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Apprenticeships, Skills, Children and Learning Bill

I sympathise with my noble friend Lord Elton. Looking back 40 years, I think that I was a victim of the sort of prejudices that he described and that we have been discussing. My school was not at all supportive when I was offered an apprenticeship by the National Coal Board. Quite why the National Coal Board did it, I cannot understand; perhaps it believed that the right place for all Etonians was 800 feet underground. But it was a considerable missed opportunity; I might have turned out a very different person if I had been properly advised. I hope that we will take the opinions expressed by your Lordships seriously. It is clear that it should not be at someone’s whim whether apprenticeships are mentioned in discussions. We are aiming high with apprenticeships; we want people of excellent ability to take them. Practical ability is not confined to those people who find academic studies difficult; there are some very great practical people who get on well in academic studies. Many schools today, particularly given the way in which exams have gone, are becoming less and less practical and pupils are not exposed to that aspect as they ought to be in school, although they would be much happier and probably much more effective people later in life if they were offered the opportunity to take a practical route rather than a purely academic one. We should not confine this to the prejudices of teachers who are largely brought up in the academic route. You see that all through the education system—teachers always want to be more academic rather than more practical. It is often the brighter children who attract their attention rather than those who are ordinary and whose talents perhaps lie elsewhere. We must insist on that breadth. I hope that the Government will, in addition to encouraging schools to do the right thing, spend a great deal of money on the internet. Kids of this age spend their lives on the net and get a lot of information from it. Making sure that what is out there is real, informative and interactive and that it allows the sharing of views between those who are currently doing apprenticeships and those who are thinking of doing them would not be a cheap business, but it would mean that there was an information flow entirely independent of anything that the adults to whom the children were connected were saying. It would need to be supported by their school, but having something really good on the internet would be a great enhancer of the sort of decisions that we are hoping to make.