Apprenticeships, Skills, Children and Learning Bill

The noble Baroness talked about the nature of the employment relationship. There is a balance to be struck on two fronts. One was addressed by the noble Viscount, Lord Eccles, when he talked about sustaining the quality of apprenticeships. That is very important. Whatever we do, we must ensure that we do not dilute the brand. We are going to deal separately with ensuring that people with learning difficulties and disabilities have access to apprenticeships. Another problem was defining an apprenticeship. When we counted them, the Government took a view that the best way of ensuring that we had a clear and acceptable definition was by stating that there had to be workplace employment. An apprenticeship could not be completed without that connection. We can address the Rathbone and Barnardo's thing in the right place as I do not want to confuse this debate. There are other flexible approaches, but we are trying not to have the arguments and debates about how many apprentices we have that we had with programme-led apprenticeships. People argued that they were not proper apprenticeships but simply college-based work with insufficient on-the-job training. We have taken a fairly hard line on this, but there is some ability to be flexible to address specific situations. For example, the noble Baroness, Lady Sharp, pointed out that young apprentices, especially in the construction industry, were being made redundant. We wanted to ensure that if we could not find alternative employment, which we did for hundreds of them by having a construction industry vacancy matching service, if they were six months away from completing a two or three-year apprenticeship, we enabled them to complete it in a college, provided they had had sufficient on-the-job workplace experience. That is an example of flexibility.