Baroness Prosser
Main Page: Baroness Prosser (Labour - Life peer)
Baroness Prosser
To move that this House takes note of the process for monitoring the availability and quality of apprenticeships, and the mechanisms for ensuring an appropriate spread of apprenticeships across the labour market.
Baroness Prosser (Lab)
My Lords, I am pleased to be able to introduce this debate today. Let me start by saying a few words about why this subject is so important. We have a low-wage, low-skill economy putting severe pressure on individuals, families and our economy overall—I would be really grateful if people did not converse while I am trying to speak. We have a serious skills shortage, especially in engineering skills of all kinds and the skills required for construction and developing new technologies. We have a particular productivity problem—the productivity puzzle—exacerbated, some would say, by our low-wage, low-skill economy. The Recruitment & Employment Confederation has cited skills shortages as the No. 1 problem facing its members, so if we want to be a real global player and stop relying on imported labour to see us through, we need to up our game.
The Government have pledged to support 3 million apprenticeships by 2020. This must not be a “never mind the quality feel the width” proposal. It will take a bigger and better effort by government departments to co-operate and co-ordinate, coupled with determination to introduce and seriously apply the proposed training levy, and a recognition by the Chancellor of the Exchequer that cutting the money granted to FE colleges is penny wise and pound foolish.
What is meant by the term “apprentice”? I heard someone on Radio 4 describe an apprenticeship as “the moving of learning from head to hand to head”. That is a nice, elegant way of putting it. Over the past few years, the term has been used as a catchphrase for the most meagre of training programmes of scant duration with little or no recognisable qualification at the end.
The TUC has welcomed the consultation on the use of the term “apprentice” but has warned that making it a criminal offence to use it and claim support under the apprenticeship scheme for short-term training which would have had to be provided anyway—for example, in the retail trade—will succeed only if mechanisms are in place to enforce action and monitor and inspect sectors of the labour market where such misuse and abuse is known to be prevalent.
As well as possible abuse, the Government must also monitor take-up of opportunities across the economy. Figures produced for the 2014-15 report of the House of Commons Education Select Committee show that efforts to engage young people in apprenticeships are not proving that successful. During the period 2009-10 to 2013-14, the number of under-16s taking up offers halved from a measly 400 to 200. In the same period, the number of 16 to 18 year-old starts saw a modest increase of just over 3,000. Conversely, again in the same period, the number of starts for those aged 45-59 increased fourfold from 10,000 to 41,850. Is this what the Government were looking for? It takes us back, I suspect, to the misuse of the term and possibly the misuse of the support made available to employers.
The Government’s plan to address the question of misuse and abuse, as mentioned above, will, no doubt, go some way towards redressing this imbalance. However, the Education Select Committee also has called for a rebalancing of current funding, giving more emphasis to support for younger trainees. Are the Minister’s Government going to support this proposal?
The question of more directed support for the younger worker has also been raised by Oxfam, which has concerns about the more vulnerable young person. It suggests ring-fencing funding to deal with the particular needs of care leavers and putting more emphasis on ensuring equality of access, with the intention of reducing gender inequality within the UK. Will any of the suggestions put forward by Oxfam be supported or addressed?
The needs of younger people cannot, of course, be dealt with without looking at what is happening in our schools, where all the evidence tells us that far too many pupils receive poor information, advice and guidance, and some receive no advice at all. In many cases, young people are actively discouraged from taking the apprenticeship route. Careers advice in schools does not have a good history. It has been poor for many a long year, mostly because it is not seen as a specialism but is tacked on to the duties of a class teacher. The very unwise decision taken by the previous Secretary of State to devolve careers advice to individual schools has left the system in an incoherent mess with no overall strategy or recognised standards. However, the major problem is that the recognition and reward system for schools is based upon the percentage of pupils attaining good GCSE and A-level results, and on the numbers of pupils retained in the sixth form. Small wonder that many schools actively discourage the apprenticeship route, with some refusing to allow local manufacturing companies to come in to talk to pupils. I understand that a new destination test is to be introduced, whereby where a young person ends up at some point in the future will contribute to a school’s standing, but horses and stable doors come to mind here. When is the Department for Education going to wake up to the problem that gives schools a real conflict of interest?
Before moving on to more positive areas, I must register the concerns of those engaged in further education. This sector seems to be the poor relation when it comes to funding. The grant per pupil varies across the sector, but funding reductions for post-16 learning reduces the FE sector’s ability to deliver the Government’s apprenticeship agenda. In addition, sixth-form colleges, unlike schools and academies with sixth forms, have to pay VAT on purchases, providing a very uneven playing field for that part of the education sector charged with delivering vocational learning to pupils, some of whom may well be needier than many others.
