Institute for Apprenticeships and Technical Education (Transfer of Functions etc) Bill [ Lords ] (First sitting)

Debate between Damian Hinds and Peter Swallow

Committee stage
Thursday 13th March 2025 Public Bill Committees

[Damian Hinds]

I am very grateful; who knows where this conversation might take us? Last time I looked, 1563 was not in the past five decades. The hon. Lady says that every generation should try to reform, and that may well be true. I do not know how many generations she calculates there are in a 50-year period, but as sure as anything, there are not 12, let alone 13.

Those many bodies over the years have been mirrored by a true panoply of qualifications and awards: traditional apprenticeships; modern apprenticeships; the YOP or youth opportunities programme; the YTS, or youth training scheme; City and Guilds; the TVEI, or training and vocational education initiative; the NCVQ or National Council for Vocational Qualifications; NVQs or national vocational qualifications, which are still in use; GNVQs, or general national vocational qualifications, which became BTECs and diplomas; the 14-to-19 diplomas, which are not quite the same thing as the Tomlinson diplomas; Skills for Life; traineeships; and all together between 100 and 200 recognised awards and organisations, excluding those that do only end-point assessments.

[Peter Swallow]

rose—

[Damian Hinds]

I have not forgotten another one, have I?

[Peter Swallow]

I simply wish to say to the right hon. Member that it was not too long ago when he was on the Government Benches and presiding over the very system in question. As he has helpfully elucidated for everyone, we are dealing with an incredibly fractured landscape, which is precisely the challenge that the Bill proposes to address. In all frankness, given the fractured nature of the landscape, which he eloquently identified, should he not support any attempt to bring it together?

[Damian Hinds]

Yes, but the Bill does not do that, and if the hon. Member thinks it does, I am afraid he is mistaken.

Some years ago, I used to sit on the Government Benches and was a Minister at the Department for Education, as the hon. Member said, and on many occasions I have had a close interest in these areas. There was a cross-party coming together in the early to mid-2010s, which resulted in the Sainsbury report. The noble Lord Sainsbury, as the hon. Member may know, is a Labour peer who devoted a great deal of his life and the work of his foundation, the Gatsby Foundation, to trying to improve something that in this country, historically and by international comparison, we have not been tremendously good at: technical and vocational education and training. The Independent Panel on Technical Education, which convened in 2015 to 2016, took a broad overview of exactly the fractured landscape that the hon. Member talked about. By the way, I have missed out the page of my notes where I was going to go through all the qualifications that someone could do at level 3 to age 18, which is a similarly sized list.