Apprenticeships
Debate between Nigel Adams and Gordon Marsden(13 years ago)
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Mr Marsden
No, I do not agree. I hear what the Minister has to say, and I accept that he and colleagues have made progress in that area. My point about 19 to 24-year-olds was not that the numbers had gone up, but that it is just as important to look at quality for that group as it is for 16 to 18-year-olds. Let me say rather gently—albeit excluding the Minister from culpability in this respect—that if the Government move in the same glacial fashion as they moved in other areas of quality and due diligence, such as with the regional growth fund, then we will have the opportunity to come back and quiz them further. However, knowing the Minister’s commitment in this area, his perspicacity, his ability to summon up armies of rhetoric—and, indeed, civil servants to do this job—I am sure that that will happen.
Let us create a landscape where we can continue to boost apprenticeship numbers. However, if we are going to do that, it is crucial to get the preparatory work right. That means a strong, solid system of careers advice for young people, to ensure not only that they are aware of the vocational opportunities available to them, but that they are given the skills to take them up. We support the principles behind the establishment of the all-age careers service, on which the Minister, while in opposition, and I, as a Back Bencher, agreed some time ago, as members of the all-party skills group. But the Ministers’ noble aspirations have been undermined by the chaos and confusion arising from the Department for Education’s arbitrary abolition of Connexions and the removal of a dedicated £200 million of support provision in schools. It is therefore not surprising that the president of the Institute of Career Guidance, Steve Higginbotham, went so far as to say:
“In reality, the National Careers Service is an illusion, and not a very imaginatively branded one either, and is a clear misrepresentation with regard to careers services for young people.”
A recent survey carried out by the Association of Colleges showed that only 7% of school pupils could name apprenticeships as a potential post-GCSE qualification. That illustrates the problem that still exists in some schools, in which the vocational route is not explained to pupils. Teachers and others need to have a much greater understanding of the role that apprenticeships can play in careers development and future job prospects. I fear, however, that the situation will not improve following the abolition of Connexions.
New initiatives such as the programme announced this week by the chief executive of the CBI to send mentors into schools to promote apprenticeships are to be welcomed. That announcement shows a welcome recognition that everyone needs to play their part, not just teachers. We must also ensure, however, that young people can afford to stay in education. Following the abolition of the education maintenance allowance, college enrolment data from the Association of Colleges show that numbers are down across the board. That has real implications, as many young people will miss out on the opportunity to gain the crucial pre-apprenticeship skills that they will need to take up a placement. If apprenticeships are to play an integral role, we must ensure that they are fit for purpose, and that they can match the expectations of the individuals who take up the placements with those of the employers who take those individuals on.
We need apprenticeship frameworks that allow progression for the individual; they must not just be there for their own sake. I know that the Minister shares that view, as it featured heavily in his “Skills for Sustainable Growth” document last year. Now, however, we need movement to match the aspiration. We need clear portability from apprenticeship frameworks, with qualifications that are pyramidal in shape, rather than horizontal. We need a process of continuous assessment and credit accumulation that builds up a broad competence, rather than just bite-sized chunks of training that do not add up to anything.
It is equally important, whatever the qualification route, that we do not force employers or apprentices into a false dichotomy between functional skills and skills for life. Enabling skills are important for gaining and keeping an apprenticeship, and subsequently a job, as well as a knowledge of specific skills. Both aspects need to be taken into account as we balance our skills needs in the years ahead.
We need clear, accessible pathways from higher-level apprenticeships into higher education. I want to point out that the choices relating to vocational and academic education should not be viewed as an either/or proposition. Perhaps the Minister should ask his colleague, the Minister for Universities and Science, the right hon. Member for Havant (Mr Willetts), to get UCAS to consider recognising apprenticeship qualifications as part of its tariff-points system. For too long, complacency about the status quo and some minor snobbery in a minority of universities have hampered not only access but the interchange between the academic and vocational worlds. I welcome what the Government have said about the higher apprenticeship fund and the way in which it will be taken forward, but the key question is how those qualifications will be recognised and integrated into higher education progression.
