Education and Skills Bill

We on these Benches have some sympathy with the amendment but do not go wholly along with the wording. We, too, were influenced by Professor Alison Wolf’s critique of the Bill when it was first introduced in January, and by her fears regarding the good learning experience that some of these young people are presently getting when they go into a job. They may not necessarily acquire accredited qualifications in their first two years of learning, but they learn a great deal about how to hold down a job. The skills that they learn on the job may not be accredited but they are very worth while. This is the group of young people called not NEETs but NETs—those not in education or training. These young people are in work but they are not getting any training at work. Some 20 to 30 per cent of young people leave school at the age of 16; roughly 10 per cent are NEETs and roughly 10 per cent NETs. Alison Wolf seems to be saying in her article that we should not write off the training that these young people receive even though it is not accredited. In particular, they learn how to turn up regularly and other useful skills about how to behave in a job. In the retail trades, for example, their mathematics can improve immensely as they have to do calculations. Sometimes they acquire during this period an appetite for some sort of training and we see them coming back into the education system, largely through further education, into adult, post-19 training. Equally, many of us are agreed that the most satisfactory form of such work has training attached to it. Learning by doing through an apprenticeship, with its formal off-the-job training, is the most satisfactory outcome for these young people, as discussed in the debates on the amendments of the noble Lord, Lord Layard, a couple of days ago. In our previous Committee session, we discussed the degree to which the Government are now trying to raise the profile of apprenticeships and increase the number of young people going into them. Over the next two or three years, we shall see a major push with the national apprenticeships service, which will be the subject of next year’s education and skills Bill. Nevertheless, there are fears that small and medium-sized employers, in particular, will pull out of providing jobs for young people because of the training obligations that this Bill will impose on them, unless—again, as discussed in the debates on the amendments of the noble Lord, Lord Layard—there is some carrot to encourage them to pursue this route. We support the general tenor of these amendments: we need a review of how the arrangements will work. On the other hand, to have a review within one year of their coming into force is much too soon. It will take some time for the Bill’s provisions to settle down. Nor is it necessary to have an annual review after three years. We want to see what effect the Bill’s provisions might have on the employment, particularly apprenticeships, of young people and how far the mix of all the proposals, including those in next year’s Bill, are effective. Some evaluation of the measures in the Bill, however, is sensible. It would be more satisfactory to have an evaluation of their effects after three or four years, especially the degree to which young people are taken into employment by small and medium-sized businesses.