Apprenticeships

Lord Aberdare Excerpts

Thursday 15th October 2015 Lords Chamber

[Lord Aberdare (CB)]

My Lords, I am a firm believer in the value and importance of apprenticeships—for apprentices themselves, for employers and for our economy. So, I very much welcome this debate. I, too, served with the Minister on your Lordships’ Digital Skills Committee and it is a great pleasure to follow our excellent chairman in this speech.

Our report in February included a call for more apprenticeships across the board, more digital apprenticeships, and also that all apprenticeships should include a digital skills element. I trust that the Minister is promoting that agenda in his current role. As a vice-chair of the apprenticeships all-party group, I have talked to many young apprentices all singing the praises of the paid apprenticeship pathway, as opposed to going to university. For this debate I have received input from too many industry employer and other bodies to list in my five minutes, but I thank them all.

I very much welcome the Government’s target of 3 million new apprenticeship starts in England during the current Parliament, although again I believe an even better target might relate to successful apprenticeship completions. Three key elements are required to reach that target: enough places from employers; enough applicants to take them up; and high enough quality to ensure that they lead to proper transferable skills and jobs.

According to the excellent Library note for this debate, there are, on average, 12 applications for every apprenticeship vacancy. Many more companies need to offer apprenticeships, especially SMEs, so it is disconcerting to hear about growing disquiet among employers about the proposed new funding and delivery model for apprenticeships, despite its being developed under the banner of employer leadership. This disquiet relates above all to the lack of clarity about how the proposed apprenticeship levy will work. There are numerous uncertainties and some scepticism about the Government’s claim that firms that are committed to training will be able to get back more than they have put in. That lack of clarity risks making training apprentices seem less rather than more attractive, with the levy viewed more as a tax than an investment. I hope that the Minister will be able to tell us when more detail on the levy will be available to set some of those fears at rest.

SMEs need specific help to offer apprenticeships. They get some extra funding but need other support, too, such as that provided by apprenticeship training agencies—ATAs—or by the automotive sector’s clearing-house approach to give SMEs access to suitable candidates, or by BAE Systems’ support for SMEs in its supply chain to take on apprentices. What are the Government doing to promote and extend schemes like this to enable many more SMEs to take on apprentices?

In a recent survey of more than 1,300 apprentices by the Industry Apprentice Council, itself made up of apprentices, 56% said that they found their apprenticeships through their own initiative; only 7% said that their careers adviser provided any input and another 7% that a teacher had helped. Some 40% believed that the careers advice they received at school was poor or very poor; 5% had had none at all. Ofsted found 80% of careers advice in school to be below the required standard and 89% of STEM teachers see providing careers information as part of their job, but only 10% know about apprenticeships. I could go on, but these figures speak for themselves.

I hope that the Minister will tell us how the Government plan to tackle the challenge of improving the awareness and status of apprenticeships beyond the limited but welcome provision in the Enterprise Bill. What about getting Ofsted to more formally inspect school careers advice, setting up a UCAS-style application system for apprentices, or giving a major boost to pre-apprenticeship activities such as work experience, traineeships and employer engagement? I declare an interest, in that I used to run a small business providing employability skills training. What about running programmes to increase teachers’ and parents’ awareness of apprenticeships?

I do not have time to cover the importance of quality for apprenticeships. Three million starts is not good enough unless they deliver real, needed skills, up to a high level, with progression into real jobs. I am attracted by the idea of a new quality mark for apprenticeships, such as NIACE’s apprentice charter.

At present, I detect a sense of unfulfilled expectation among employers about the state of apprenticeships policy: employers are willing to pick up the ball and run with it, but need first to be clear about the rules of the game. I hope that the noble Earl the Minister will be able to give some indication of how the Government plan to progress the three critical strands that I have outlined.