How will this culture shift of which the Minister is so proud be delivered? The national apprenticeships service, which we set up when we were in government, is clearly set to lead from the front, but will it have the resources to deliver the expansion that the Government are talking about? Recent parliamentary questions have shown that the organisation has lost just under 100 staff in the course of the past year, at the very time that it is being asked to lead the delivery of more and more apprenticeships and to oversee the additional initiatives that the Government are pushing out, including those announced today. My own inquiries have shown that regional directors are now finding themselves further stretched by having to cover multiple areas of the country as well as delivering all the new initiatives that the Government are launching.
The Skills Funding Agency is responsible for all post-19 provision, but, crucially, the Department for Education still controls 16-to-18 provision and is arguably not showing the same commitment to apprenticeships and vocational education as Ministers in the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills have done. The problem with all this, and with the Minister’s dual role in the two Departments, is that it is sometimes hard to see who is leading whom.
We might also ask about the situation on the ground. Following the abolition of the regional development agencies, the Government have completely failed to link local and regional growth into their skills policies. That obviously includes apprenticeships. They have swept away the informal architecture that used to bring together the key players who were crucial to delivering apprenticeships locally, including further education, higher education and small and medium-sized enterprises.
I welcome what the Minister said today about the supply chain, but he merely echoed what we have been saying for more than a year. Why did a year have to be wasted before he came to the House to say these things? Why did we have to wait a year for the Minister of State, Department for Communities and Local Government, the right hon. Member for Tunbridge Wells (Greg Clark) to talk about the Government setting up a set of apprenticeship hubs in a number of city areas? The reason is that both Ministers were fettered by other Ministers, by the Chicago-based economists and by the people who think that they can deliver everything on the ground without any Government intervention, whom the Minister has on other occasions derided. Yes, it is good that the Government are looking at apprenticeship hubs, but who on the ground is going to deliver, arbitrate and energise demand? What about those outside the city regions? Are the second-tier towns, the seaside towns and the suburban and rural areas not entitled to an apprenticeship hub locally? We need those structures on the ground so that business demand can be recognised locally rather than being micro-managed from Whitehall, as happens now.
The situation is not helped by the cluttered environment that has developed in post-16 provision, with the creation of university technical colleges and the potential for free colleges and 16-to-19 academies alongside existing FE colleges. We can all see the results when apprenticeship schemes are run well; we have only to look at the demand for schemes run by BAE Systems, Jaguar Land Rover and Network Rail. I have also seen for myself the excellent work being done by British Gas to encourage more female apprentices, and the work done by the nuclear skills academy. All those schemes demonstrate the value of investing in training and skills for the long term—a point emphasised eloquently by my hon. Friend the Member for Streatham (Mr Umunna), the shadow Business Secretary, in his recent Bloomberg speech.
This brings us back to the age-old question: what is a good job? How do we match the fluid skills demands of the labour market with the life chances and skill sets of individuals? To boost apprenticeships, we will have to meet the challenge of winning over employers who are still sceptical about the some of the values that apprenticeships could bring. A recent British Chambers of Commerce skills survey showed that many employers were still not ready to engage with the programme. Only 20% of businesses surveyed across the board took on apprentices in 2010-11, with the figure set to drop to 15% in the coming year. The Federation of Small Businesses has rightly highlighted issues of complexity and red tape, which act as a deterrent to its members. So I welcome what the Minister has said today, although we shall have to wait to see the small print and to see how rapidly the proposals are put into practice.
I raised the problems of SME engagement in a debate in June, when I said that the Government needed urgently to consider tailoring apprenticeships better towards their needs. That means not just having financial incentives, which Ministers and others sometimes seem to think are enough, but structuring them to the daily cycle and the needs of SMEs’ work. We need to improve the levels of engagement between large companies and middle-ranked companies—identified only last week as key by the CBI director, Mr Cridland. They can play a vital role in boosting apprenticeships via supply chains.
Undeniable pride and dignity surround apprenticeships. That is why so many hon. Members have been able to recruit support for individual initiatives in their area. It has been the same in my area, and this summer I met apprenticeship award winners at Blackpool and the Fylde college in my constituency. My local paper, the Blackpool Gazette ran a successful campaign to create 100 apprenticeships in 100 days. In these sorts of processes, however, making connections and having middle men can be key. I learned that by talking to my FE college and to apprentices and the SMEs with whom they had bonded.
