Lord Addington
Main Page: Lord Addington (Liberal Democrat - Excepted Hereditary)Enterprise Bill [HL]
Lord Addington Excerpts
Baroness Sharp of Guildford
My Lords, this amendment is concerned with care leavers and those with special educational needs and disabilities; its purpose is to open up apprenticeships to those two groups of young people. Some of them are perfectly able to undertake such an apprenticeship—I recognise that not all young people with special educational needs and disabilities are in a position to take up apprenticeships, but some of them are. The feeling is that it is important that they should have the opportunity to do so. Something like 8% of those with special educational needs and disabilities currently have apprenticeships of some sort, compared to 16% nationally.
Looked-after children, it is well known, achieve less highly at GCSE than their counterparts; they often miss out on parts of education, partly because they have a chaotic family background, or there may be a history of abuse in their background, and so forth. Barnardo’s has been very concerned about the issue of these young people leaving care. I refer to evidence that it gave to our Select Committee on Social Mobility, picking up a remark that one such young person made, that school really did not help them at all. We were told:
“These young people often leave school with few or no qualifications and need alternative options outside of the school environment if they are to achieve their potential. Some need provision that allows them to catch up on what they have missed and Barnardo’s services offer a variety of Level 1 courses … These young people also often want the option of practical-based learning, that clearly links to a real job. Barnardo’s services offer a range of qualifications that focus on occupational skills. These include foundation awards … NVG levels 1-3 and pre-apprenticeship programmes. The young people we work with can undertake these qualifications in a range of work areas including floristry; painting and decorating; business; horticulture; hair and beauty; construction; and catering”.
It is important to recognise that some of these young people, because of the chaotic backgrounds that they come from, need time to catch up and move forward. For example, Birmingham sets aside for care leavers a proportion of the apprenticeships that it takes on as a local authority. I think that a number of other local authorities do that.
In relation to those with disabilities, it is a similar story. Some of them need longer to catch up and get themselves ready for an apprenticeship than others, yet they benefit from them. Ofsted’s report states:
“Too few disabled people or those with learning difficulties become apprentices. In all further education and skills providers in 2013/14, over 16% of learners disclosed a learning difficulty or disability compared with only 8% of apprentices. Only one of the providers in our survey demonstrated that they had supported an apprentice with dyslexia to pass their functional skills test”.
We do not have my noble friend Lord Addington here.
Baroness Sharp of Guildford
I am sure my noble friend will talk about dyslexia. Ofsted said:
“Only one of the providers in our survey demonstrated that they had supported an apprentice with dyslexia to pass their functional skills test while one other had made adjustments for a disabled apprentice. However, such examples of providers and employers encouraging disabled people or those with learning difficulties to succeed on an apprenticeship were rare”.
It is important that such people are considered. Figures indicate that the proportion of apprentices who have learning difficulties or disability has decreased. It was 11% in 2010-11, and it decreased to only 8% in 2012-13. The success rate of all apprentices completing their framework rose considerably from 55% in 2005-06 to 73% in 2011-12. In the same period, the success rate for those with disabilities rose from 49.5% to 69.9%. That is a very high rate of success on the part of those with disabilities. The success rate is now 75%. The differential between the two is not very great.
Back in 2012, there was a comprehensive review—the Little and Holland review—Creating an Inclusive Apprenticeship Offer. It made 20 recommendations, including: clarifying funding to support apprentices with learning difficulty or disability; raising the awareness of providers and employers of funding sources, such as access to work and learning; the promotion of on-the-job support in terms of job coaching and mentoring; review and better monitoring of the self-declaration process so that underrepresentation by specific groups can be addressed; and the removal of barriers to access and completion in the form of qualification requirements. The Government seem to have been very slow in acting on those recommendations. Will the Minister update us on what is happening?
On barriers, English and maths remain a major issue. I do not know whether my noble friend Lord Addington will add anything on that. He has been very concerned about the shift to GCSE English and maths and the difficulty that some of these young people face. They used to be able to qualify with more examinee-friendly functional skills. I beg to move.
