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Education and Skills Bill

We have some sympathy with these amendments, particularly Amendments Nos. 30, 32, 34 and 113. We share the desire of the noble Lord, Lord Lucas, for more clarification on what constitutes full-time and part-time—for example, why the figure is 20 hours—and that sort of thing. The CBI and the Institute of Directors made it quite clear, in the briefing that we received from them, that in-house training does not necessarily have to lead to accredited qualifications but often involves much learning of skills. They are somewhat wary of all learning having to be accredited. We are getting into a culture of accreditation. As the Minister may know, there is quite a lot of criticism of Train to Gain, where, in many cases, the problem is that employers are doing no more then they did before but are bringing in the assessors so that they can accredit their people with an NVQ level 1 or 2 and claim money from Train to Gain. In Alison Wolf’s essay on this issue she emphasises the fact that these days many 16 and 17 year-olds—the top 10 per cent of the 25 per cent who are not participating in education post-16—may not receive formal training but are learning many useful skills. Her great fear is that the duties imposed on employers under the Bill will cause them to shy away from employing young people of 16 and 17, so that these young people will no longer acquire the ““learning by doing”” skills that they had gained from such jobs. Having talked with the noble Lord, Lord Layard, who is not in his place at the moment, I think that the really important route to try to develop is apprenticeship—we are probably all agreed on that. Yet if apprenticeships are not available, the danger is that those young people who do not go into jobs will be on what are termed programme apprenticeships in colleges. Those are fine: you train off the job and, if you are lucky, you get a little work experience. However, the employers do not find programme apprenticeships at all satisfactory, and we know that very well from all the information received from them. Alison Wolf is really worried that the young people who had been getting quite useful ““learning by doing”” training will now get a really unsatisfactory second best.