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Apprenticeships (EAC Report)

My Lords, I congratulate the noble Baroness, Lady Garden of Frognal, on the excellent contribution that she has made to this debate in her maiden speech to your Lordships’ House. What she said tonight was based on a distinguished career in teaching and, in particular, on her long-standing role in the administration of City & Guilds qualifications, whose standards have done so much to improve the skills of so many young people over the years. Clearly, from what we heard in this debate, we can look forward to the noble Baroness sharing with this House her wide experience of educational and business affairs and, I am sure, of many other matters of public interest. In doing so, she will continue the outstanding service given to this House and to his country by her much admired husband, Tim, who made such a great contribution in all too short a time. I also pay tribute to the chairman of our Select Committee on Economic Affairs, the noble Lord, Lord Wakeham, for his able and affable handling of this complex subject in the committee and his leadership of the debate today, as well as to my noble friend Lord Layard for the expertise that he brought to our deliberations and the powerful points that he made tonight. Our report is yet another milestone on a very long route. As the noble Lord, Lord Dearing told us during the recent debate on the Address, the shortage of skills in British industry was first investigated by a Select Committee back in 1868. Since then, many other parliamentary committees have continued the search for solutions to this seemingly very British problem. One explanation was offered by Professor Martin Wiener in his fascinating study, English Culture and the Decline of the Industrial Spirit: 1850–1980. England may have been the cradle of the new industrial age but, alas, Professor Wiener argued, its bucolic myths and innate conservatism esteemed the gentleman above the entrepreneur, the landowner above the factory owner, and thus contributed to our economic decline. At the start of the 1980s, that academic critique was shared with a mass audience through Granada television programmes broadcast in peak time. As a Granada producer at the time, I remember well the angry chorus of agreement tinged with real sadness at the eclipse of traditional industries that had once made Britain the workshop of the world. Along with millions of others, I shared that sense of loss, having served a five-year apprenticeship as a marine fitter in a Clydeside shipyard now long gone. It is worth recalling what it was about those lost crafts that meant so much to many skilled working people. We may have left school at 15, but apprenticeship was a rite of passage to adulthood and the status of a time-served tradesman. What we missed in schooling was compensated for by the disciplines engrained by skilled manual work. As an engineer, for instance, you would grind away to one-thousandth of an inch until the job was just right, knowing that if you got things wrong it would not work and, worse, it might break and do someone damage. With that came a sense of responsibility and, in heavy industry, teamwork—and, perhaps in time, leadership. Back then a good apprenticeship was the foundation of many successful careers to the highest levels of industry. Of course, the education system has changed radically since then and mostly for the better. For instance, when I left school in the 1950s, only one pupil in 20 went on to university, mostly boys. Today by contrast the status of women is transformed and nearly half of all young people go on to higher education. That is as it should be in a very different world, where our universities have become the factories of the emerging knowledge economy. Elitists still claim that in higher education more means worse, but I would argue that their overly academic view fails to appreciate the range of expertise required in a changing economy or indeed to value properly the natural aptitudes, emotional intelligence and social skills of many people now excluded from worthwhile employment. As a former visiting professor of media studies at Stirling University, I am familiar with the mockery of so-called Mickey Mouse degrees, but our record for graduate employment was very good—and there was nothing Mickey Mouse about the profits that my company used to make, producing ““The Disney Club”” in Scotland. In recent decades, the growth in service industries and financial services has more than compensated for the loss of traditional manufacturing jobs, yet too many have been left behind as their options narrowed with the decline in unskilled jobs, with hundreds of thousands of young people not in education, employment or training—the so-called NEETs—or living on disability allowances. The social benefits of putting significant numbers of these youngsters into apprenticeships could be considerable. It is worth noting that almost half of all jobs now require computer skills and that the proportion of jobs needing less than one month’s training has fallen to just 19 per cent. We can see ever tougher challenges ahead in the rapidly globalising economy. All this gives renewed urgency to the historic parliamentary search for a solution to Britain’s skills shortages, in particular to proposals for a revivified system of apprenticeship, recruitment and training as outlined in our Select Committee report. The noble Lord, Lord Wakeham, in his characteristically fair-minded introduction, summed up our continuing concerns very well, and I wish only to underline some issues and ask some questions. Can we trust government departments to deliver on recent promises? The former Department for Education and Skills and its predecessors had a pretty poor record of innovating and nurturing vocational education and apprenticeship schemes in particular. Recruited as they are largely on academic prowess, one fears that there might have been a cultural aversion among senior civil servants to giving vocational training its proper priority. Of course, the same may also be true of Ministers, very few of whom have now climbed up from the shop floor. Whatever