Apprenticeships

Lord Addington Excerpts

Thursday 15th October 2015 Lords Chamber

[Lord Addington (LD)]

My Lords, apprenticeships are one of those things which everybody hailed as a wonderful idea but nobody has been quite sure exactly what they are supposed to do; I think that would be the assessment finally coming through.

I was probably one of the first to say there were problems, because of one specific area I had experience of: dyslexia in taking the final assessment. I have since discovered, thanks to people at the British Dyslexia Association who have had a look at it for me, that in the new trailblazer guidance there is absolutely no mention of what to do about disability when setting up an apprenticeship. Effectively, it seems that the Equality Act is being ignored. There might be some guidance hidden—and if you dig back far enough there is a mention of some form of legal requirement—but nobody is telling you how to do it. Nobody is telling you how to handle this incredibly diverse, complicated sector, which is overrepresented in the NEET population, this thing we are supposed to be getting rid of with apprenticeships. We are not addressing it.

Then we go to the employers, who are quite convinced that if you have not got a GCSE in maths and English you are utterly unemployable, which means you have got to take an assessment. Other disability groups, including one I have had quite a lot of contact with over the years and have not always agreed with, the Alliance for Inclusive Education, have raised the concerns for every bit as long as I have. A different group, mainly dealing with people with learning disabilities, once again, feel excluded. Unless you start to address this problem, the apprenticeships are not going to touch one of the biggest groups we have employment problems with.

With the backing of this House, I managed to get people to say that those who had certain types of literacy problems or disabilities could take the final assessment. I thank this House for that and I thank your Lordships’ patience for allowing me to bore you for long enough to get it dealt with. Indeed, if it did not bore you it certainly bored me. But unless we start to address this properly, we are always going to miss; we are always going to have people left aside. Employers have got to be told, “It is the Equality Act”, but there are ways around this, and reasonable adjustment does not mean we are saying take someone who cannot do the job or access the training. We are saying that you have to do it differently. Certain groups will always be excluded from certain occupations—that is just the way it is—but far fewer than now. There seems to be a total lack of understanding or, indeed, a will to look at the way that changes in behaviour and the application of technology can change the situation. It will not change unless we bring those things together, as we have done in other education sectors. Indeed, higher education is a much better example; you can get through a degree far more easily and with far more support than you can get through the most basic of apprenticeships. That is an absurdity we have not dealt with yet. All the parties represented in this House have a degree of blame for that. We now have to try to address it.

I say to the noble Earl, who is a long-standing friend, can we please get some idea of how the Government are going to bring this forward? For instance, will they make sure that anybody who is teaching in the college-based parts of the apprenticeship has at least some basic awareness of the most commonly occurring disabilities, hidden or otherwise, or at least knows where to go and access that help? We are now encouraging a situation where they are effectively breaking the law. We are institutionally encouraging people to get rid of something that they are required to do under the Equality Act and dozens of bits of legislation before that. Unless we start to do some more work here, we are guaranteeing a level of failure in the system that is unacceptable. I hope we can start to get a coherent answer to this question, because at the moment we are merely storing up trouble for later down the line and, I am afraid, far more parliamentary time will be taken up on dragging awareness to this subject.