Oral Answers to Questions Debate

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Department: Department for Education

Oral Answers to Questions

Kelvin Hopkins Excerpts
Monday 24th June 2013

(11 years, 5 months ago)

Commons Chamber
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Kelvin Hopkins Portrait Kelvin Hopkins (Luton North) (Lab)
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On Saturday, I had the pleasure of visiting a high-tech engineering company in Luton, and it was drawn to my attention, yet again, that we are having to recruit thousands of graduate engineers from abroad every year because we cannot train enough of them ourselves. When are the Government going to take real steps to encourage more youngsters to look for careers in engineering?

Michael Gove Portrait Michael Gove
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Our ministerial team, and, indeed, the superb team at the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills, take every opportunity to encourage young people to consider engineering as a career, but one of the problems we face is that the quality of the teaching of literacy and, in particular, numeracy and mathematics in science qualifications is often not good enough to give ambitious young people the chance to become engineers. That is why we are improving the quality of English, mathematics and science teaching, and reforming GCSEs.