---

Higher Education

The Chairman of the Select Committee has just revealed his guilty secret to the House, which is that he was a student of Michael Oakeshott, for which reason I am prepared to forgive him a lot. However, his account of what has happened to apprenticeships is tendentious. As the structure of the British economy changed, and as there were fewer manufacturing jobs available, there were fewer manufacturing apprenticeships. We put in place a reform of apprenticeships, with more modern apprenticeships, but under this Government we now have a decline in their number. If the Chairman of the Select Committee is interested in the figures, I have here the Government's latest statistics on post-16 education and skills. I can tell him that the number of people in apprenticeships in the first quarter of 2009 showed a decline on the figures for the first quarter of 2007-08. There is now a downward trend in apprenticeship participation, and if we are to reverse it, we need the policies that my party has put forward—policies for easing the bureaucratic burdens on companies taking on apprentices, offering a fairer deal for post-19 apprenticeships and helping small businesses take on apprenticeships. That is the way forward, not the decline that is happening under this Government.