Education and Skills Bill

The issue of the supply of apprenticeships by small employers is very much on our minds. How we seek to boost that supply is an issue of great concern. I will deal with the specific point mentioned by the noble Baroness; and also with the comments that she made earlier about the direct incentive payments scheme under the LSC’s Train to Gain initiative, whereby employers with fewer than 50 full-time employees are eligible for a contribution to wage costs for employees, in order to help them achieve their first level 2 qualification and/or approved skills for life qualification. This was the specific point raised by the noble Baroness; that the scheme does not extend to apprenticeships. I draw her attention, and the attention of my noble friends, to the paper World-class Apprenticeships: Unlocking Talent, Building Skills for All that we published earlier this year. It addresses this issue, and the wider issue of how we might better incentivise employers to offer apprenticeships. Paragraphs 5.16 and 5.17 refer specifically to the Train to Gain initiative and the wage subsidies that are provided to small employers. Paragraph 5.17 says: "““We believe that this approach should be extended to employers with fewer than 50 full-time employees recruiting Apprentices … We do not propose across-the-board eligibility for this incentive payment, as the particular risks of employing 16 to 18 year-olds vary across different types of business, as do the benefits for the programme of incentivising growth in this way. It will be targeted where it is likely to bring meaningful growth (for instance, a target group might be cost-sensitive small businesses in a sector that we know to be afflicted by skills shortages), and the criteria will be transparent””." It goes on to give other examples of incentive payments that we might make to employers to offer apprenticeships. For example, it cites third sector organisations, which, it says, "““have also got a significant role to play in the expansion of Apprenticeships … In recognition of this, the pilot scheme will also include a number of Third Sector organisations. We will set aside sufficient budget to pilot the scheme in this spending period (and to pilot a variety of approaches with different groups), with the intention of revisiting the total budget and best approach, with the benefit of the pilot’s data, in the next Comprehensive Spending Review””." So precisely the issues raised by the noble Baroness, Lady Sharp, and by my noble friend, about how we might more directly incentivise employers to offer apprenticeships, are being addressed by these pilot schemes and by other measures set out in the world-class apprenticeships paper. We would welcome the views of the noble Baroness and of my noble friend and we hope that, when we have got the data from the pilots, they will look at them with us and help us to reach conclusions about the way forward.