There is also room for improvement in the arrangements for regulation and oversight. Currently we have the Education Funding Agency, the Skills Funding Agency, the Higher Education Funding Council for England, the FE Commissioner and Ofsted. That sounds like a system devised for the sitcom “Yes Minister”. The Association of Colleges has called for a review of these arrangements. Is there any intention to rationalise what must be an expensive, confusing and unnecessary plethora of governance?
Earlier this year, this House established a Select Committee on Social Mobility. The TUC submitted evidence and noted the findings within the UKCES report Working Futures, which flagged up the mismatch between apprenticeship starts and the future requirements of the jobs market. There will be precious little social mobility if young people are training to do jobs that are declining or disappearing altogether. What steps are the Government taking to address this problem and to ensure that there is a fit between training offered and long-term job opportunities?
Now for something a little more positive. We welcome the proposed training levy. Some of us remember the training levies of yesteryear and could not understand at the time, nor since, the reasons for their demise. We very much welcome the requirement for companies procuring contracts valued at £10 million-plus to demonstrate a clear commitment to apprenticeships. However, we would go further and say that those major contractors must play their part in training for the future. We have a very good example in Crossrail, and if it can do that, so can others. The recently announced £70 billion injection into the transport sector will also require skilled labour to carry projects forward, and will give another opportunity for employers to commit.
We also welcome the new degree apprenticeship in professional management. The Chartered Management Institute has said that only 13% of current managers have any management qualification at all. That is not good enough by any means, so this initiative is therefore welcome. I am also pleased to be able to include here the excellent example set by the Nuclear Decommissioning Authority. Obviously, this industry requires a highly skilled and safety-aware workforce, and it has wasted no time in establishing multilevel training arrangements delivered across the country, from Cumbria to Bridgwater in Somerset and from Wales to northern Scotland. Across eight sites between 2012 and 2015, 423 new apprentices were taken on, and this autumn will see a further 215 starts. In order to protect the integrity of the supply chain, the NDA has supported the community apprenticeship scheme and the supply chain apprenticeship scheme. These schemes will help to ensure the continuing availability of skilled labour for the nuclear industry and, to that end, funding support is available to employers engaged within the industry.
I cannot conclude my remarks without a mention of the serious gender imbalance, particularly within the STEM areas of employment. As well as committing to apprenticeships, companies should be required to take positive action to bring in under-represented groups, something Crossrail has again dealt with successfully.
Finally, I will give a shout-out for those girls and young women who take up apprenticeships in the beauty industry. I am not the only person in this Chamber, male or female, who needs a good hairdresser—some may say I need it more than others—or who enjoys a massage or a manicure, and so on. Training lasts for three years and is quite intensive. The only problem with these jobs is that they are not anything like as well paid as many skilled jobs that are generally done by men. However, we may need to have that debate another day.
Baroness Chisholm of Owlpen (Con)
My Lords, I remind all noble Lords that apart from the noble Baroness, Lady Prosser, the noble Lords, Lord Watson and Lord Stoneham, and my noble friend Lord Courtown, there is a five-minute limit on speeches. It will be much appreciated if noble Lords keep to that time limit.
Baroness Prosser
I thank the Minister for that response. Like him, I think this has been a hugely interesting and informative debate. I was particularly pleased that we had contributions to the discussion from all Benches of the House, which was important.
I recognise that this is a rather tricky matter in the sense that apprenticeships come under two government departments, which is always a bit of a recipe for more problems. When I read Hansard on Monday, should I discover that my important questions have not been answered, I shall look for the Minister’s correspondence in the Library.
I thank all noble Lords who contributed to the debate. Many points were raised which I had not really thought of myself, so I am grateful both for them and for the very interesting and diverse contributions that were made.
Whenever the question of apprenticeships is raised, it reminds me of a television programme from quite a number of years ago on the industrialists and entrepreneurs of the late 1900s. They were men who had made vast amounts of money and built significant organisations in shipbuilding, the arms trade, textile manufacturing et cetera. None of those men had sent their sons—nobody thought about daughters in those days—into those businesses. They had ensured that their sons went into the professions, as they called them—into medicine and law et cetera. We have an ongoing snobbery in this country about trade. It is up to all of us here to promote the value of trade and that sort of learning. I hope the Government will be prepared to give a good lead on this because we need a big cultural shift, so that we can begin properly to compare ourselves with other countries which do not have that history and that attitude. I thank all noble Lords and the Minister for their contributions.