Education Bill

Lord Young of Norwood Green Excerpts

Wednesday 14th September 2011 Grand Committee

Moved by

[Lord Young of Norwood Green]

144AA: Clause 67, page 53, line 11, at end insert—
“(13) In addition to the above, the Secretary of State will make available the apprenticeship offer and will ensure that progress is made to ensure the offer is available to all qualified persons by 2015.”

[Lord Young of Norwood Green]

My Lords, I shall speak also to Amendments 144AB and 144AC, and give an indication of my view on Amendment 144B in the name of my noble friend Lord Layard.

I felt that the importance of Amendment 144AA was underlined by today’s unemployment figures. UK unemployment rose by 80,000 to 2.51 million jobless, a rate of 7.9 per cent. The bit that caught my attention more than anything else, because it is germane to today’s debate, was that youth unemployment rose sharply by another 78,000 to 973,000 unemployed young people. It was interesting also that public sector employment fell by 110,000, partially offset by a 41,000 increase in the private sector. I mention that because the public sector is an area where we look to a significant number of apprenticeships, so the impact of that is likely to feed through.

I shall mention our record on apprenticeships when we were the Government. I have said this before and make no apologies for repeating it: if apprenticeships had been a national health patient, they definitely would have been in intensive care. We had only about 65,000 of them and an appalling completion rate of something like 27 per cent. By the time we left office in 2010, there were nearly 280,000 apprenticeships, with a completion rate of 72 per cent. I am proud of that; it was a good record. Was the task completed? Clearly, it was not. But we had set a target in the Apprenticeships, Skills, Children and Learning Act. We gave a commitment that by 2013 every person who wanted an apprenticeship would be able to have one, assuming that they had the requisite qualifications. We felt that that was a very important, albeit ambitious, commitment.

I want to pay tribute to the Government's commitment. The good news is that funding is being made available to support 437,000 apprenticeships in 2011-12, including 230,000 for 16 to 18 year-olds. I welcome that; it shows commitment. Further still, the Government are talking about 497,000 apprenticeships for 2012 and the funding to go with them, so I acknowledge that they are treating this issue as one of importance. The real question is: are they doing enough? The purpose of my amendment is to stretch that commitment. I make no apologies for that in the current climate.

Looking at what is being achieved at the moment, the figures for August 2010 to 2011 make interesting reading. The worrying area of the figures, for me, is that in the 16 to 18 year-old group we see an actual decline in the number of starts. For 16 year-olds in 2009-10, there were 29,000 starts but so far in 2010-11, in quarters one to three, there are only 24,690. That is reflected in the figures for 17 year-olds, with 40,780 starts in 2009-10 and 34,500 in 2010-11. Similarly, with 18 year-olds, we see a decline from just over 46,000 starts to 43,000. I must admit that the 19 to 24 age group shows a healthy increase from 113,000 starts to 102,000, which I acknowledge is good progress.

The really startling increase has been in adult apprenticeships. A significant number in that was accounted for by switching people who were previously on Train to Gain to adult apprenticeships. Again, I do not deplore that. There is a need for people to reskill, but surely the major area of concern for us should be in the 16 to 18 age group. We know how important that is. I do not want to draw any glib analysis from the riots that have taken place recently, because somebody else will be looking at that, but youth unemployment certainly does not help the situation. For every young person who you can offer an apprenticeship to, we know that that is a beacon of hope for them, as I have described it. We know that many young people have turned their lives around by starting apprenticeships, which is why we attach so much importance to that particular group of young people. While the overall figures may look good, when they are disaggregated there are definite causes for concern.

Another bit that worried me was when I sought to look at what the Government’s targets were. It was quite interesting because John Hayes, the Minister for Further Education, Skills and Lifelong Learning, has explained:

“The apprenticeships programme is a demand-led programme for young people and adults. Government funds apprenticeship training but relies on employers and providers to work together to offer sufficient opportunities. Therefore, Government do not plan apprenticeship places or set targets”.—[Official Report, Commons, 4/3/11; col. 708W.]

I find that a rather curious statement. Therefore, I would welcome the Minister confirming whether it is true. If it is true, how do the Government arrive at the funding figures because presumably they relate to something? Presumably, somebody has decided that that is the funding we need for a certain number of places. As I say, I find the statement to which I have referred rather strange. Perhaps it has been taken out of context, but I hope not as I obtained the statement from what I hope is an unbiased source; namely, the House of Lords research department. I just asked for a statement of government policy.

--- Later in debate ---

[Lord Young of Norwood Green]

My Lords, I was trying to establish that I believe that this commitment on entitlement one by 2015 could be achieved. In the current circumstances, given the level of youth unemployment, it is something that we ought to go for. The Government should be sending a signal to the young generation that we are absolutely committed to ensuring that there will be an apprenticeship available, as was offered in the previous entitlement in the 2009 Act.

