I hear what the hon. Gentleman is saying. It is true, of course—but this is outwith the discussion that we are able to have this evening—that careers advice and education in this Bill does not start at 16 or at the remit of the DFE. It starts much earlier. If the hon. Gentleman is saying that that is an argument for doing nothing within the limited scope of the Bill, I do not agree. We need to do something. I would like to see the overarching structures that he mentioned but, unfortunately, at the moment I would be quite happy to see a limited overarching structure for the area that we are discussing. The challenge for the Minister is to talk about the £90 million that the Government have allocated to the Careers & Enterprise Company over the course of this Parliament, how it will be spent, how it is being distributed and whether it is adequate.
There are some damning statistics in the report produced by the Institute for Apprenticeships under the aegis of Semta. As the Minister knows, the proportion of respondents saying that their careers advice and guidance was poor or very poor has remained high across all sectors in all surveys from 2014 to 2016. The report says:
“Worryingly, this year 94 survey respondents, 6% of the total, said they had not received any careers IAG at all.”
When we discussed the matter in Committee, those were the sorts of statistics that were available to us. I said—perfectly fairly, I thought—that, although the Careers & Enterprise Company was beginning to make progress, I did not believe that it was yet able to do the
necessary coverage because it is heavily reliant on volunteers. Early in December, we learnt that the company does not cater to every college in the country, including the whole of London. There are not just a few cold spots, but whole cold areas. There is a postcode lottery for FE coverage, with 15 local enterprise partnerships not covered and London completely absent.
The chief executive of the CEC, Claudia Harris, confirmed that the company did not work with any of the capital’s 44 FE and sixth-form colleges. During an interview with FE Week, she blamed the lack of coverage on “ramp-up”—I think that is what lesser mortals would call the rolling out of pilots, but I await a definition from the Minister. Now, I am not laying the blame at the door of the Careers & Enterprise Company; the Government are expecting it to do too much with too little, and they should probably also look again at having a company that is so heavily reliant on volunteers to carry out these tasks.
6.30 pm
As I said, Claudia Harris said the offer would be expanded to all schools and colleges over the coming year. That is fine, but what are the budget indications? Is the Minister already working on the Chancellor on a substantial hike in funding for this area in the Budget? He will certainly need one if he is going to address the issues we are talking about in the new clause.
On top of that, a report in the middle of December from the Edge Foundation showed that the poor quality of careers advice was limiting young people’s choices. Research carried out by the Institute for Employment Research at the University of Warwick, and commissioned by the Edge Foundation and City and Guilds, found that only 1% of students viewed careers advice as the most important influence on their decision to stay on in further education and that over half said they wanted more information from employers.
As I said, the Minister’s new year article for FE Week put priority on this issue, so I am taking him at his word. If his aims are indeed those he has set out, this new clause sets out fairly comprehensively how the process would operate—if there are technical or practical deficiencies with it or its draftsmanship, we would welcome any suggestions—and it is exactly what he needs to make his rhetoric a reality. There is an old saying that if wishes were horses, beggars would ride, so perhaps the Minister should get on his white charger and accept what we say; otherwise, he will remain a beggar come the Budget and will be looking for scraps from the Chancellor’s table.
While we are on the subject of careers, the Minister mused on another issue last year at, I think, the Tory party conference. He talked—again, we absolutely applaud this, and I believe that the previous Education Secretary made some announcements about it—about plans to allow schools to give equal weight to vocational and academic routes when providing careers advice. However, we are told—or, at least, The Times Educational Supplement was told—that that has now been put on ice as well. Again, I would welcome a response from the Minister on those issues.
I want now to speak briefly about amendment 4, which would make sure that the institute must have regard to the need to promote equality of opportunity
in widening access and participation. I think that the Minister and I agree that the Bill presents a real opportunity to reform long-neglected vocational pathways and to support post-16 institutions, but too few students from disadvantaged backgrounds are transitioning from level 2 to higher levels of study, so thousands of young people are not realising their potential. High-quality technical education and work-based training must act as a vehicle for social mobility. Giving the institute the obligation in the amendment would help to focus it on changing the status quo.
Currently, the Government do not publish data—I stand to be corrected—on the social background of apprentices, so it is difficult to assess just how many people from disadvantaged backgrounds start and complete apprenticeships. However, recent research published by the Social Mobility Commission found that, nationally, young people eligible for free school meals are half as likely to start and complete an apprenticeship as their better-off peers. Just under 50% of students in that category attain a grade A to C GCSE or level 2 equivalent in English or maths by 19, as opposed to 74% of their better-off peers. Of course they therefore lack the grades to enrol on level 3 pathways. Figures also show that only 36% of such students achieve a level 3 qualification, compared with 61% of their better-off peers. That shows the importance of having the transition year proposed in the post-16 skills plan. If that does not happen, and does not happen well, we will see a wider gap in access to the new technical routes, which will prevent them from being an effective vehicle for social mobility. An amendment to widen participation is therefore important.
