Education Bill

I rise to speak to Amendment 144B. When the four of us tabled the amendment, we thought that it was very important, but since then the riots have shown that it is even more important than we thought. If you look at the situation in our country, it is clear that academic young people are offered a clear route to a skill and a useful role in society. They can see where they are going. That is not the case for less academic young people. There is no clear route that they can see they are entitled to go down. The result is low levels of skills and a degree of alienation. That is why in 2007 the Economic Affairs Committee, under the wonderful chairmanship of the noble Lord, Lord Wakeham, supported the idea of an entitlement to an apprenticeship. Following that, the 2008 Act enacted that there should be an entitlement to an apprenticeship for 16 to 19 year-olds. The body charged with finding places was the National Apprenticeship Service, which was set up at the same time. However, no employer can be forced to take on an apprentice, and for that reason the present Government have judged that the entitlement is putting them into an unduly exposed position from a legal point of view. Therefore, the Bill repeals the entitlement. That is a very serious thing to do. At the same time, the Government are doing a very welcome thing, which is introducing an automatic funding mechanism whereby any employer who wishes to take on a 16 to 19 year-old as an apprentice, and can find one, will get automatic funding. However, that is quite different from an explicit commitment to find enough places for all those 16 to 19 year-olds who want them. It is a laissez-faire mechanism that has a strength but also a serious weakness. Nothing is being said about the shape of the educational system that we are trying to create for our 16 to 19 year-old population. The purpose of this amendment is to construct that bit of the building block of our educational system for 16 to 19 year-olds by saying that for those who do not want to go down the full-time academic route, the apprenticeship route is open. It is making a statement and putting an obligation on the National Apprenticeship Service to bring it about. If you look at this from a young person’s point of view, we are raising the education participation age. It is quite difficult to see how we are going to be able to do that in a way that is acceptable to young people unless these apprenticeship places are available to them. We need legislation that states the main aims of our education system. For that 16 to 19 year-old group, we have a lacuna. We cannot fill it by ministerial statements and assurances, as Ministers come and go. We expect the basic structure of our educational system to be reflected in the laws of the country. When we drafted this amendment, we leant over backwards to protect the Government against the threat of legal redress. The draft says that the National Apprenticeship Service shall, "““subject to guidance from the Secretary of State, make all reasonable efforts to ensure that an apprenticeship is offered to those””," 16 to 19 year-olds who want one. So ““all reasonable efforts”” are to be made and those can be defined in guidance. This combines a clear statement of what we want with protection against judicial review. Some of us have already had useful discussions with Ministers about this. Of course, we would be happy to consider alternative wording, provided it did not weaken the existing wording. I think that that is an extremely important point, because it is what we owe our young people.