I talked about the small number of employers that are engaged. How can we improve on that? We started down a road which I think had lots of unexplored potential. There is the question of involving SMEs, especially smaller companies. If you talk to them, as I do whenever I meet them, you will understand that they worry about administration, costs and so on. If they have not been involved with apprenticeships before, they see them as a voyage into the unknown and cannot necessarily see the benefits.

Yet we have a brilliant scheme which has been around for some while now: group training associations. Significant numbers of small and medium-sized employers gather under that umbrella where a lot of administration and basic training takes place and when young people have achieved a reasonable level of expertise, they go out to companies. Once again, the Government have committed themselves on group training associations, but I do not feel that there is enough drive to ensure that we are maximising the opportunities available in them. If there were a really intensive drive on group training associations and ATAs, I think we could be confident that we could get more SMEs involved, which we desperately need to do.

The interesting thing about apprenticeships and demand is that I recall that when I was a young lad of 17 years old, I wandered down the road, rang the doorbell at Telephone House and managed to get a telecom apprenticeship. If a young person tried to get an apprenticeship with BT today, I do not think he would have that success. BT offers about 300 apprenticeships and is oversubscribed by something like 25,000. The demand is huge. Somebody said that it is harder to get an apprenticeship with BT than it is to get into Oxford or Cambridge. There is huge, unsatisfied demand, and we have got to make sure that we engage employers.

I am also speaking to Amendment 144AB, which is a key part of the Government’s commitment. We made it clear that part of the condition of offering government procurement contracts was that there should be a commitment from employers to provide apprenticeships. We had significant success. I shall quote two large-scale contracts. They could have been better, but there were something like 300 apprenticeships on the Olympics and Crossrail has offered 400, so it can be done. Surely it is wrong in this day and age that we should be awarding government contracts to companies that have no—

[The Deputy Chairman of Committees]

My Lords, I apologise, but there is a further Division in the Chamber. Therefore, we stand adjourned for 10 minutes until 7.16 pm.

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[Lord Young of Norwood Green]

My Lords, I shall round up as speedily as I can on the final couple of aspects of these amendments. I talked about the importance of procurement. Again, the Government have not seen fit to make apprenticeships a condition of government procurement contracts. I would welcome some reassurance on that. There is also the important question of government departments demonstrating that they do not just talk about the value of apprenticeships but actually recruit apprentices themselves. The latest figures show that 2,120 apprenticeships were started in government departments. From my brief experience as a Minister, I would say that this is an area where we cannot afford to take our eye off the ball. Making sure that government departments are held to account on a regular basis is vital. In current circumstances, when jobs are going but where nevertheless there is a commitment in government departments to apprenticeships—we can see from the figures that they are still going—we cannot afford to be complacent.

In answer to a parliamentary Question, the Minister for Further Education, John Hayes, said that no data were available on how many apprenticeships government departments were planning over the next three years, but that,

“Civil Service Learning is encouraging Departments to use apprenticeships to support delivery of their business objectives and will provide some central support to promote a more consistent approach”.—[Official Report, Commons, 19/7/11; col. 978W.]

That is not good enough if we are serious about trying to ensure that the maximum number of apprenticeships are available to meet the entitlement.

Another area where we could give a good signal relates to Amendment 144AC, in which I refer to Investors in People. I was surprised, when I went to a presentation for a company that had won an award for best employer that year, that when I spoke to the CEO of the company, he said that they did not have any apprenticeships at all. I looked at the Investors in People website and could not find any requirement in it. There is talk about selection and recruitment being fair, but I could not find any explicit reference to that requirement.

I believe that the target year I have suggested—2015—is reasonable and achievable. It will take a significant effort by the Government, but in the current circumstances, given the importance of apprenticeships to young people and the figures for youth unemployment, it is surely a signal that this Government should give, and I commend the amendment to the Committee.

--- Later in debate ---

[Lord Henley]

I am very grateful to my noble friend for putting it in those terms. That makes it even more important that he talks to the department and to my honourable friend and tries to secure some sort of agreement. We now have a reasonable amount of time. I know the noble Lord will be heading off to wherever the Liberal Democrats hold their conference but, in due course, he will be back and then discussions can take place in the appropriate manner.

I want to deal with a couple of other points. First, the noble Lord, Lord Low of Dalston, raised a question concerning people with disabilities and the offer. I can confirm that disabled people aged 19 to 24 are covered by the offer and that that group will be prescribed in regulations. There is also the commitment given by the previous Government during the passage of the ASCLA—as we now seem to call it—to take on an inclusive approach. They are also being advised on this by external disability experts. No doubt we will be able to let the noble Lord know a little more in due course.