the reasons, our concern, as the most recent Select Committee to address the issue, is that having so many unskilled young people with restricted employment opportunities is one reason why productivity in Britain still cannot match that of other advanced economies. We suggest, as we heard from my noble friend and Professor Lord Layard, that the main route to skills below graduate level should be through apprenticeships combining work and learning. I therefore welcome the recently published Education and Skills Bill which, at long last, raises the educational leaving age to 18 and establishes new rights for young people to take up opportunities for education and training. This Bill also places a duty on young people to participate in these options, including apprenticeships. As I understand it, a tripartite structure will be put in place. First, A-levels remain as the principal academic route to higher education. Secondly, new diplomas are being introduced, and thirdly, there will be work-based apprenticeships. The new diplomas are being designed to bridge the gap between academic and vocational studies. Diplomas in languages, humanities and science will, it seems, be largely academic. However, most are vocational—construction industry careers, for instance—yet they will be based mostly on classroom learning. I hope that we can be reassured by the Government that the introduction of diplomas will not leave apprenticeships branded by vested academic interests as the inferior low-status option. What prompts that particular concern is evidence that we took suggesting that schools, with their laudable academic aspirations, sometimes do not appreciate the importance of apprenticeships to many young people and to our economy, and that teachers, consequently, fail to promote apprenticeships as an attractive career option. I look for assurance that the new diplomas, with their classroom bias, will not be allowed to become a vehicle which take away either esteem or resources from apprenticeships. That would be particularly damaging since the world-class skills that the noble Lord, Lord Leitch, seeks to encourage in his report, will surely require many more young people to progress through the apprenticeship route into higher education, as they aspire to greater professional expertise. Our committee’s conclusion that apprenticeships should be the main route to skills below graduate level implies that there should indeed be a shift in the balance of resources away from other post-16 provision in favour of apprenticeships. Since the Government's response to our report did not address this matter, perhaps the Minister can today. Our committee also expressed concern about the lack of encouragement given to apprenticeships through careers advice in schools. The new Education and Skills Bill intends to transfer careers responsibilities to local authorities. That will be most welcome if we can anticipate that this switch will lead to more impartial information, advice and guidance being given to young people in the future, particularly about apprenticeship opportunities. The Bill also strengthens the duty of local authorities to collaborate with partners in the provision of education and training for 14 to 19 year-olds. The most important local partners, in our view, will be local employers. They should be at the centre of all apprenticeship provision. Additionally, I support the noble Lord, Lord Wakeham, in saying that we believe apprenticeship funding should be routed through employers, who could then subcontract off-the-job training and other services which they cannot themselves provide—subject, of course, to appropriate regulation and supervision. It was encouraging to read last week that the Institute of the Motor Industry wanted to double the number of its apprentices over the next five years. Retail motor businesses at present have more than 11,000 vacancies— almost half for skilled technicians—and reckon that they will have to train 120,000 more skilled workers over the next decade. Gathered more widely throughout business, that kind of information would help us estimate more accurately the employer demand for apprentices. The positive counterpart to that problem of skills shortages is on the supply side—the reported demand from young people for high-quality apprenticeship places, with no fewer than 200 applicants for every apprenticeship place offered by BT. This shows the potential for well planned progress based on employer demand. Already, 130,000 employers offer apprenticeships in 180 different lines of business. I hope that the CBI and other industry bodies will encourage companies to create even more training opportunities, particularly for young people from ethnic minorities who are not well served at present. A wider range of opportunities for young women would also be welcome. At departmental level, government should insist on more comprehensive monitoring and reporting to strengthen the statistical base required for better delivery across this field. That said, I applaud the relative success of the Government’s policy on apprenticeship in the past decade. Since 1997 the number of young people in apprenticeships has trebled to about 250,000 in England. Completion rates, which were such a problem, are also improving. We should note the energetic promotion of the skills agenda by the Secretary of State, John Denham, at the new Department for Innovation, Universities and Skills. Particularly welcome was his announcement in November that funding would be made available for the 400,000 apprenticeship places in England targeted by my noble friend Lord Leitch in his review of skills. A departmental review of the existing apprenticeship programme is under way on the scope for reform and the need for any legislative change. Echoing the noble Lord, Lord Wakeham, I am sure that your Lordships would be interested in any ““preview of the review”” that could be offered to us today. In conclusion, I hope that the report of the Select Committee on Economic Affairs will be judged to have made a useful contribution to the continuing debate on this issue of national importance and, indeed, to the forthcoming apprenticeship Bill.