Opportunities for the Next Generation

Debate between Lord Willetts and Jeremy Corbyn

Tuesday 13th September 2011 Commons Chamber

[Mr Willetts]

Absolutely; my hon. Friend the Minister for Further Education, Skills and Lifelong Learning is doing an excellent job with tight resources in trying to ensure that we can make at least some improvement to the further education estate, but I want to talk about apprenticeships in particular.

[Jeremy Corbyn (Islington North) (Lab)]

Before the Minister goes on to talk about apprenticeships, will he acknowledge that the direction of travel is entirely wrong? With many young people deterred from going to college because of the loss of education maintenance allowance and rising fees, and others deterred from going to university because of debt and rising fees, does he not think that the situation will be considerably worse in a year or two, because of the policies that he has already adopted?

[Mr Willetts]

Let me now turn to what we are doing to ensure that young people have more opportunities, so that the picture that the hon. Gentleman paints does not come to pass.

I should now like to make some progress and to say that one of my other regrets about the Opposition motion is that it repeats not only the economic mistakes that we associate with the Brown premiership, but the spinning techniques that we recall from the Blair premiership, and that is not an attractive combination. The worst example of that in the motion, which the shadow Secretary of State repeated in his speech, is the statement that

“the proportion of apprenticeship places for 16 to 18 year olds has decreased by 11 per cent.”.

I should like briefly to explain to the House why that statement is both strictly speaking accurate and deeply misleading.

We are talking about a nine-month period, because we have only nine months’ data for the latest year. In the first nine months of 2009-10, 92,500 apprenticeships were started for 16 to 18-year-olds out of a total of 211,000 apprenticeships, so 43% of apprenticeships went to 16 to 18-year-olds. By comparison, in the first nine months of the 2010-11 academic year, under this Government, 102,900 16 to 18-year-olds started apprenticeships—up from 92,500—out of a total number of apprenticeship starts of 326,000 in a comparable period. So we have more apprenticeships for 16 to 18-year-olds, as part of a big increase in the total number of apprenticeships. Therefore, because the rate of increase in 16-to-18 apprenticeships was not as rapid as that of other apprenticeships, 16-to-18 apprenticeships in our first nine months constitute 32% of the total number.

The shadow Secretary of State, using his knowledge and ingenuity as a former Secretary of State, constructs an argument in which, because 16-to-18 apprenticeships were previously 43% and are down to 32%, we are all supposed to regret the fact that they have fallen by 11 percentage points given the increase in total apprenticeships. If anyone wants an example of the Blairite attitude to statistics—using every trick in the book to take an increase in the number 16-to-18 apprenticeships as part of an increase in the total number of apprenticeships and to include in a motion an assertion that, somehow, there has been an 11 percentage point fall—we have just seen a case study.

If Labour Members want to be taken seriously, they must get serious not just about the economic challenge that we face, but about levelling with the country and dealing with the facts that we face in an honest way. Referring to that 11 percentage point fall shows something deep in Labour’s instincts; the electorate got completely fed up with it, and we all understand why. We are delivering more apprenticeships across the piece.