Apprenticeships: Ethnic Minorities

Lord Young of Norwood Green Excerpts

Monday 18th June 2012 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Wilcox]

My noble friend does wonderful work making sure that dyslexia stays at the very top of my agenda, and he knows that we are working hard to see if we can get the right access criteria for dyslexia. Yes, we will continue to look at any group of young people who are being excluded from work. We cannot afford to have anybody out of work at the moment.

[Lord Young of Norwood Green]

My Lords, while we support the Government’s objectives in focusing on apprenticeships and the drive to increase their quantity, can the Minister assure the House that the Government will maintain the quality of apprenticeships? I am still waiting for a government response to a Question about a recent “Panorama” programme which showed some rather worrying abuses of apprenticeship programmes.

[Baroness Wilcox]

As the noble Lord will know following the very good work that he did on apprenticeships when he was a Minister in this department, we have really extended the number and breadth of the apprenticeships that we are doing. I suppose that there is bound to be the odd mistake every now and again, for which we would be very sorry. However, apprenticeships are central to ensuring that our workforce is equipped to help build economic growth and enable companies to compete globally on behalf of us all.