Apprenticeships, Skills, Children and Learning Bill

I would like to try a line about inclusion. I think the whole House would agree that further education and training is a must; it is a necessity for everybody who can be persuaded or cajoled into becoming included. The question then is complicated by the fact that there is a mismatch between the demand for certain types of job and the supply of them. This mismatch affects apprenticeships. Perhaps the classical apprenticeship is in Wagner’s "Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg", between Hans Sachs and David. There you see a very small, self-employed firm in the shape of Hans Sachs, very much training on the job. My worry is that making apprenticeships all-inclusive may be a mistake; it would devalue apprenticeships, in my view. They need to be specific, as my noble friend Lord Sheikh was pointing out, and not a kind of class of further education available to all. Surely we can achieve the inclusion through other available methods: through further education colleges, training, Rathbone and all sorts of ways. I end on one thought. There is a certain danger of there being a mythology about apprenticeships. Apprenticeships after all were originally about craft. In many industries, including those that I have been in myself—I cited the foundry industry at Second Reading—we have been deskilling, in the craft sense, for years and years. We have been putting in much larger chunks of capital in order to reduce the need for craft labour. We have then had to put a great deal more emphasis on numeracy, literacy and the ability to handle IT in all sorts of shapes and forms. I shall cite just one example. Lace-making is done very little by hand and almost wholly on large machines. The skill is in the setting up of the machine, not in the operating of it. Once you have set the machine up with the right fibres in the right places, the floppy disk in the end of the machine can be sent to China and put into the same machine made by the same German manufacturer, and out comes the same lace. The skill is in the setting up and the maintenance of the machines. It is entirely specific. I am concerned that we do not believe that in some way we can generalise apprenticeships to be the all-inclusive form of further education and training that is implied if we do not accept the amendments.