Oral Answers to Questions

Tristram Hunt Excerpts

Monday 24th June 2013 Commons Chamber

[Michael Gove]

I absolutely agree that those working with apprentices need to have either the best qualifications or the best experience in the relevant sector, which is why we implemented the recommendations of Alison Wolf’s report. We have allowed lecturers in further education, who are qualified in that sector but were not previously able to work in schools, to work in schools. We will also implement the Richard review, which once more puts employers in control of assuring the quality of vocational qualifications, so that anyone who secures an apprenticeship can be confident that it will lead to a satisfying job.

[Tristram Hunt (Stoke-on-Trent Central) (Lab)]

With youth unemployment at the 1 million mark, one would have thought that Ministers would do all they could to get young people into training and jobs, so why have the Government overseen a 12% reduction in young apprenticeships in the past six months alone, alongside a £165 million departmental underspend? Where is the determination to fix this crisis? Rather than writing eight-page letters and trying to become the pen pal of my hon. Friend the Member for Liverpool, West Derby (Stephen Twigg), should the Secretary of State not be focusing on some policy work?

[Michael Gove]

Rather than writing eloquent questions and reading them out with the rounded vowels of a public school educated champion of vocational education, I suggest that the hon. Gentleman concentrate on what the Government have done. I also suggest that he refer back to the wonderful Westminster Hall debate, held with the Under-Secretary of State for Skills, my hon. Friend the Member for West Suffolk, in which the hon. Gentleman acknowledged that under the previous Government vocational education was not good enough, that there were far too many low standard courses, and that the Wolf report and the Richard review have been the two best pieces of work on vocational and technical education undertaken in the past 25 years. If he looked back at what he said then, he would face a dilemma: does he eat the words he uttered in Westminster Hall, or does he acknowledge that the question he has just asked was nonsense from start to finish?