Apprenticeships

Lord Wallace of Saltaire Excerpts

Tuesday 20th February 2018 Lords Chamber

[Viscount Younger of Leckie]

There are a number of initiatives. For example, the DfE and the Department for Transport are looking at ways to ease young apprentices’ travel from home to work. That could take the form of providing extra money or practical ways of getting them to work. It is important that young apprentices are not put off taking up this great opportunity to get a good start in life.

[Lord Wallace of Saltaire (LD)]

My Lords, are the Government aware of the scepticism I have encountered when talking to people in Yorkshire involved in this area over whether the new apprenticeship scheme really will be used to encourage 18 year-old school leavers to take up new apprenticeships as their first job rather than companies using it to upskill those they already employ? Can the noble Viscount assure us that the Government will make every effort to develop links with schools to ensure that children are helped to make the transition to work, particularly in areas such as the construction industry where skills are in desperately short supply?

[Viscount Younger of Leckie]

The noble Lord is correct: in Britain we desperately need to grow certain skills ourselves. Encouraging employers to go into schools is very much work in progress. The Careers & Enterprise Company has pushed for employers to go into schools to talk to young people about opportunities. Linked to that, the traineeships, which the noble Lord will know about, provide quality training for thousands of young people who need to develop initial skills to help them into the pipeline of getting into apprenticeships and on into a meaningful career.