Apprenticeships, Skills, Children and Learning Bill

My Lords, I welcome the opportunity to contribute to today’s debate. In doing so, I declare an interest as a member of UNISON’s parliamentary group. While this is a wide-ranging Bill, with much to commend it, I will concentrate my comments on two aspects, namely the investment in apprenticeships and the creation of the School Support Staff Negotiating Body. Given that this has already been a long and well informed debate, I will be relatively brief. The Bill’s proposals for apprenticeships are, by any measure, bold and ambitious. The Government already have a commendable record of skills investment and now they seek to move the agenda on to a new plane. The investment of £1 billion, with a target of 400,000 apprenticeships, could change the whole employment landscape for young people for the future. It is a defining and iconic policy, in that it illustrates our Government’s belief that in times of global recession, rather than cut services, we should invest in our future. That means investing in the skills of our young people, so that they can be at the forefront of the economic upturn. The strategy will not succeed unless we also redefine and shape the scope of apprenticeships. They currently have an image that is stuck in another era. Our challenge is to modernise the concept so that it can be more easily embraced by the non-traditional sectors. The biggest challenge in this regard—but also the one over which we have the most control—is the public sector. My noble friend Lord Young has previously conceded that our record in the public sector is poor. Currently, the public sector accounts for 20 per cent of the workforce, but only 10 per cent of apprenticeships. We have begun to address this but, clearly, more can be done. This is why a rethink of the Government’s approach to public procurement is so crucial. As the recent report of the Office of Government Commerce acknowledged, today the total value of public procurement is around £175 billion a year. As the paymasters, it is in our power to insist that public contracts embed skills training and apprenticeships, as well as other good employment practices. The Secretary of State has already embraced this concept in applying it to some public construction projects, such as new school building and the Olympic park, but this is a very small part of the public contract opportunity and, indeed, runs the risk of further stereotyping the image of apprenticeships as being mainly aimed at young men in the building and engineering trades. So I hope the Minister will feel able to go further today and give a commitment that training and apprenticeship provision will in future be built into all public contracts for products and services as well as for capital programmes. In this regard there is one area of public procurement that could really benefit from further measures to drive up standards and improve skills: the care sector. The recent adult social care workforce strategy identified that 1.5 million people work in the adult care sector and over two-thirds work in the private and third sectors, the majority of which are small employers. Meanwhile, local authorities spend more than £16 billion a year on adult social care, much of it contracted out to the private sector, so there is an opportunity there for those contracts to have apprenticeships built in. There is a desperate need to raise the status, skills and rewards of those working in this sector. The Government have taken some steps to address this by announcing 50,000 traineeships in social care for young people who have been out of work for 12 months, but this hardly begins to address the scale of the problem. We are facing huge demographic changes and there are already now more people over 65 than under 16 for the first time in our history. At the same time, quite rightly, we have higher expectations of care. A massive investment is now necessary to guarantee the professional, vocational and ongoing development needs of this sector. As part of this investment, a programme of apprenticeships in this sector could appeal to the mainly female workforce and help remould its image. Finally, I would like to say something about a separate provision in the Bill concerning the creation of the School Support Staff Negotiating Body. We had some fun earlier with its acronym but it is a very serious and worthwhile body. It is a long overdue initiative which will affect more than 400,000 low-paid school support staff, mainly women, working in diverse jobs such as teaching assistants, technicians, secretaries, craft workers and school meals workers. Undoubtedly they make an invaluable contribution to children’s education and well-being as part of the school team, yet all too often their loyalty and commitment to the children and the school have been exploited. Their pay, often set by local authorities or individual schools, has been seen to be expendable and, as a result, school support staff have ended up being among the lowest paid in the entire public sector. A recent survey has shown that the average take-home pay for teaching assistants is £758 a month or around £11,000 a year, and for a qualified nursery nurse it is £957 a month or about £14,000 a year, and their relative pay rates compared to teachers have fallen dramatically. Yet in recent years their roles and responsibilities have become more complex: for example, actively supporting teachers and learning, covering for teachers and providing individual support for pupils and their families. Many of the improvements the Government want to achieve in schools, such as improved reporting, raising standards and tackling poor behaviour, as set out in the Bill, will add further to the responsibilities of the support staff. I am therefore pleased that the Government have finally addressed this issue and created this national negotiating body, albeit with some caveats. The issue which has to be confronted is the dichotomy between a Government keen to set national standards with fairer rewards and an ongoing desire to give schools more control. However, the issue has been overcome for other groups, such as teachers, and it would be invidious if the lowest paid were expected to bear the brunt of the consequences of decentralisation. The dilemma has been addressed in the Bill by allowing for a national framework for pay and conditions with local flexibilities. Obviously, this has the capacity to undermine the objective of consistency, so there is still some work to do to ensure that the agreed outcomes of the negotiating body are applicable to all schools. I understand that these issues were explored at length on Report in the other place, and suitable clarification was agreed. However, there remain concerns that some of the Secretary of State’s powers to refer agreements back to the negotiating body—for example, on the grounds that it is not practicable to implement the agreement—remain ambiguous and need further clarification. I hope that the Minister will be able to address this point of detail in due course. While I am on the subject of seeking commitments, it would also be helpful if those responding from the opposition Benches could reassure support staff that they see a long-term future for the work of the School Support Staff Negotiating Body. I have sought during this debate to raise a couple of matters of concern, but overall I welcome the Bill. It addresses issues that are fundamental to the concerns of young people and their parents. It gives new rights where they are due and focuses investment where it can be justified. If it is successful, it will change the learning experience for a whole generation and finally achieve our oft stated aim of lifelong learning for all. I hope that the House will give it its wholehearted support.