Education: Industrial Strategy

Lord Storey Excerpts

Monday 24th June 2019 Lords Chamber

[Lord Agnew of Oulton]

The noble Baroness is right. The number of starts for the first quarter of 2018-19 is some 76,000, compared with 41,000 this time last year. We know that the quality of the new apprenticeships is of a much higher order than under the old system, and this shows that employers are getting behind the scheme.

[Lord Storey (LD)]

My Lords, the creative industries are an important part of the industrial strategy. They are worth £101 billion per year to the British economy and grow at double our overall rate of economic growth. The difficulty is finding people to go into the creative industries. We are seeing, as we heard in the first Oral Question, that the number of students following creative subjects is declining in our schools. How can we ensure that we have the young people to go into these important creative industries?

[Lord Agnew of Oulton]

My Lords, for that to happen, we need to make sure that we have apprenticeship standards for the creative industries. A great deal of work is going on there and the number of apprenticeships in creative subjects is increasing as we speak.