The Government have re-announced today—this is about the third time—the £250 million scheme to allow employers to bid directly for the training budget, but they need to be careful that the human resources element is not lost in hastily thought-out schemes that do not have safeguards and risk deadweight while funding for learning providers and colleges, which are already voicing their concerns, is top-sliced.
This October WorldSkills hit London, and team UK won 12 medals. I was delighted when by lobbying the Government I was able to play a small part as chair of the all-party skills group in tandem with others in the group in helping to bring that event to the UK. Young people with apprenticeships shone out, including Rachel Cooke from Blackpool and the Fylde, a BAE employer in my area. I agree with what the Minister said about the value of that. Labour Members have agreed with it for many years. Although I did not regret the changes made in the 1990s to the Labour party’s constitution in respect of clause IV, I did regret the removal of the words, to achieve
“for the workers by hand or by brain the full fruits of their industry”
because that embodied and continues to embody an important part of our tradition and our aspiration. I believe it is crucial that apprenticeships should have and deserve to have this respect—not least because some of the organisations that promote them, such as City and Guilds, which has been with us since 1878, have become a byword for attaining qualifications, rather like Hoover has become a byword for vacuum cleaners. Apprenticeships now span both traditional types of occupation such as stone masonry and thatching offered by the National Trust and the new schemes in the green industry and everything that goes with them. Harsh words have been said about some elements of the service sector in connection with some of the shorter-term apprenticeships, but we have to recognise that the sector will be key in delivering future economic prosperity.
We need to build a bridge of values between the old and new apprenticeships. We need a 21st century offer that combines an appreciation of the traditional strength of apprenticeships with what they can offer for young people, for retraining and for returning to work, particularly for the women of today. All the structural changes and genuine enthusiasm for apprenticeships will be for nothing if we appear to have promised too much from apprenticeships as a one-stop shop for all training and skills and as the silver bullet to solve all this Government’s skills and employment problems. They will be for nothing if we allow the brand to be contaminated by questionable providers or overstretched by branding all forms of training as apprenticeships. They will be for nothing, too, if we do not provide frameworks that offer the flexibility and progression opportunities for a 21st century economy—ones that are able to adjust to changing domestic and international demands.
The Minister did not find time this evening to talk about one issue that looms on the horizon—further education loans, which anyone aged 24 and above, but not the traditional 25-plus division, will be able to take up. Apprenticeships will be a large part of that number; perhaps as many as 100,000 people will be obliged to take up these loans after Government support is wound down. The time scale for the Government to make detailed decisions after consultation is very short, and this is already causing major problems with colleges across the sector, while business groups have raised the concern that the additional bureaucracy in administering these loans could disengage them from the process. A big bang approach to student loans in further education, including for thousands of apprenticeships, is one thing in a time of plenty, but in a time of scarcity, it is quite different.
When we were in office, we revitalised and re-energised the apprenticeship programme. We put in place procedures to ensure that Government contracts such as Building Schools for the Future would take on apprenticeships, and we saw completion rates rise dramatically to their current rate of over 70%. While the Government have sensibly built on much of that inheritance, there are new challenges that they have not yet understood or that have been hampered by silos, divisions in government and a reluctance to understand how Government can shape and enable markets, which includes skills and apprenticeships. Despite all the press statements and all the re-announcements and the conferences, the adult training budget has been significantly cut. The previous Government had put more than £700 million into funding Train to Gain, but that money has not been allocated to apprenticeships. In effect, the Government have not increased the overall budget for training apprenticeships.
Any Government—whether it be this Government or the next Labour Government—will need to build on a strong legacy from the past by working tirelessly to help expand access to the apprenticeship programme, by engaging with SMEs and helping them to overcome the barriers they face and by making apprenticeships offer a clear route of progression, as I have described. We also need to use the enormous power of Government, which includes creating thousands of new apprenticeship opportunities by incentivising companies to bid for Government contracts over a million-pound threshold to offer apprenticeship schemes.