Apprenticeships, Skills, Children and Learning Bill

I support everything that my noble friend Lord Layard has said and the Committee will not be surprised that I have put my name to the amendments. However, I want to pick up on one or two of the issues that have been raised by other speakers in this short debate. I shall go through the five subsections of the proposed new clause but, before I do so, I wish to underline what my noble friend said. This goes to the heart of the Bill—at least the apprenticeship section of it. Unless we can secure high standards and high-quality apprenticeships, all our work in this House and in another place, and all the work that employers are doing, will be wasted. It is absolutely essential that apprenticeships are held in high regard by the young people who take them, by the other areas of the education system to which they might progress and by all employers. Unless we establish in the Bill that there are to be high standards and good quality, none of those things will happen. I make a plea to my noble friends the Ministers to take this seriously. Even if there are details in what is proposed that they may wish to modify or amend, I hope that they will accept the principle behind it. I was a little surprised by what the noble Lord, Lord De Mauley, said on 250 guided learning hours. I am delighted that the Conservative Front Bench supports the principle that an apprenticeship framework should be of a higher standard, that there should be a technical element in the qualification and that basic skills are important, but there is some inconsistency in the noble Lord’s commitment to those things and his suggestion that 250 hours of guided learning are not necessary. I do not understand how one can achieve that higher level of key skills in a young person, and a growth and development in their knowledge, without taking them off their particular daily tasks and teaching them in order to help them to develop in this way. Day release is not a particularly new concept, as my noble friend said: it goes right back to the 1918 Act. It should not be enormously revolutionary for the employers who are taking part. Perhaps I may speak with my employer’s hat on for a moment. We are considering taking on some apprentices. However, I know perfectly well that wherever the apprentices go to work in the university that I run—helping in an office, helping a group of people responsible for security or helping with the transport that we provide, for example—they will not acquire that knowledge and those basic skills if they spend all their day in the workplace just being given some guidance. They will need that guidance, of course, but we will not achieve the quality that we want. Perhaps I may pick up one other point made by the noble Lord, Lord De Mauley. There is of course a wide variety of apprenticeships. The amendments would merely establish a basic level. There may be some more demanding areas where the time off work needs to be greater—all the percentages that the Minister specified represented far more time off and away from the workplace for guided learning than the seven hours per week, 40 weeks a year that the noble Baroness, Lady Sharp, referred to. There is therefore room for flexibility, as there should be, but it is the basic minimum that we are trying to establish here. It is surprising that the CBI should have taken the position that it has. I often want to support what the CBI says, but I do not in this respect. Responsible employers will see this rather differently. The second issue is whether an element of the qualification should be concerned with knowledge and competence. I say to my noble friend Lady Wall that I have no problem if it is a single certificate; all that I am asking is that there should be a technical as well as a skills component, because otherwise we will not have the quality that I referred to earlier. That must be specified in the Bill. It would be better if the young apprentice went away saying, "I’ve got this technical certificate which I can take to another employer and I’ve got this certificate which is all about my skills". I think that every employer in the country would say that far too many young people and adults do not have decent basic skills—the noble Lord, Lord Moser, spoke about this at Second Reading. Their skills are sometimes so low that they can barely function in any job that makes any demands on them. It is of fundamental importance that every young person should continue. As a university vice-chancellor, I can say that many young people who even get as far as university do not have basic skills at the level that they should have. I therefore believe that we owe it to young people who are going through the apprenticeship system to help them in this way. I hope that my noble friend the Minister will agree with the proposal and support it and that he will accept that we need to specify this in the Bill. Again, I was a little surprised by what the noble Lord, Lord De Mauley, said about young people with learning difficulties, arguing that this would put them off. Young people with learning difficulties in particular need to be helped with these basic skills so that they can operate effectively not just at work but in their lives. They need to be given even more help in this respect, not less, and I do not think that in any way they will be put off. On Second Reading, I mentioned the provision of a mentor. Many young people need a lot of help and support. They are not yet mature adults and many may not get a huge amount of help and support at home. They need someone who will provide them with encouragement, who will hold their hand when something is going wrong for them, who will give them a bit more confidence, who will praise them when praise is due, but who will also give them constructive criticism when needed. I do not believe that a mass system of apprenticeship will work unless we can put something of this sort in place. It should be a requirement that every employer does that. I do not believe that it would be difficult for employers to provide a mentor; they would want to have someone who takes responsibility for the young person on a day-to-day, week-by-week basis. I repeat that the new clause would put into the Bill a series of small changes that would bring about an apprenticeship system of which we could all be proud and that was of a standard and quality that is absolutely necessary and fundamental.