Education Bill

My Lords, I shall speak also to Amendments 144AB and 144AC, and give an indication of my view on Amendment 144B in the name of my noble friend Lord Layard. I felt that the importance of Amendment 144AA was underlined by today’s unemployment figures. UK unemployment rose by 80,000 to 2.51 million jobless, a rate of 7.9 per cent. The bit that caught my attention more than anything else, because it is germane to today’s debate, was that youth unemployment rose sharply by another 78,000 to 973,000 unemployed young people. It was interesting also that public sector employment fell by 110,000, partially offset by a 41,000 increase in the private sector. I mention that because the public sector is an area where we look to a significant number of apprenticeships, so the impact of that is likely to feed through. I shall mention our record on apprenticeships when we were the Government. I have said this before and make no apologies for repeating it: if apprenticeships had been a national health patient, they definitely would have been in intensive care. We had only about 65,000 of them and an appalling completion rate of something like 27 per cent. By the time we left office in 2010, there were nearly 280,000 apprenticeships, with a completion rate of 72 per cent. I am proud of that; it was a good record. Was the task completed? Clearly, it was not. But we had set a target in the Apprenticeships, Skills, Children and Learning Act. We gave a commitment that by 2013 every person who wanted an apprenticeship would be able to have one, assuming that they had the requisite qualifications. We felt that that was a very important, albeit ambitious, commitment. I want to pay tribute to the Government's commitment. The good news is that funding is being made available to support 437,000 apprenticeships in 2011-12, including 230,000 for 16 to 18 year-olds. I welcome that; it shows commitment. Further still, the Government are talking about 497,000 apprenticeships for 2012 and the funding to go with them, so I acknowledge that they are treating this issue as one of importance. The real question is: are they doing enough? The purpose of my amendment is to stretch that commitment. I make no apologies for that in the current climate. Looking at what is being achieved at the moment, the figures for August 2010 to 2011 make interesting reading. The worrying area of the figures, for me, is that in the 16 to 18 year-old group we see an actual decline in the number of starts. For 16 year-olds in 2009-10, there were 29,000 starts but so far in 2010-11, in quarters one to three, there are only 24,690. That is reflected in the figures for 17 year-olds, with 40,780 starts in 2009-10 and 34,500 in 2010-11. Similarly, with 18 year-olds, we see a decline from just over 46,000 starts to 43,000. I must admit that the 19 to 24 age group shows a healthy increase from 113,000 starts to 102,000, which I acknowledge is good progress. The really startling increase has been in adult apprenticeships. A significant number in that was accounted for by switching people who were previously on Train to Gain to adult apprenticeships. Again, I do not deplore that. There is a need for people to reskill, but surely the major area of concern for us should be in the 16 to 18 age group. We know how important that is. I do not want to draw any glib analysis from the riots that have taken place recently, because somebody else will be looking at that, but youth unemployment certainly does not help the situation. For every young person who you can offer an apprenticeship to, we know that that is a beacon of hope for them, as I have described it. We know that many young people have turned their lives around by starting apprenticeships, which is why we attach so much importance to that particular group of young people. While the overall figures may look good, when they are disaggregated there are definite causes for concern. Another bit that worried me was when I sought to look at what the Government’s targets were. It was quite interesting because John Hayes, the Minister for Further Education, Skills and Lifelong Learning, has explained: "““The apprenticeships programme is a demand-led programme for young people and adults. Government funds apprenticeship training but relies on employers and providers to work together to offer sufficient opportunities. Therefore, Government do not plan apprenticeship places or set targets””.—[Official Report, Commons, 4/3/11; col. 708W.]" I find that a rather curious statement. Therefore, I would welcome the Minister confirming whether it is true. If it is true, how do the Government arrive at the funding figures because presumably they relate to something? Presumably, somebody has decided that that is the funding we need for a certain number of places. As I say, I find the statement to which I have referred rather strange. Perhaps it has been taken out of context, but I hope not as I obtained the statement from what I hope is an unbiased source; namely, the House of Lords research department. I just asked for a statement of government policy. I refer to another statistic that has room for improvement if we are serious about our commitment to apprenticeships. The Employer Perspectives Survey 2010, which was published in January 2011, indicated the number of employers who offered apprenticeships. I do not know why but I had a totally different figure in my head in that regard from the one in the survey. Clearly, I had picked up an anecdotal figure from somewhere. I thought that roughly a third of employers offered apprenticeships. However, the survey figures show us how much work we have to do in this regard. The survey states: "““5% of employers currently have staff undertaking apprenticeships, 4% offer apprenticeships but currently have no staff undertaking them, and a further 8% plan to offer apprenticeships in future””." So we have a long way to go in this regard. This situation presents us with a challenge and an opportunity to sell the benefits of apprenticeship programmes to employers. The number of apprenticeship starts this year is good at 326,000. However, over the first three-quarters of this year the number of apprenticeships lasting longer than one year rose by less than 2 per cent while those lasting less than a year increased by more than 30 per cent compared with the figures for 2009-10. So although the Government can say that they have created a record number of apprenticeship places—I do not dispute that—it largely comprises courses lasting less than 12 months. I do not criticise those apprenticeships provided they are of good quality. The apprenticeship frameworks cover a range of different occupations from highly skilled engineering to areas such as retail and healthcare. We need the highly skilled traditional apprenticeships. They are vital for future growth, and we know that employers are crying out for them. That is another area where it is not enough just to look at overall numbers. My amendment seeks to give the Government a target, although I know that the Government do not like targets. It was set originally at 2013. I have freely acknowledged in other apprenticeship debates that that was an ambitious target. I could not guarantee that the Labour Government could have achieved it were we still in power. However, nobody told us that we could not put it in legislation and that it was wrong to do that. In looking at giving something that was a reasonable target to aim for, I thought that if we set it at 2015 that that would be a reasonable objective. The question is whether we should do it. John Hayes says that apprenticeships are demand led and that it is the Government’s job to respond to the demand. I argue that it is not just the Government’s job to respond to demand. We have the highest youth unemployment that we have experienced in a long time. The situation fascinates me because we have changed the legislation relating to people aged 65 and over, and we now have more young people unemployed than we have in, I think, the 50-plus age group. So younger people—not that they would use the phrase ““intergenerational compact””, but we tend to think of that—ought to give us cause for concern. We are saying to people in that older age range that we want them to work longer. I can remember civil servants assuring me that I did not have to worry about changing the legislation relating to that because there would be enough job growth not to impact on youth employment. Whether or not it has impacted on youth employment, if you make that comparison, the figures at the moment speak for themselves. I believe that it is absolutely right that we should be sending a signal to young—