Education and Skills Bill

I believe that that is about people training more individuals than they are required to do and being paid for it. However, my impression is that in many cases training anyone will mean the receipt of a subsidy. This world-class apprenticeships paper is a huge step forward. We have been pootling along over this issue redesignating some workplace training as apprenticeships but, to be honest, without a major breakthrough until now. We are now poised for a major breakthrough and there is only one reason for that, which is this Bill. Unless we can provide many more apprenticeships and satisfy the apprenticeship guarantee, we cannot possibly implement the Bill, and the Bill is incredibly important because of all the other things that follow from it. What concerns me about my noble friend’s reply is the lack of a reference to the general principle of how this group of people should be funded compared with those who go down the full-time route. These are the underprivileged people whose educational future we are trying to lift, but all the inertia in the system will lead to full-time people being treated better than this group. I wonder whether it is possible for the Government to think of some way of tying their own hands, because that is what is required. The pressures from the full-time lobby are so strong that the part-time people will never get a deal unless the Government do that. Surely the Bill is about trying to get a new educational philosophy going. It deals with only about 30 or 40 per cent of the population, and this is the first time that we have had a Bill which is concerned only with the less privileged part of the population. With all the old pressures, the full-time route will get the focus of attention and the focus of the money.