My Lords, I support the amendments. I slightly disagree with my friend in this matter, the noble Baroness, Lady Sharp. I do not see anything wrong with setting targets; obviously, there ought to be consultation. The question I wanted to ask is: apart from these public bodies, is each ministerial department to be set targets? Do they currently have targets? In my brief ministerial career, we used to gather departments together and get them to report at least once a month on whether they were meeting apprenticeship targets. I would welcome a comment on that.
The Government have set themselves a big task in reaching a 3 million target over the course of this Parliament. I have on many occasions raised the problem of having a large public target, such as 3 million. The latest figures I have for apprenticeship starts show that there were 444,000 during 2013-14, which is good until you realise that a significant number—some 161,000—were aged 25-plus. I have nothing against adult apprenticeships as such, except that, if we disaggregate the figures again, a significant number would not be new-start apprenticeships but people being reskilled in existing jobs. I still think that the challenge we face is getting more young people into apprenticeships—those numbers are much lower and, in some cases, we have even had a decline. It is not as though the demand for apprenticeships is not there. For example, Semta’s estimation for the number of engineering apprenticeships required over the next period of time is huge—something like 830,000—so we have a huge task on our hands in relation to apprenticeships.
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I am not sure whether this is exactly the right place in the agenda to raise these issues, but while I am on my feet I might as well raise my concerns. In a previous debate on a statutory instrument, I referred the noble Earl, Lord Courtown, to a disturbing article that appeared in the Times just over a week previously that was somewhat sensationally headlined but still worrying. The headline stated, “Apprenticeships are ‘a waste of money’” and the article referred to a recent Ofsted report. In its targeted criticism, it stated that if you looked at the total number of apprenticeships and at the areas of the major starts,
“About 140,000 people started apprenticeships in business administration last year and 130,000 began healthcare apprenticeships”—
and there were significant numbers in the retail sector as well. The article continued:
“Standards were much higher in the motor vehicle, construction and engineering industries, where numbers were much smaller”.
It is good that standards were higher there, but it is worrying that, in areas where we have such large numbers coming through, the report states that we are not meeting quality. I asked the noble Earl, Lord Courtown, what process there is for ensuring that, as numbers expand, quality will be sustained. I do not say this to make a political point, because we have all made mistakes in this area—we had problems with individual learning accounts and with train to gain. The previous Government poured a lot of money into those initiatives, only to find that when the noble Baroness, Lady Wolf, did her analysis, she regarded a lot of those qualifications as substandard.
I do not think that I am raising an alarm unnecessarily. We should be concerned about this. Recently, I had a conversation with someone who had significant experience of apprenticeships. She said that the amount of time that training providers have to oversee apprenticeships is about one hour a month. Therefore, the Government should be concerned. The target to raise the number of apprenticeships is laudable, and I am sure we would all support it, but we face other problems as well.
I will also raise here, although I could raise it in other places, the problem of career guidance. We still have a significant lack of impartial career guidance. Despite the legal requirement on secondary schools to cover vocational and academic career paths, my experience of meeting young people aged 15 to 17 is that, if they are asked what they are going to do, most say that they are going to university. If they are asked whether they are aware of any other career paths, you are lucky if one hand goes up and mentions apprenticeships. If you talk to employers in some areas, you will find that they have difficulties getting into schools. We have not even achieved a situation where every school has links with businesses.
I noticed in a recent document published by the Government that they intend to send staff from jobcentres into schools. Again, I do not want to criticise the enthusiasm, but I query whether that is the right way to deal with the problem. Surely the challenge is to ensure that schools live up to their legal obligations on career guidance and that every school has links with business. In that way, we will build this up—and there are some good examples of it—and be able to ensure
that more and more young people actually have some work experience. That is another problem that employers raise. They say it is not necessarily that the young people do not have qualifications; what they lack is any understanding of the world of work.
I have raised a number of problems. I do not want to go on much longer but, given the importance of this issue and the size of the targets that the Government have set themselves, it was worth it. My final point is to reiterate something that my noble friend Lord Stevenson drew to the Committee’s attention. The Government are still resisting making it a requirement for apprenticeships to be part of public contracts. I am still waiting for a satisfactory response from the Government as to why they will not do that. I know that they say that they are in favour of the voluntary approach, but why should we be parting with significant sums of public money—we are not talking about very small contracts but contracts worth millions of pounds—without the stipulation that, as part of tendering for those contracts, companies should include their commitment to training and to a specific number of apprenticeships? If the Government are serious about trying to meet this target, and a target for high-quality apprenticeships, they seem to be missing an important part of that process.