Apprenticeships, Skills, Children and Learning Bill

As so often, I greatly sympathise with what the noble Baroness, Lady Sharp, has argued. I also greatly sympathise with her aversion to the way in which the Bill gives so much more centralised power to the Secretary of State. We see the Secretary of State doing almost everything on every other page, and that is the wrong direction in which education should move or be controlled. As I listened to the noble Baroness, I also had considerable sympathy with the concept that the NAS should have some kind of senior status within this appalling "network", as my noble friend Lord Hunt so graphically described it, of quangos that the poor people on the ground who have to deal with all these various bodies have to cope with. The Minister himself said that there have been attempts to improve the status of apprenticeships and to increase the number of young people going into apprenticeships, which the country so badly needs, so would it not be a gesture to say that the NAS should be separate from a funding individual or agency that regulates the money? The NAS should be there to ensure that the apprentices have a proper experience of quality, that the numbers of employers who are prepared seriously to take on apprentices improve and that the numbers of apprentices steadily increase over the years. I remember the early 1990s, or perhaps even the late 1980s—my memory goes back a long time now—when the NVQs were first introduced. I had the great fun of being on the national advisory council and working on the Aspire Training Team targets for NVQs. Separate from funding and regulation, our job was to encourage employers and more young people to take up NVQs. I could envisage something quite positive for the NAS in that sort of field—something that was separate, as I say, from the Skills Funding Agency, which will be very much more a regulatory and finance-based kind of body. Although I am the last person to want yet more quangos in the field, I have a great deal of sympathy with the noble Baroness’s arguments.