700,000 since 2010 to 4 million. Nearly 1.5 million adults were unemployed, and between 2021 and 2024 the number of young people not in...
My Lords, I am very grateful for the contributions of noble Lords across the House to this debate. A wealth of expertise, experience and passion has been evident throughout. What came across loud and clear in so many contributions-indeed, it was acknowledged by the Minister in her wind-up-was the need for government to consider policies and interventions across education, employment and welfare in the round. They are inextricably interconnected, and policies developed in one silo of government can have unintended and damaging consequences in another-as, unfortunately, we have seen too often over the last couple of years. As we heard powerfully across the House, nowhere is this joined-up thinking more urgently needed than in tackling the growing number of young people not in education, employment and training. I again thank everyone who has contributed today and commend this Motion to the House.
Motion agreed.