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Further and Higher Education (Employer Engagement)

The Minister cannot be allowed to get away with that. He knows that the skills for life programme, which is designed to bring adult learners back into the process and to re-engage them, is unfortunately heavily skewed towards younger people. That may be due to paucity of provision in state education. I do not know. But certainly it is not providing the opportunity to the degree that is necessary to bring people back into the process of learning and training, so that they can be reskilled for the needs of the workplace. Demographic change means that fewer young people are coming through, so that will become more and more of an embarrassment to the Minister. What specific measures will be put in place to encourage people, perhaps 30, 40 or 50-year-olds, to reskill and to re-engage? They are hard-to-get groups and he is not getting them at the moment. I rushed here from a meeting with the chief executive of the Learning and Skills Council and that is what he told me.