Higher education has seen an increasing focus on widening participation, and HE institutions will invest £833 million in 2017-18 in widening participation. Further education, including apprenticeships, deserves the same attention and scrutiny. The institute must be required to measure and report annually on the gap between disadvantaged young people and their peers accessing and progressing from technical pathways.
Madam Deputy Speaker—welcome to you and a happy new year to you as well—if I was not so aware of the woeful inadequacy of the staffing proposals for the institute, I might suggest that the Government take a leaf out of HE’s book and have an equivalent of the Office for Fair Access for FE students, but we are not asking for that tonight. What we are asking for is an appreciation of the fact that the institute needs the focus I have suggested.
I want to couple that with another issue. We have talked a lot in this Chamber over the past year about the timescale for delivering the 3 million target. Amendment 5 says the institute
“must co-operate with the Apprenticeship Delivery Board on progression into, and delivery of, apprenticeships.”
Under its terms of reference, the delivery board was originally to be chaired by the chair of the Apprenticeship Ambassador Network and the Prime Minister’s adviser on apprenticeships and to provide support across all areas to ensure that the Government’s ambition of achieving 3 million programme starts by 2020 was met. The terms of reference talked about the ADB’s purpose being to
“implement an employer engagement strategy…increase the number of apprenticeships”
and
“secure new employer engagement”.
It sounded absolutely great, but when we actually delve a little further into the delivery of the board, it is not quite as it seems.
First, the terms of reference talk about it being co-chaired by the Prime Minister’s adviser on apprenticeships, but the Government’s tsar—the hon. Member for Stratford-on-Avon (Nadhim Zahawi)—was stood down last autumn, and that left only David Meller, the private sector co-chair of the board, as its sole chair. People are bound to ask, where is the Government’s adviser on apprenticeships now?
How about the rest of the board? When the issue was raised in Committee, the Minister sang the praises of the Apprenticeship Delivery Board, but its role so far has been somewhat underwhelming. It may be a fine body, but its members were drawn from a relatively narrow section of business, and, incidentally, they had only one woman among their number. There was no role for other bodies, such as FE providers, universities, trade unions or local authorities. To be fair, there has been some progress on the number of women on the ADB, and it now has three, but it is important that the lessons are taken on board with the institute.
When the board was announced, it was advertised as being a key part of the process: it was not simply there to be a bully pulpit but was to have a very direct and active role. Naturally, I questioned the Minister on that in Committee, where he responded:
“I reassure the hon. Gentleman that the Apprenticeship Delivery Board is in full flow. I meet it and its chairman regularly. It goes up and down the country and works with businesses to encourage them to employ apprentices. Much of our success has been because of that board’s incredible work.”––[Official Report, Technical and Further Education Bill Public Bill Committee, 24 November 2016; c. 83.]
Yet having examined the minutes of the board, I do not get quite the same sense of achievement, because what they show, over the summer period, is a couple of employees from large employers telling each other about random conversations or meetings they have, or plan to have, with the occasional presentation from the Skills Funding Agency about its marketing plans. Very little co-ordinated action seems to have been taken over the summer months, and it is quite clear to me that the delivery board is not currently fulfilling that role. That is why we have tabled this amendment.
The Institute for Apprenticeships and Technical Education does not have the resources or capacity to be taking on these responsibilities; its focus is supposed to be on developing standards. We know from the shadow chief executive that staffing levels and finance will be limited, with 60 staff, possibly rising to 100 when the technical education elements kick in, and there is a very short space of time between now and its April start. I should mention the princely budget of £8 million a year on which the institute is supposed to operate initially. There has to be more focused and targeted marketing. The delivery board is not just a trade fair, as the minutes suggest; it is meant to help to deliver and increase the number of apprenticeships, and it must co-operate with the institute to succeed. That is vitally important now that the Government have scrapped any involvement they had and, presumably, forgotten about apprenticeship tsars.
We have also tabled an amendment to try to get some clarity and to put some focus on to the Government with regard to delivering money that will be additional to, or substitute for, existing Government funding. We were told that the Government were already spending £1.5 billion on apprenticeships in 2016, and we are now told that the levy is expected to raise £2.9 billion by 2020, of which, at the latest count, £2.4 billion will be spent in England. So where does the additional money go? Last year, I submitted a written question on this to the then Skills Minister and got a sort-of response saying:
“By 2019-20 we expect…to spend £2.5 billion on apprenticeships in England.”
My maths told me at that time that if £2.5 billion was raised from the sector and the Government were currently putting in £1.5 billion, that means an extra £1 billion, as mentioned in the Minister’s reply. I therefore come back to the point that we raised early last year: what will happen to the remaining £1.5 billion raised? Will there be 40% for apprenticeships with 60% going straight back to the Treasury? The challenge remains for the Government to convince employers and stakeholders that this remains a genuinely long-term funding commitment for apprenticeships and not just something that becomes regarded as a Treasury payroll tax.