Education Bill

Debate between Lord Wakeham and Lord Layard

Wednesday 14th September 2011 Grand Committee

[Lord Layard]

I rise to speak to Amendment 144B. When the four of us tabled the amendment, we thought that it was very important, but since then the riots have shown that it is even more important than we thought. If you look at the situation in our country, it is clear that academic young people are offered a clear route to a skill and a useful role in society. They can see where they are going. That is not the case for less academic young people. There is no clear route that they can see they are entitled to go down. The result is low levels of skills and a degree of alienation. That is why in 2007 the Economic Affairs Committee, under the wonderful chairmanship of the noble Lord, Lord Wakeham, supported the idea of an entitlement to an apprenticeship. Following that, the 2008 Act enacted that there should be an entitlement to an apprenticeship for 16 to 19 year-olds. The body charged with finding places was the National Apprenticeship Service, which was set up at the same time. However, no employer can be forced to take on an apprentice, and for that reason the present Government have judged that the entitlement is putting them into an unduly exposed position from a legal point of view. Therefore, the Bill repeals the entitlement. That is a very serious thing to do.

At the same time, the Government are doing a very welcome thing, which is introducing an automatic funding mechanism whereby any employer who wishes to take on a 16 to 19 year-old as an apprentice, and can find one, will get automatic funding. However, that is quite different from an explicit commitment to find enough places for all those 16 to 19 year-olds who want them. It is a laissez-faire mechanism that has a strength but also a serious weakness. Nothing is being said about the shape of the educational system that we are trying to create for our 16 to 19 year-old population. The purpose of this amendment is to construct that bit of the building block of our educational system for 16 to 19 year-olds by saying that for those who do not want to go down the full-time academic route, the apprenticeship route is open. It is making a statement and putting an obligation on the National Apprenticeship Service to bring it about.

If you look at this from a young person’s point of view, we are raising the education participation age. It is quite difficult to see how we are going to be able to do that in a way that is acceptable to young people unless these apprenticeship places are available to them. We need legislation that states the main aims of our education system. For that 16 to 19 year-old group, we have a lacuna. We cannot fill it by ministerial statements and assurances, as Ministers come and go. We expect the basic structure of our educational system to be reflected in the laws of the country.

When we drafted this amendment, we leant over backwards to protect the Government against the threat of legal redress. The draft says that the National Apprenticeship Service shall,

“subject to guidance from the Secretary of State, make all reasonable efforts to ensure that an apprenticeship is offered to those”,

16 to 19 year-olds who want one. So “all reasonable efforts” are to be made and those can be defined in guidance. This combines a clear statement of what we want with protection against judicial review. Some of us have already had useful discussions with Ministers about this. Of course, we would be happy to consider alternative wording, provided it did not weaken the existing wording. I think that that is an extremely important point, because it is what we owe our young people.

[Lord Wakeham]

My Lords, I am here simply to add my support to the noble Lord, Lord Layard, who was a very distinguished member of the Select Committee which produced our report on apprenticeships. However, as I have sat here all afternoon, I could not help reflecting that it is probably nearly 40 years since I first sat on a parliamentary committee dealing with a Bill. I do not do much of that these days. Things have not changed very much, but I have had a very pleasurable afternoon listening to the way things seem to be going.

I do not have much to say about this, but one thing worries me about the report. I agree with a great deal of what the noble Lord, Lord Young of Norwood Green, said—certainly at the beginning of his speech. At the end I thought he was a little off key, but most of it was pretty good stuff. What staggered me about this exercise was how many of our kids leave school and get an apprenticeship but simply do not have the literacy or numeracy skills to enable them to take on an apprenticeship. You cannot leave that to officials. Someone in the Government must have responsibility for encouraging a move in the right direction.

Secondly, I thought that there was a failure by many schools to tell people about apprenticeships. Children who are likely to go down that educational route need to start thinking about it around the age of 14. In my experience on the Select Committee, one thing stuck in my mind. We visited an old people’s home where girls were training to look after the old people. For many years as they grew up, those girls knew that they wanted to do this. They got there but no one had told them that unless you have a basic knowledge of arithmetic you simply are not capable of dispensing medicines to the old people. That failure of schools and of 16 to 18 year-old apprenticeships is at the core of many of our problems. The noble Lord spent longer talking about it than I am going to, although it is still very important. I am here just to give him support.