Catherine West
Main Page: Catherine West (Labour - Hornsey and Wood Green)Department Debates - View all Catherine West's debates with the Department for Education
(8 years, 5 months ago)
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Nicky Morgan
The hon. Lady speaks with great passion. She is talking about the adult skills budget, but what we are debating today is 16-to-19 education. If she looks at the detail of that contract, she will see that it was not performing as well as expected. I think she would agree that every single pound of taxpayers’ money spent by Government should work as hard and as effectively as possible.
Nicky Morgan
My hon. Friend speaks with passion and eloquence about her constituency. She is absolutely right to say that the 2.4 million apprenticeship starts in the last Parliament and the 3 million we have committed to in this Parliament are transforming the opportunities available to young people and employers.
Nicky Morgan
I am not going to take any further interventions for the moment.
Around the world, apprenticeships have long been recognised as a crucial way to develop the skills wanted by employers. We have committed to a significant increase in the quantity and quality of apprenticeships in England for 3 million starts in this Parliament, putting control of funding in the hands of employers. That step change in the scale of the programme needs a step change in funding. We will therefore introduce a levy on large employers to fund the new apprenticeships, ensuring that they invest in their future workforce. That follows examples of levies to fund training that are already in place in Germany, France, Denmark and more than 50 other countries, often supporting high-quality apprenticeship systems.
As Professor Alison Wolf, who has already been mentioned, set out in a recent report, it is now time for the UK to do that as well. We want young people to see apprenticeships as a high-quality and prestigious path to successful careers, and for those opportunities to be available across all sectors of the economy and at all levels.
Nicky Morgan
The hon. Lady has been so persistent that I will give way to her.
Catherine West
I am grateful to the Secretary of State for giving me the opportunity to intervene. I am aware of an apprenticeship offer that involves going into a sandwich shop for two or three days a week to learn how to use a cash register. Does the Secretary of State consider that to be a high-quality apprenticeship?
Nicky Morgan
First, I do not think the hon. Lady should be undermining those who do that sort of work. They are serving our economy very well. More importantly, those are the sort of apprenticeships that happened under her party when in government. We have reformed the framework, the incentives, the quality and the demands for training. That is why we have launched the trailblazer apprenticeships. Rather than knocking the start given to young people by apprenticeships, she should be talking them up.
Our reforms are leading to employer-led trailblazers, designing quality apprenticeships that provide exactly the skills, knowledge and behaviours required by the workforce of the future. In the previous Parliament we swept away the panoply of vocational qualifications that allowed politicians to trumpet ever-higher grades, but which were not respected by employers and did not lead to a job. Now we will go further, across both apprenticeships and classroom-based technical and professional education.
We will simplify the currently over-complex system, working in direct partnership with employers to ensure that the new system provides the skills most needed for the 21st-century economy. Up to 20 specific new professional and technical routes will be created, leading to employment or degree-level study, which will be as easy to understand as academic routes.
Mrs Anne Main (St Albans) (Con)
It is interesting to follow the right hon. Member for Tottenham (Mr Lammy), who says we should bring back night school. I would like to know where he would get the funding for it. It has been gone for a long time in a lot of areas.
Mr Deputy Speaker, you missed being lectured for 15 minutes by the Scottish National party spokesperson in a debate that its Members did not even bother to sit around to participate in afterwards. That is a real shame, given that we have an Opposition day debate today. I feel sorry that we were lectured like that when they could not be bothered to stay to listen to the meat of the debate.
I want to focus on apprenticeships, because the motion says that this Government are risking the country’s prosperity, yet it leaves out apprenticeships. The right hon. Gentleman did refer to them, but I was disappointed to hear him say that they are not worth the paper they are written on. I have been working with my local college, Oaklands college, which has apprenticeship week in March; I met many providers who were encouraged to make sure that apprenticeships are worth while. That is why I wanted to speak in this debate. I cringed when I heard the hon. Member for Hornsey and Wood Green (Catherine West) sneer—I can use no other word—about an apprenticeship; she seemed to be saying that using the till in a bakery was not worth while.
Mrs Main
I am not giving way to the hon. Lady, because she has plenty on her own side who wish to speak. Many young people, my own son included, want to go into an apprenticeship and they will be feeling today, “If I take up an apprenticeship at the lower level and learn some of the skills of interacting with other people, using the till, and learning to get up to get to work on time, to make myself presentable and to make myself work-ready, somehow I am not—
Catherine West
On a point of order, Mr Deputy Speaker. Is it possible to come back on a particular point?
Mr Deputy Speaker (Mr Lindsay Hoyle)
It is up to each Member to decide whether to give way.