Apprenticeships, Skills, Children and Learning Bill

I hope we will not make the mistakes we made with GCSEs, in producing a curriculum at least half of which has no relevance to at least 90 per cent of the population. I have spent my life with figures, one way or another, and when I took my sons through GCSEs, I recognised that I had never used, and could not conceive of using, about half of the curriculum. I suppose they might be used in certain specialist circumstances. If we are going to produce a functional skills curriculum, then let us use the flexibility we have in the system to make sure that what we are asking of an apprentice is a set of mathematics and English that has a relevance to the apprenticeship that they are doing and the career they might follow. First, that produces the motivation to get it right, and secondly, it produces a real qualification at the end of it. I do not really care if my plumber can parle Shakespeare—I would be delighted if he does, it will add to the quality of his life, but it should not be a requirement of an apprenticeship, even at the advanced level. I support my noble friend in what he says about flexibility, but I am worried about who the guardian of this flexibility is supposed to be, if we allow it into the system. If it is entirely the employers who are running this system, and who are saying how many guided learning hours should get into an individual qualification, then the pressures on the whole are going to be all in the direction of reducing the amount of guided leaning hours, until we get to the situation we have now in universities. I would be hard put to identify more than about 10 that my daughter received in an entire three years education—she was either being lectured at or reading by herself. Actual contact with academics, even at quite decent universities, has been reduced to extremely low levels. You can get lectures off a computer and you can read from a computer. The equivalent is staying at your workstation and absorbing some computer-generated learning, all of which is becoming much better designed and is working much better. That surely must be the pressure that employers will be under as apprenticeships evolve. If we want something other than that, what mechanism are we putting in place to make sure that there is pressure in that direction? Otherwise we get into the same problems we had with examination quality, where the pressure is all in one direction—to make them gradually easier. That is why we have Ofqual in the Bill. I would like at this stage to avoid that problem by making sure that we design in pressures in the right direction. However, I do not see what the pressures are to keep the independence and quality of learning up, rather than letting it all be absorbed in direct learning at the workplace, which is, as I say, getting better and easier. I like the idea in subsection (2) in Amendment 59 of the two separate qualifications. This has worked extremely well for music examinations. If you get level 5 in flute, there are two level 5s—level 5 practical and level 5 theory, and you can go through the whole system without touching theory. One of the finalists in the BBC’s conducting competition was a man who had made his career in music without being able to read it. It was a challenge to him to come up against something where he was required to learn to read music. I think he did it extremely well. There are a lot of careers for which the practical knowledge is an amplification, and is necessary to some elements of it, but is not tied in to the ability to perform it to a very high level. So I think that the separation of the two—again, if done flexibly; if it is right for that particular qualification—seems to have attractions and to let through particularly people with learning difficulties of all sorts of varieties who find, for one reason or another, the theoretical side hard. I do not know whether we still do it, but there was a moment when we suddenly insisted that you could not be a teacher of dance in a school unless you had GCSE mathematics. I have always thought that that was totally ridiculous. You just do not need maths to teach dance. It is an enhancement to your life, but it should not be a qualification. We should not, particularly when dealing with practical qualifications, build in obstacles that are irrelevant to people's eventual performance in the workplace. Yes, the economic side is an enhancement, it may enable people to reach higher. It should always be there as part of the offering and encouraged, but it should not be put in people's way in terms of getting a qualification. I entirely agree with the noble Baroness, Lady Blackstone, on subsection (5) of the new clause. I think that it is a great help to a young person to have an individual mentor. You may end up with a nightmare of a mentor but most people adapt to this extremely well, particularly with a little training. Mentoring schemes run very well in many good schools where the older pupils mentor the younger ones. Most people are capable of it. As I say, with a little support and training in how to be a good mentor, it is something that is enormously supportive. I think that it should be built into the requirements.