My Lords, I share the wish of the noble Lord, Lord Young, to encourage vocational education. It is exceptionally important as a means of improving youth employment. However, I am slightly concerned about the route for apprenticeships, He knows far more about this than I do, but when I take part in the Lord Speaker’s outreach programmes and we talk about apprenticeships to sixth formers, too often they feel—and I think they are probably right—that the apprenticeship is a time-based qualification,
not a performance-based qualification. That is to say that you have to spend a certain amount of time doing a job before you can get a qualification.
That puts off sixth-formers, who think that even if they are good they cannot move through the apprenticeship scheme at the speed at which they acquire the skills. That is something I have often referred to. I would be nervous about trying to put too much weight on apprenticeships. I am keen on youth employment, but apprenticeships are potentially too narrow, particularly given the comments made to me by sixth-formers, which may or may not be entirely accurate.