Young People: Apprenticeships

Lord Addington Excerpts

Thursday 28th November 2013 Lords Chamber

[Lord Addington (LD)]

My Lords, I am afraid that when I talk about apprenticeships, I bring with me rather a big moan. One of the major problems that we have had with the apprenticeship system is that the choice of wording, and the way in which the matter has been approached, has ended up, almost by definition, by excluding anybody who has even moderate dyslexia. We are currently dealing with this problem in the Children and Families Bill and may come to a satisfactory conclusion on it at Report. I will not rehearse those arguments now, because nobody has annoyed me enough to go through it all over again, but what it points out to me is that there is a problem with the idea that we have got in front of us now.

In fact, there are effectively two problems. The first is the perception that apprenticeships are wonderful and should be left alone and nobody can criticise them because they are to do with business. The other is the perception that education happens somewhere else and is nothing to do with training. We reached a point where I asked the then Minister, the noble Lord, Lord Young of Norwood Green, whether we were going to prevent dyslexics from getting their apprenticeships because of the English test. He said, “No, we’ll sort that out”. Somewhere in the slip between cup and lip, however, and with the change of government, we developed a system where they were being stopped. Would that have happened in an educational establishment? No, it would not. Educational establishments know that you bring people on board and, with a long-term advantage, you can deal with it. If we go after training, we could have a system where people say, “Training and business? Business wants people who have literacy skills. If you don’t have good literacy skills, we cannot deal with you”. They do not know that in the modern world there are dozens of ways of assisting people to gain literacy skills through technology.

It was particularly worrying that although the same department provided both the disabled students allowance and the literacy package for universities—which is particularly for dyslexics but also for others with disabilities—the two parts were not talking to each other: the silos had closed. And just to make the absurdity slightly greater, guess what? Afterwards they could get help through Access to Work, which helps dyslexics access the written word. We got ourselves into a situation where a scheme was too precious to look outside itself. If that can happen once it can happen twice. We have to try to cross over that and ensure that the different parts talk to each other.

My noble friend and the noble Lord, Lord Aberdare, talked about building up this important aspect which should be valued by the education system, this cross between training and education. The two worlds currently regard themselves as separate. I agree with my noble friend that schools should be better at directing people towards this area. In this case, however, the people from the academic world have had a better understanding of the support required for this group—which is 10% of the population—than people in the training world have had. Let us also face facts. If you put a dyslexic through university, what sorts of entrance-level jobs will be available for a university graduate? They will go into a white-collar office job. With the best will in the world, and with all the technological support in the world, they would probably be happier in a more practical environment. By not thinking laterally, and by defending your own little world, you are deliberately excluding people who would have been happier in that place. Unless the people undertaking these schemes start to talk to each other, they will continue to make these mistakes.

I do not have enough time in the remaining seconds to go further into this. However, we need to make sure that everyone who provides training supports people with disabilities throughout the process, not only up to the test but during practical demonstrations as well. Unless that happens, we shall continue to have these problems, even if we successfully deal with the problem of the functional skills test.