Finally, my noble friend Lady Sharp of Guildford asked about the response to the Wolf report on incentives to employers. We accepted that recommendation in the Wolf report. The National Apprenticeship Service has recently run pilots looking at incentive payments and we need to consider these and other research into employer payments to ensure that we avoid dead weight when implementing this recommendation. That is work in progress.

Before my voice finally gives out, I say that we are all travelling in roughly the same direction. We might be going at different speeds and there might be tensions in how we do it, but I believe that much more can be done through further discussions. I believe that we are all committed to the same outcome, which is seeing increasing numbers of apprentices across both public and private sectors and increasing employer participation in the programme. With those assurances, I hope that all noble Lords who have put forward their amendments and spoken to them so eloquently will feel able to withdraw them and, where appropriate, I hope that conversations can continue between now and Report.

[Lord Young of Norwood Green]

Perhaps I may make a few brief comments in relation to what has been said. I support the intentions of my noble friend Lord Layard in his amendment. I would like it to go a bit further but we are all travelling in the same direction. I was not exactly sure what the noble Lord, Lord Wakeham, meant when he said I had gone off key in the latter part of what I said, but I agree with him on his point about literacy and numeracy skills. Interestingly, if you can get young people involved in the apprenticeship process, it refocuses them on the importance of learning. I share the concern of the noble Lord, Lord Addington, and I would want to do everything I can to assist in that process. We discussed a whole range of disabilities, as the noble Lord, Lord Low, will testify—he always makes sure that we do. I thought we reached some useful agreements. I am glad that the incentive to employers was answered and I thank the noble Baroness, Lady Sharp, for her support, and likewise my noble friend Lord Monks.

On the status of apprenticeships, I agree with the noble Lord, Lord Storey. One thing that we got slightly wrong was that, by focusing on getting 50 per cent of young people to go to university, we gave the impression that the vocational route was a second-class route. We need to do a lot more on that. Gradually, the tide is turning. On a lot of apprenticeship schemes, when the apprentices complete their training there is a graduation ceremony. We need to do more on this.

The noble Lord, Lord Henley, referred to targets. Whether or not we delete “target” and insert “planning assumption”, we will still have to make calculations. Before the Government say that the 2015 commitment is not the right approach, it would be interesting to see the planning assumption for what the demand would be. I say that it could be done, and that it is absolutely the right signal that should be sent to young people and to the country.

The noble Lord said that he preferred a voluntary approach when it came to contracts, and that apprenticeships would place an additional burden. I wish that he would not use that term. Apprenticeships are not a burden on companies. They think that they are, but when they take on apprentices they frequently realise what a good investment they are. I do not see them as a burden. When we worked with the Olympic committee and Crossrail, we found that they understood the value of apprenticeships. The Government should take a long, hard look at making them a key part of government procurement contracts. I do not believe that it would disadvantage SMEs, but I will not go over the debate again. With IiPs, what disturbed me was that again there was no reference to apprenticeships. If we are to say that these companies invest in people, surely apprenticeships ought to be part of the investment. I do not know how we should go about it, but something should be done.

I will of course withdraw the amendment, because that is how we operate in Grand Committee. However, we will return to these issues on Report. I welcome the offer of further discussions because I, too, want to make progress. I thank the Minister, John Hayes, for our previous discussion. It was a worthwhile exchange of views. With those comments and caveats, I beg leave to withdraw the amendment.

Amendment 144AA withdrawn.

Education Bill

Lord Young of Norwood Green Excerpts

Tuesday 14th June 2011 Lords Chamber

[Lord Young of Norwood Green]

My Lords, I declare an interest. As I have said before, I am a school governor at my local Three Bridges Primary School, which recently got an “outstanding” assessment from Ofsted, of which we are immensely proud. It took something like 10 years to move from “satisfactory” to “outstanding”, which was a long and interesting journey. I maintain my interest as a school governor because it gives me an insight into what is happening in primary school education, rather than just theorising about it.

This has been a fascinating debate with, probably, the House of Lords at its best. It brings a huge range of experience and expertise into this debate. I am sure that, had the Minister been here, he would have been listening, but someone is listening on his behalf. Whether he has the freedom to compromise and accept necessary improvements will be revealed in Committee. A lot of people have said that they are enthusiasts for the whole of this Bill but it is a bit like the curate’s egg and will need significant amendment. I would not want to be derogatory about it because a number of good parts of this Bill have been referred to in this debate.

The record of the previous Government bears mentioning. In the past decade, the Labour Government put a huge investment into schools—into the fabric and structure of them and into support for teachers. We attracted record numbers into teaching and made teaching a top destination for Oxbridge graduates. The numbers entering the profession are already starting to fall because of this Government’s cuts to teacher training. Ofsted’s assessment was that we had the best generation of teachers ever thanks to Labour's reforms. We set up the Teach First scheme to encourage high-performing graduates to take up a career in teaching and recent studies have shown that schools with Teach First teachers saw pupils boost their grades by an average of a third of a GCSE in every subject that they studied. Important progress was made during those 10 years.

