Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Bill

Lord Layard Excerpts

Thursday 18th September 2025 Lords Chamber

Moved by

[Lord Layard]

483: After Clause 62, insert the following new Clause—
“Apprenticeship provisionThe Secretary of State must promote sufficient provision of apprenticeship places up to level 3 to ensure that every qualified applicant aged 16 to 18 receives an offer of a place.”

[Lord Layard (Lab)]

My Lords, this amendment aims to remedy one of the greatest injustices in our whole education system: the acute shortage of apprenticeships for young people not going to university.

If you qualify for university and want it, you can expect to find a place. However, if you qualify for an apprenticeship and want it, you have no such luck. On the Government’s matching scheme for apprenticeships, only one in three people applying finds a place. There is a more shocking fact, from which all thoughts about post-school education should start: by age 18, one in three of all our young people has ceased to receive any education or training. That one in three is of course nearly two in three of the people not going to university. That is how we are treating them—they are either NEET or in a dead-end job without training, heading for low productivity and low pay. The main reason for that is the shortage of apprenticeships.

This situation is a disaster for the economy—it is the major reason for our low economic growth—and it is a disaster for our young people. It is the prime duty of the state to give everybody a proper start in life and we are simply failing: we are not doing it. We have talked about this problem for years, but the scale of apprenticeship opportunities for school leavers today is no better than it was in 2009.

However, in that year, the previous Labour Government took a major step to remedy the situation. They passed the apprenticeships Act 2009, which obliged the Government to ensure that there were enough places for all 16 to 18 year-old qualified applicants for apprenticeships up to level 3. That would have changed everything, but, unfortunately, it was almost immediately repealed by the coalition Government.

--- Later in debate ---

I hope I have managed to convey our absolute conviction that apprenticeships are a vital part of our journey to creating more opportunities for young people. There is an enormous amount of work to do in this space and I am very pleased that the Government are putting steps in place to achieve the right outcomes. For these reasons, I kindly ask the noble Lords not to press their amendments.

[Lord Layard (Lab)]

My Lords, I am most grateful to everyone who spoke in this excellent debate. The noble Lord, Lord Macpherson, got us off to a good start on the economics, which is, of course, a central part of this—but economics can appear to look just at the whole economy rather than at the fates of individuals. Ultimately, of course, the economy is about the fates of individuals and especially the fates of these young people who are headed for lives of such poverty and also, in many cases, inactivity, at a cost then to the rest of us.

I am very grateful for what I think was the main theme, which came out of almost all the contributions—from the noble Lords, Lord Deben, Lord Storey, Lord Hampton and Lord Addington, and the noble Baronesses, Lady Barran, Lady Wolf and Lady Coffey. It is that we have taken our eye off the needs of these young people at the lower levels of skill. How do we get people to levels 2 and 3 as the top priority for the use of the levy money? What has been happening, as we know, is that the levy money has been increasingly diverted, I would say, to supporting older people—often existing employees—and to higher levels of qualification. That would be all right if it were not being diverted from the needs of young people, whom employers have increasingly been turning their backs on. That is what we have to reverse, and it requires a major policy decision by the Government and the setting up of a major administrative structure to reverse this whole trend. I think it is encouraging that the survey by the CIPD showed that employers are up for this if some leadership and support is given to make it come about.

We are worried that the levy is being diverted. We should revert to the principle that its main purpose is to get people up to levels 2 and 3—when it comes to levels 4 and above, there are many other potential sources of funding. There is obviously the student loan. It is not so obvious that essentially the taxpayer, through the levy, is funding higher-level education for people taking levels 4 and 5 or degree apprenticeships at level 6, when most of those studying at levels 4 to 6 are on student loans or alternative sources of funding. Obviously, if the employer wants to get a bright young person quickly, they can contribute to the cost. We must re-establish the idea that the central—the first—overriding claim on the levy is young people doing levels up to level 3.

I am very grateful to the Minister for what she said and for the sincerity of her concern about all this. We would very much like to meet and see how this can be carried forward and, in the light of that, for the moment I would like to withdraw the amendment.

[The Deputy Chairman of Committees (Baroness Garden of Frognal) (LD)]

I thank the noble Lord, but we are debating Amendment 483A, so I need to ask the noble Baroness, Lady Barran, to withdraw that first.