Apprenticeships, Skills, Children and Learning Bill

My Lords, I thank the Minister for explaining this Bill, which attempts to address a wide range of areas of policy across the spheres of the Department for Innovation, Universities and Skills and the Department for Children, Schools and Families. In that regard, I note with regret the lack of a Minister from the former department to speak today. However, it is reassuring to have here the Minister, given her experience, as well as so many experts who have chosen to speak today, as we very much hope that they will in Committee and on Report, to ensure that the Bill is subjected to the exceedingly stringent and effective scrutiny that it needs. I wonder whether, when the then Prime Minister proclaimed, "Education, education, education", this Bill was what he had in mind. While we welcome some of the policies and specific provisions, we are concerned at the apparent convoluted and confusing tangle of institutions and policies, which suggest the creation of a bureaucratic muddle. At Second Reading in another place, my honourable friend David Willetts said that the Bill has no clear or sustained argument. Through 262 clauses and 16 hefty schedules we dash from apprenticeships to academies, from children to complaints, from behaviour to bankruptcy, and even to a small section tucked away on education for those detained in youth accommodation. There remains a fear that perhaps the breadth of this Bill comes at the expense of any depth of conviction or clarity in some of its policies. My honourable friend also commented that it seemed to demonstrate, ""the besetting problem of a decaying Government coming to the end of their term: when in doubt, reorganise … Even worse than that, they are now reorganising their own reorganisations, and changing the institutions that they themselves created".—[Official Report, Commons, 23/2/09; col. 115.]" We have to ask ourselves whether this Bill is symptomatic of a Government who are frantically hurling semi-formed policies at problems, desperately trying to legislate for higher standards of education. A moment ago, I said that there are bits in the Bill that we welcome. We welcome, for example, the incorporation of advice about apprenticeships into more general careers advice in schools and we see the attractions of creating an entitlement to apprenticeships, but we do not see that merely legislating for it will make it happen. Furthermore, at a time of economic crisis, when many businesses are struggling to make ends meet, we foresee difficulties in enforcing a statutory right to an apprenticeship. Will the Minister assure us that provisions will be put in place in order to prevent this right from becoming a lawyers’ charter? The nightmare scenario would be that of employers who cannot afford to do this ending up at an employment tribunal or people ending up on a so-called apprenticeship but not doing anything productive or useful. We need to know how the Government will guard against these sorts of problems. When it comes to making promises about apprenticeships, the Prime Minister himself does not exactly have a glowing record. In his 2003 Budget as Chancellor, he announced that apprenticeship places would increase to 320,000 by 2006. In fact, by 2006-07 there were only 239,000 apprentices in training. In 2007, he announced that he would double the number to 500,000, but by 2008 the number had fallen by 13,000. We now have a new target. At Second Reading of the Bill in another place, the Secretary of State for Children, Schools and Families announced that there would be 1,000 more apprenticeships by the end of the next financial year—admittedly, a rather more modest target, but a target none the less. Do we believe him? I hope that we can. Ofsted’s 2008 report, The Impact of Programme- led Apprenticeships, confirmed that many of the apprenticeships created by Labour are only virtual apprenticeships and do not include any proper workplace training. The Adult Learning Inspectorate has noted that, ""some apprentices can potentially achieve the full requirement of the apprenticeship framework without having to set foot in a workplace"." Furthermore, your Lordships’ Economic Affairs Committee reported that, ""most of this increase has been as a result of converting government-supported programmes of work-based learning into apprenticeships"." Therefore, while we broadly welcome the Government’s intentions behind the apprenticeship clauses of the Bill, we do not believe that these provisions really get to the heart of the matter. The Minister will not be surprised to hear that we hope to table amendments that will help to address the core problems. We want to create an apprenticeship structure that will increase the availability and take-up of apprenticeship places by reducing the bureaucracy surrounding certification and inspection regimes, increase employer involvement through the sector skills councils and make sure that apprenticeships include real work-based experience. We also welcome much about the addition of Ofqual, which appears later in the Bill. We are grateful to the Government for at last accepting the proposal made by my right honourable friend David Cameron nearly four years ago for a new independent regulator of exam standards. We welcome its incorporation into statute. At a time when public confidence in exam standards seems to decline year on year—the Minister herself referred to this—it is vital that there should be a public body to ensure that the infamous dumbing-down is stopped and that we have an exam system of which we can be proud and in which we can have confidence. Nevertheless, we have reservations about the body’s independence—and that independence is fundamentally important. We hope to receive assurances from the Government that they will not allow Ofqual to be viewed as a government agency. This would undermine public confidence in qualification standards. In this vein, it is most concerning that, infamously, one of Ofqual’s earliest interventions was to lower the pass mark in a science GCSE—to 20 per cent for a grade C—to make it easier to pass. For a body charged with restoring public confidence, this seemed to be a backward step. We will look for assurances that the regulator will, from now on, push standards up, rather than down. The Bill also represents the fourth major transition of the Learning and Skills Council. The body, which was set up only in 2001, had been through two major reorganisations by 2005-06 and a further restructuring in 2007. In 2009, we now see that it will finally be abolished. In principle, this might seem sensible. After all, the organisation, which employs over 3,000 staff, churns through £11 billion in its inefficient administration. Nevertheless, the Government propose simply to replace it with three more quangos: the YPLA, the SFA and its sub-quango the NAS. This sounds to us less like "Education, education, education" and more like "Quango, quango, quango". The impact assessment issued by the two departments involved points out: ""Administering the new system is expected to be cost neutral for the exchequer"." I repeat: "cost neutral". The Explanatory Notes state that staff movements are expected to mean that about 1,000 staff will be transferred from the Learning and Skills Council to local education authorities; some 1,800 will form the Skills Funding Agency, including about 400 in the National Apprenticeship Service; and 500 will travel to the YPLA. If my calculations are correct, the Government are saying that the three new agencies will employ exactly the same number of people as the old, hugely inefficient LSC. They have not cut down on a single penny of budget nor reduced the number of staff, yet they are keen to emphasise the slimline nature of these bodies. One wonders who they are trying to convince. There are other key areas of the Bill which we very much look forward to addressing as we go into Committee, including specifically the Government’s provision for the education of those detained in youth accommodation, the clauses regarding the complaints procedure and those on careers education in schools. I am sure that the Minister will be pleased to hear that we intend to address these issues in a positive and constructive frame of mind. We aim to help the Government to find more substance and concrete policy to underpin these areas and others and to help to construct a Bill based solidly on education, education, education rather than on quangos, bureaucracy and targets.