The future is bright for young people, says Peter Lauener

The implementation of the Sainsbury Review will be ‘an enormous challenge’, but it leaves the former ESFA chief executive optimistic
18th March 2018, 8:03am

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The future is bright for young people, says Peter Lauener

https://www.tes.com/magazine/archive/future-bright-young-people-says-peter-lauener
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There is a wider range of opportunities available for young people now than there was 30 years ago, Peter Lauener has said.

The former chief executive of the Education and Skills Funding Agency (ESFA) and the Institute for Apprenticeships (IfA), and current acting chief executive of the Student Loans Company, told Tes: “I think that the situation is much better for young people in terms of the opportunities that there are than it was [in the 1980s, when Lauener began his career]. There is a much wider range of opportunities - and I think the new work that is being done on the Sainsbury routes will make a difference.”

He added: “The implementation of that will be an enormous challenge, but I am an optimist about the future. It is a much better future and set of opportunities than young people faced at the beginning of my career. It is also great that apprenticeships are equally available for adults.”

Apprenticeships ‘have a much higher profile’

A strong supporter of WorldSkills UK and attendee of international competitions and the Skills Show, Lauener said he was optimistic about the opportunities now available to those young people he has aimed to support throughout his career. “One of the great gains from recent years is that apprenticeships have had a far higher profile - and it is one of the reasons I am so committed to the skills competitions, raising the profile, and watching primary and secondary school children going around the Skills Show having lightbulb moments,” he said.

Mr Lauener took on the acting chief executive post at the SLC last year, and only months later he was appointed chair of Newcastle College Group - one of the biggest college groups in the country.

As chief executive of both the Education Funding Agency and the Skills Funding Agency - and then later the ESFA - he was in charge of budgets worth hundreds of millions, funding schools as well as further education provision. Having also been the first, if interim, chief executive of the new Institute for Apprenticeships when it was set up in 2016, Lauener has held many of the strings of the reforming FE system in his hands simultaneously.

Revolutionising opportunities

As you would expect from a man who started his career as a labour market economist and spent much of it in charge of vast amounts of money, Lauener is a numbers man. And it turned out that this particular affinity started very early: “My father was an actuary. He used to pay my brother and myself to check his calculations - so to be his second checkers on essentially a spreadsheet all done by hand. We would spend four hours on an afternoon checking all the figures, and there was always a great moment when we found a mistake. It made life worth living. I was probably about 12 or 13.”

His early career was spent in economic forecasting for the Scottish Office. But the job that had the most formative impact on him, Lauener said, was the time he spent at the Manpower Services Commission (MSC) in Sheffield in the 1980s. “It was a fantastic organisation. I absolutely loved it. The really great thing the MSC did - and this speaks a lot to my own commitments and interest - is they revolutionised the opportunities that were available to young people who had not been successful at school.” He said he believed this was the birth of the kind of structured training now underpinning apprenticeships.

This is an edited version of an article in the 16 March edition of Tes. Subscribers can read the full story here. To subscribe, click here. To download the digital edition, Android users can click here and iOS users can click hereTes magazine is available at all good newsagents

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