Lord Addington
My Lords, when I look at the apprenticeship system and the newly created apprenticeships, it is quite clear that there is a degree of fear within the system that the exam will not be taken seriously. This means that various standards have been clung to, particularly in English and maths, so that the apprenticeship will be as good as something else. This is quite clearly inappropriate if you do not take other steps for groups which have struggled in the traditional sector. Dyslexia was a classic example. As I dug into it, it became almost farcical. People were saying, “Employers like it”. Then you had employers saying that yes, they wanted functional skills so that people could do the job, not a qualification. That was said to me more than once. A degree of paranoia was building up because people were not saying, “This is a test that allows you to do a job”.
The groups mentioned here are always going to struggle. If you do not want them in the apprenticeship system, it is about time somebody turned round and said, “It’s not for you”, and provided something else for them. I do so hope that that will not be the case, because it means creating an entire new examination and qualification system. I hope that the Minister will be able to tell us that the Government are taking practical steps to allow people in.
Baroness Neville-Rolfe
My Lords, this amendment would require that, when setting public sector apprenticeship targets, the Secretary of State must also impose targets on public bodies in relation to the number of young people who were in care and those with special educational needs or disabilities. I am very grateful to the noble Baroness, Lady Sharp, for bringing the issue alive, for bringing up the findings of the Social Mobility Committee and for talking about Birmingham as an exemplar of good practice—because we must capture and celebrate good practice in all these areas. I was encouraged to hear of the improving completion rate that she mentioned.
The Government do not feel that it is appropriate to specify a proportion of the public sector target for young people leaving care or with physical or learning disabilities. We are trying to keep our targets simple. Apprenticeships are real jobs with training. As with all other jobs, employers have to make the final decision about who they hire for any apprenticeship that they have advertised. I know this having run apprenticeships myself when I was in business. Apprenticeships are employer led, so we are not able to ring-fence apprenticeships for particular groups as to do so would mean requiring employers to hire particular people for their vacancies. I am not sure that that would work.
However, although we would not want to interfere in employers’ decisions about who to recruit, we believe that more can be done to ensure that people from a diverse range of backgrounds are in the best possible place to apply for and secure an apprenticeship. The Government are committed to ensuring that care leavers are aware of the support and opportunities that are available to them. The Government provide full funding for apprenticeship training under the existing frameworks for entitled 19 to 23 year-old care leavers, and a number of local authorities already offer apprenticeships to care leavers, as has been said.
I have quite a long list of what we are doing to help care leavers, but in the interests of time I will set all that out in a letter, alongside information on what is being done in various different ways so that care leavers can access programmes such as traineeships to get the support they need to get ready for an apprenticeship. The noble Baroness also mentioned a review. In turn, I will mention Peter Little OBE, who undertook a detailed review for the Government of the inclusiveness of apprenticeships for people with learning difficulties or disabilities. Perhaps it would be helpful to set out the information I have in a rather extensive note. I have tried to explain why accepting this amendment would be a problem, but I will set all that out.
It is good to see the noble Lord, Lord Addington, here because of all that he has done on support and accessibility. Apprenticeships are accessible. In 2013-14, almost 40,000 people with disabilities or learning difficulties started an apprenticeship. We can do more. We can continue, as he said, to look at English and maths requirements within apprenticeships to ensure that they do not create a barrier, and the use of reasonable adjustments for disabled learners has been promoted through the skills funding rules. The SFA—the Skills Funding Agency—has published an evaluation of a series of diversity and apprenticeship pilots which looked at innovative ways to increase accessibility for underrepresented groups.
We judge that the measures we are undertaking can give confidence that the Government are ensuring in the right way that apprenticeships are accessible for people of all backgrounds, including care leavers and people with special educational needs and disabilities. I hope that noble Lords have found my explanation helpful and will look forward to my letter, and that on this basis the noble Baroness will withdraw her amendment.
Lord Addington
When the Minister does provide that letter, might it include some guidance about compliance with the Equality Act? People tend to say, “Oh no, that is different, that is not for us”. It needs to be stated quite clearly that the colleges and employers that are going through this process know that they are part of the legal framework and are not in some way exceptional. It is my experience that people are hiding behind the fact that we are different.
Baroness Neville-Rolfe
I will certainly undertake to look at that point and discuss it further with the noble Lord, if I need further clarification, so that I can give him a proper answer.