Apprenticeships

Justin Tomlinson Excerpts

Tuesday 12th March 2013 Commons Chamber

[Mr Robin Walker (Worcester) (Con)]

It is a pleasure to follow the Chair of the Business, Innovation and Skills Committee, the hon. Member for West Bromwich West (Mr Bailey), who made an excellent speech.

Apprenticeships are working for business and more young people are taking up apprenticeships in Worcestershire than ever before. In that context, I warmly welcome the start of another national apprenticeship week. Like many other MPs, I have employed an apprentice to work with me in my constituency office, and I will be meeting local employers in my constituency this week to discuss how we can strengthen the roll-out of apprenticeships, widen participation by businesses in supporting them, and continue to drive up quality for employers and apprentices alike.

[Justin Tomlinson (North Swindon) (Con)]

I know that my hon. Friend is a real advocate of apprenticeships. One of the ideas I hope he will push in that forum and with Ministers is to use the mailing of business rates. We already pay for those to go to every business every year. Simply inserting a leaflet setting out the benefits of apprenticeships would provide a real boost, and would serve to open the window for many other businesses and future apprentices.

[Mr Walker]

My hon. Friend comes up with an intriguing, and very creative, suggestion, and I am sure Ministers will respond to it in due course.

Although I welcome the fact that the Opposition have chosen apprenticeships as the topic for this debate, and I particularly welcome their support for the excellent report from the BIS Committee, which I was proud to join shortly after its inquiry into apprenticeships, I am afraid that their motion is very narrow and self-congratulatory and misses most of the important recommendations of that report, as the Committee Chair eloquently explained in his excellent speech.

As a proud member of the all-party group on apprenticeships, I have met a wide range of employers who want to take on apprentices and who value the opportunity to have people earn while they learn. I have also met some enormously impressive young people from all over the country who are undertaking apprenticeships and who recognise the huge opportunity they offer. It is very easy for a debate such as this to be dominated by statistics, and I am sure other Members will introduce plenty of them into the debate, but the overall story is undoubtedly one of strong growth under the coalition Government. A big rise in the number of apprenticeships in Worcester helps to explain the sharp fall in youth unemployment, which today is around 18% lower than it was at the time of the general election, and down more than a quarter since its peak under Labour.

However, I want to focus on quality, not just quantity, and on people, not just numbers. Suffice it to say, I welcome the fact that the numbers keep rising, which is testament to the Government’s commitment on apprenticeships. Apprenticeships are often seen as the first step in a career, but it is important to recognise where they can lead. We should see them not just as a route into the lower end of the jobs market, which they have sometimes been misrepresented as in the past.

When I look at local manufacturers in my constituency, I see that many of the bosses are former apprentices. Both the current and previous managing directors at Worcester Bosch, the biggest private sector employer in Worcester, started out as apprentices. In smaller local engineering firms, one reason why the bosses and owner-managers are so passionate about making today’s apprenticeships work is that they started their careers in old-fashioned apprenticeships.

We should not see apprenticeships as an end in themselves, but as a conduit into learning about work, good careers and wider opportunities. For many young people, staying in school or college until 18 or going to university are not necessarily enticing prospects. Some of the brightest young people can be disengaged from classroom study by the time they reach 16 and many would relish the challenge of being able to learn in the workplace.

In the past, apprenticeships served generations well as a means of entry into work, particularly in the manufacturing sector, but with the number of apprenticeships increasing across the advanced manufacturing, cyber, computer and service industries, I believe that they can serve the current generation of school leavers even better. Many young people are better suited to learning in the workplace, rather than the classroom, and will thrive best given the opportunity to succeed, work hard and learn in a working environment. I am glad that apprenticeships now offer a progression that can take people right up to degree level and provide an alternative route to that valuable level of qualification.

I was pleased to hear the Prime Minister say that apprenticeships should be seen as the “new normal”. In order for that to remain the case in the long term, however, we need to make some changes. We need to get the message through, as the Select Committee Chair has shown strongly, to all those in our education system who provide careers advice that apprenticeships are here to stay. I was shocked to hear from apprentices at BAE Systems that many of them, who had achieved that gold-standard apprenticeship, had been actively discouraged from applying for it by their teachers. My hon. Friend the Member for Burnley (Gordon Birtwistle), who unfortunately is not in the Chamber, has previously given the appalling example of one candidate whose teacher tore up their application for an apprenticeship with that fantastic employer because they did not want to see them “wasted there.” I have seen some of the outstanding facilities available to those apprentices.