Technical and Further Education Bill

Debate between Baroness Wolf of Dulwich and Lord Knight of Weymouth

Committee: 2nd sitting (Hansard): House of Lords
Monday 27th February 2017 Grand Committee

[Lord Knight of Weymouth]

This is an important amendment. I very much enjoyed the exchange at Oral Questions today in which the noble Lord, Lord Prior, responded for the Government on the importance of employee engagement. I felt he really understands how important it is in the private sector and, in some ways most surprisingly, in the public sector, particularly from his comments about junior doctors. In that spirit, obviously I hope that apprentices—who, as we have discussed this afternoon, are employees—will enjoy employee engagement with their employers, even though they are apprentices. It is equally important that the institute feels that it is accountable to learners and that the accountability of the institute is not more upwards to the Government than it is to employers and learners.

As I said last week in this Committee, I have general concerns that the dynamic, rapidly changing nature of the labour market presents ongoing challenges to the institute. I was set a challenge by my noble friend Lord Hunt to come up with a solution to some of that before Report. I have been mulling on that and may have at least the beginnings of a solution, but I shall wait to surprise the Minister with it at some future date. The point remains that, if the institute does not have within its structure a way of listening acutely to the learner experience, of assessing the relevance of the qualification in the labour market for learners not only while they are going through their apprenticeship but in the months immediately after they have completed it, and of being accountable to employers of all sizes, as my noble friend pointed out, I worry that our efforts in this Committee to try to help and advise the Government in making the institute a success will be in vain because it will too quickly become out of touch and out of date.

[Baroness Wolf of Dulwich]

My Lords, I shall speak to Amendment 36A, which is in my name and has been placed in this group. It is also about accountability, but a rather broader form of accountability which links the Government, who are encouraging young people and adults to enter training, and the changing environment, which means that many of them are put at risk in a way that was never the case before.

The amendment relates to Clause 13 and asks that any,

“training provider offering publicly funded apprenticeship training or offering publicly funded education training for students aged 18 or over”,

should be included in the requirements of that clause—in fact, what I would like to see is that extended through the whole chapter.