Apprenticeships, Skills, Children and Learning Bill

I wish to add my voice to those who have mentioned the sad death of Lord Dearing—or Ron, as I knew him. His contribution to education in this country was immense, but what stands out in my mind is his consideration of the future of higher education before the 1997 election. His report achieved all-party agreement and higher education would have been profoundly different without it. More recently, my Committee has been considering testing and assessment, is concluding an inquiry into the national curriculum and will go on to look at inspection. Ron Dearing's name runs throughout all those issues. The education sector will be poorer for his loss. On a lighter note, Ron's sense of humour was amazing. It was a sight to behold him and Ken Baker—Lord Baker, I should say—going around together to promote university technical colleges. That was a lovely last campaign for Lord Dearing, and we shall miss him. I turn now to something that would have been of great interest to Ron, and that is where we are after nearly 11 years of Labour education policy and this latest Bill. As Chairman of the Select Committee on Children, Schools and Families, I have noticed how some colleagues complain about how disgraceful it is that we have new legislation that will take our mind off the job of running schools and upset people because the quango structure will be changed. On the other side are the people asking why the Government do not provide more direction or make more high-profile, sweeping changes right through from early-years, pre-school education to higher and adult education. We have to achieve a balance, as all Governments try to do. As I have said in previous Second Reading debates, three pillars of reform—testing and assessment, the national curriculum and inspection—are associated with the period between Baker and Balls. Those reforms have now been in existence for 20 years and it is therefore a good time to reflect on them. Some of the elements of the Bill do that, although it is somewhat a catch-all Bill. I shall start with apprenticeships. In this case, the Government gave both my Committee and the Business and Enterprise Committee the opportunity for pre-legislative scrutiny—it was all that we had time for. It was an experiment for the two Committees, which worked for the most part blind to the other's work but came to very similar conclusions, which is not a bad recommendation. Broadly speaking, we welcomed the proposals on apprenticeships. All of us worried about the ambitiousness of the Government's targets, and whether they could be delivered—especially as by the time we wrote our report, we were in recession, a time when it becomes ever more difficult for the private sector, especially small and medium-sized enterprises, to think about taking on more apprentices. Those of us who have been here for a long time remember the collapse of apprenticeships under a previous Prime Minister. We had wonderful apprenticeship schemes in some of the premier companies in this country, but they fell away, and it has taken a long time to get back to that quality of training and to rebuild the apprenticeship infrastructure. People can get carried away by the term ““apprenticeships””, and the Committee considered the issue of quality control. Some of us with constituencies that still have a strong engineering base—as I do in Huddersfield—assume that an apprenticeship lasts three or four years and is intensive and of high quality. It is paramount that when a person finishes an apprenticeship, they not only have a good qualification that will more or less provide them with a career for life, but are well remunerated. That is true of some apprenticeship schemes, and those in engineering seem to set the gold standard. Many apprenticeships are short term nowadays, lasting as little as a year, so they are rather different. Some are not served with employers but are programme-led. We drew quality control to the Government's attention, because we need assurance that qualifications are of good quality and lead to well-remunerated employment. Both Select Committees said, ““For goodness' sake, make sure that in every school the apprenticeship option is brought to the attention of young people coming up to 16””. Absolutely. Why not? It provides a wonderful opportunity that is better suited to the talents of many young people than staying on at school until they are 18 and then going to university or seeking employment. Apprenticeship is a good option if it is the right apprenticeship for the young person. I believe that young people should be told what the career they are entering will bring them as an income. That was one of the things I wanted to add to our report although we did not include it. They should know how often on average they would need to change jobs as a hairdresser or in retail or distribution, where the training is much shorter but incomes are much lower. The assurance of the good life in some sectors, based on an apprenticeship, is not what it is in others, so people need better knowledge of the career steps beyond the short apprenticeships offered in some sectors. The Minister's response to our pre-legislative report was rather late. We reminded him that it was due when he was giving evidence to the Committee a few days beforehand and it arrived in the nick of time so that it could be attached to the documents for this debate. Our challenge to the Government is that there can never be a better time to train than during a recession. If we do not have training during a recession, we might as well give up on the commitment to train. This is when we have to train; the Government have to become more active and recognise that the private sector will be more reluctant, unless it is given inducements—unless it is made beneficial for small, medium and large companies to take on apprentices. When companies are finding it difficult to make ends meet and to obtain bank loans to continue production, there must either be generous help for the private sector or public sector apprenticeships will have to be pulled into play in a way that we have not considered seriously for a very long time—if ever. As most of us know, the major employers in constituencies such as mine 30 years ago were household names—the big engineering and textile companies and chemical companies such as ICI—that employed many thousands of people. Today, the main employers are the university, the health authority, the hospitals, schools and colleges. The picture is totally transformed, and those are the jobs people do. If we want apprenticeships to grow, we have to embed them in the health service, local government, universities and all the public sector areas. If we do not do that, we shall not have high-quality apprenticeships and we shall not have them fast. I made a recommendation to the Department and to the Prime Minister 10 days ago, when my right hon. Friend was giving evidence to the Liaison Committee. I asked him if he could"““give a guarantee that no young person leaving school at 16 in this interim period, in the recession, before we get the leaving learning age to 18…will be without training or an apprenticeship.””" The Prime Minister said:"““I want us for school leavers to be able to be in a position to say that every school leaver will have the chance either of a job or of an apprenticeship or of some form of training that will take them through to a job in the future.””" That is quite a commitment and I hope it will be translated into Government action. Most people who have spoken so far—certainly the Front-Bench spokespeople—have mentioned Ofqual and the Qualifications and Curriculum Agency. It is interesting that nearly everyone has homed in on the replacement for the QCA. The agency has a history, and the hon. Member for Surrey Heath (Michael Gove) was at some pains to talk about the evidence for deteriorating standards in young people's GCSEs and A-levels. In an interjection, I pointed out that it was easy to find such evidence; indeed, the QCA appeared before the Education and Skills Committee, and the Children, Schools and Families Committee has visited other countries—for example, to look at the Swedish model, which I prefer to the Finnish model, as some members of my Committee know. However, countries like the UK—big urban nations such as Germany, France, Italy and Spain—share the same difficulty as us; it is difficult to track standards over time, because everyone's system changes to some degree. The Committee asked questions of Ken Boston, the former head of the QCA. He is a fine public servant who had the honour and integrity to resign when he thought that he had got things wrong in terms of the testing regime last summer. That should not detract from the fact that he is a fine public servant and I thought he was a very good head of the QCA. When he gave evidence to the Committee, he made a robust defence of the maintenance of standards over time. We have to find a balance, because we can easily fall into the arguments set out in The Sunday Times, The Times and the Daily Mail—that standards have gone to pot and that none of our children does any work or achieves qualifications worth the paper they are written on. We all know about that kind of populist nonsense, but under my chairmanship, when the QCA was regularly interrogated over a long period, we received pretty satisfactory answers about the maintenance of standards over time.