I think this is the first time that a lapel microphone has been used in this way—I appreciate that. I wish the House, and the many apprentices who worked over Christmas and the new year, a very happy new year. I thank you, Madam Deputy Speaker, for chairing the debate. I am grateful to the hon. Member for Blackpool South (Gordon Marsden) for his amendments—as ever, very thoughtful.
I will start by discussing new clause 1, but I just want to make the point that the hon. Gentleman talked about the completion of apprenticeships. Some 70% of apprentices complete and 90% get either employment or further training. We have nearly 900,000 apprentices, an all-time high and a record in our nation’s history, so we are making good progress. He talked about NEETs. He will know that between 2014 and 2015 the proportion of 16 to 18-year-olds in education or work-based learning increased to 90%, which is the highest on record. The percentage of NEETs fell to 6.5%, the lowest rate since records began. He talked about the Institute for Apprenticeships and Technical Education appointments and went on, yet again, about Christmas. I have to say that IFATE is not just for Christmas, it is for life and we want to get it right. We want to ensure that the appointments we make are the right ones and are not made in haste. He sometimes says that we are doing things too quickly and at other times he says that we are doing things too slowly.
On new clause 1, as I explained in Committee, the institute will be required to report on its activities annually under schedule 4 of the Enterprise Act 2016, and the report must be placed before Parliament. That provision will also allow the Secretary of State to ask the institute to report on anything else she thinks
appropriate, such as the information requested in the amendment. We think it would be an unnecessary and significant duplication of effort, as the information is already collected and published by the Secretary of State on the performance of the FE sector, which includes apprentices—I gave the hon. Gentleman some of the figures only a moment ago.
Much of that information goes far beyond the role of the institute. The institute’s core role from April 2017 is to oversee and quality assure the development of standards and assessment plans for use in delivering apprenticeships. Under the reforms in the Bill, college-based technical education cannot be held wholly responsible for, for example, job outcomes and wage rates of apprentices once they complete their apprenticeships. It is essential that the institute is aware of the impact it is making. We would expect it to make good use of the data on the outcomes made available to it through these public data sources and surveys, and to explain in its annual report how it has deployed them.