My Lords, I have an amendment, Amendment 50AA, in this group. It is a probing amendment but it ranges slightly more widely than the focused questions that the noble Lord, Lord Stevenson, put to the Minister.
The overall purpose of my amendment is to ensure that all apprenticeships have the appropriate level of quality—an issue that came up in various comments earlier. It does so by adding a subsection to the end of new Section A9 in Clause 18 on public sector apprenticeship targets, requiring the Secretary of State to set out minimum standards for apprenticeships. It also requires the Secretary of State to consult on what is required. In tabling this, I have been helped, advised and encouraged by the Engineering Employers’ Federation, which is somewhat concerned about the lack of clarity on the position as a whole.
That having been said, we had a debate on Tuesday last week on the draft English Apprenticeships (Consequential Amendments to Primary Legislation) Order, which the noble Lords, Lord Stevenson and Lord Young of Norwood Green, have spoken to, and which was replied to by my noble friend Lord Courtown. A number of questions were asked in that meeting, some of which cross over with what we are discussing this afternoon. I received the answer from the department as I came into the meeting this afternoon, so if I am not absolutely up to date with what the responses are to the questions raised, it is because I have only had it for about half an hour.
I very much support the Government’s policy of creating 3 million apprenticeship starts in this Parliament mentioned in paragraph 18 at page 6 of the Explanatory Notes. There is a real need for vocational training. It could equip people better for practical work and give them a more satisfying, satisfactory and long-lasting permanent job than, dare I say it, a 2.2 in media studies, which may not equip them for an enormous amount. This relates to the point made by the noble Baroness, Lady Corston, on the quality of courses available.
The Government’s ambition is very great. It is worth while pointing out that last year there were 696,000 live births in England and Wales and 56,000 live births in Scotland, so a total of around 750,000 live births. Therefore, in a five-year period you have 3,750,000 live births, if those numbers are maintained, and we are talking about creating 3 million new apprenticeships over the next five years. That is 80% of the people who will have been born. I know they are not going to be apprentices in their first few years, but it is the scale of what we are thinking about. Of those currently being born in a five-year period, 80% will be expected to take up an apprenticeship.
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It may be that my slight worry about how we will maintain the quality is because I do not fully understand how the apprenticeship scheme works—I certainly have not studied as long as the noble Lord, Lord Young of Norwood Green—and I therefore hope that my noble friend will be able to reassure me. The noble Lord, Lord Young, and I have discussed this before and I think there are a couple of issues. One is the image of apprenticeships. There has been a problem with apprenticeships being slightly old-fashioned, being seen as old-fashioned and perhaps too often being portrayed as old-fashioned in schools. The second issue is that the apprenticeship brand has been weakened by programmes of training that have been termed
apprenticeships but offered little more than on-the-job basic training. That is not what an apprenticeship is about. While we are seeing the beginning of a shift in opinion about this matter, we need to make sure that there are not set-backs or bad publicity around quality control and standards.
I find it quite difficult to establish what defines an apprenticeship, so my amendment is an attempt to require that some form of minimum standards are set down somewhere in regulation. Obviously, those should be consulted upon before being set in place. If my noble friend is able to say in her reply that this is all covered and I need not worry about this, no one will be more delighted than me. She may refer me to the Skills Funding Agency, which I see referred to in the letter from my noble friend Lord Courtown. If she is able to give that chapter and verse, that is terrific, and I shall be even more pleased to pass it on to the Engineering Employers’ Federation and other bodies which appear to be pretty much as confused as I am.
The sorts of things that I have in mind as the basic building blocks of an apprenticeship scheme would be some combination of vocational and academic qualifications with on-the-job learning, so at the end apprentices have the skills they need to occupy the jobs which have been created by the employer. Apprentices should have some basic-level qualifications, probably level 2, in English and maths before they start; otherwise, you are asking the employer to carry out basic education, and if that is to be the case, it should be a traineeship, not an apprenticeship—an apprenticeship should be seen as a smarter thing to do. The quality of an apprenticeship should be determined on outcomes—not on what is said in a book, but on what actually happens in relation to the length of the apprenticeship, the level of training, the qualification attained and the career prospects. Finally, as the noble Baroness, Lady Sharp, said, there needs to be a long-term commitment by all parties to stick to their knitting and not alter the model along the way.
Against those inquiries, I shall ask my noble friend a couple of specific questions. First, who can offer an apprenticeship? For example, a very able young man has come to spend a year working for me doing research. He has helped me with the remarks that I am now making. He is at university, so he is not particularly suitable. If he were to come without being at university and were to say that he would like to be a permanent researcher, could I offer him an apprenticeship? Could he be an apprentice? Would he qualify?
Secondly, having started on that, if he thinks I am not offering him quite what was anticipated, to whom does he complain? You can complain to your employer, but you will probably make a relatively short-lived complaint. It may also be that the Skills Funding Agency can consider this. If it does, how does the apprentice know of its existence and how do they find out that there is an organisation which can check and guarantee quality and that what they have been promised is being fulfilled? Would that be done on a confidential basis? Will the person therefore be certain that their position will be protected? Is the SFA only reactive? Does it just respond to complaints, or does it do mystery shopping to see if the levels of apprenticeships promised are being fulfilled?
If we are to achieve the Government’s very worthwhile and very important but ambitious target of 3 million apprenticeships, and at the same time provide real, fulfilling training that leads to long-term, satisfying permanent posts, some legislative framework around all this would be helpful. Fifteen years ago, when I served on the regional development agency in the West Midlands, the system became “used” by people. There were people who knew how to go and get a grant—they knew how to play the system. They could tell you how you had to show this amount of increase in output, this amount of increase in employment and this additionality that had to be fulfilled in order to get a grant. Unless there is a very clear framework, what slightly worries me about the scale of what we are setting out here is that there will be people whose role will be to set themselves up and to fulfil the letter of what the Government envisage but not the spirit of it. It is the spirit that we need in order to make apprenticeships worth while and to encourage our young men and women to undertake this very important vocational training.