An area that we have not heard referred to much in this debate is the role of head teachers. In my experience, they are crucial in the ability of a school to succeed in achieving its objectives of improving the educational experience. We should not lose sight of that. It was good to hear my noble friend Lady Morgan talk about the strategy for improving the role of Ofsted. That is now an important area. Just because a school has achieved an outstanding assessment, you cannot leave it to its own devices. That is a little too complacent, and I hope that we will give further thought to it.

In the short period of time that I have I will cover only a couple of areas. I have been involved with the Alliance for Inclusive Education, which has expressed concern about admissions policy and dealing with children with SEN. The alliance wants,

“the schools’ adjudicator role in admissions policies complaints to be maintained”.

The Government, as we know,

“wants to remove the role that admissions forums have in increasing the accountability of school admissions protocols within a local authority area”.

The alliance believes, and I think it is right, that:

“These forums allowed parents to raise issues of concern which may help to identify particular problems and challenges local schools face in taking their share of children with special educational needs”.

The alliance is looking for,

“some kind of local coordination of the schools admissions role which is accountable to both parents and local communities”.

That is what we are looking for in admissions policies. We want to see transparency and fairness. That is not guaranteed.

The next area interests me especially, and I declare another personal interest. My noble friend Lord Touhig, who is unfortunately not in the Chamber, gave us some interesting statistics on autism. I have a personal interest because I have a granddaughter with Asperger's. It was interesting when I looked at her experience of state education. It was good in primary school where it was a reasonably safe and secure environment, and teachers seemed to know how to deal with a child with those particular difficulties. But in secondary school it has been dire, quite frankly. Teachers seem not to be trained in what they need to do. There is a lot of room for improvement.

That leads me to the question of exclusion and the real concerns about the policies contained within the Bill. Again, I quote from a briefing document from the Alliance for Inclusive Education. It states that:

“The Department for Education’s own statistics confirm that the primary reasons for most children with SEN being excluded are of an emotional, social and behavioural nature”.

It,

“welcomes the Government’s Targeted Mental Health in Schools fund to improve their pupils’ emotional well-being, which should help to reduce the rate of school exclusions”.

The alliance wants,

“the Government to consider strengthening schools’ duties to arrange special education needs provision, which will prevent a high percentage of these children being excluded from school”.

It is right: prevention certainly is better than cure. It wants all schools to be under a duty not to exclude but required to arrange support provision as soon as possible to prevent the child from being excluded. Clearly, this is an area that we will return to in Committee.

Lastly, on apprenticeships, while I welcome the Government’s commitment on funding—we heard the Minister talk about 135,000 places for 16 to 18 year-olds and 300,000 others—this is really about ensuring that those places actually emerge as real apprenticeships. Withdrawing the 2013 commitment to guarantee an apprenticeship to all 16 to 19 year-olds who qualify for one is the wrong decision. If this country was at war and we decided that we needed all young people to be skilled and employed, then we would find the means. We ought to wage war against youth unemployment. We ought to guarantee that opportunity to every young person who wants an apprenticeship and qualifies for it. As I have said before, the Government have the means to show that they lead by example in government contracts and departments, and can also look at the large number of employers who still do not employ apprenticeships or encourage things such as group training associations.

I have run out of time and do not want to abuse the situation—I can see that I am being looked at. I thank you for this opportunity.

Education: Vocational Subjects

Lord Young of Norwood Green Excerpts

Thursday 12th May 2011 Lords Chamber

[Lord Young of Norwood Green]

My Lords, we found much to welcome in Professor Wolf’s vision for a higher quality vocational education. In particular, we welcome the commitment to ensure that every young person reaches a decent level of proficiency in English and maths before they leave school, an area to which we devoted a considerable amount of resource, with some success, and gave them the opportunity to make progress in those important basic skills. I declare an interest at this point, as I am a school governor of my local primary school, which I am pleased to say recently received an “Outstanding” assessment by Ofsted. English and maths are the key sets of achievements when pupils reach year 6.

We welcome the efforts to simplify the system and qualifications to make it easier to navigate for young people so that normal programmes of study lead to progression. Professor Wolf recommends the adoption of multiple measures of school performance, echoing moves that we made in government towards what we described as a balanced school report card approach. The Secretary of State has accepted that and is proposing new performance management measurements in addition to the English baccalaureate. But will teachers’ hearts not sink a bit when they hear that there are to be more targets, and will they not question whether the Government are delivering the autonomy to get on and teach that they promised? Will the Minister give the House an assurance that they will consult teachers before dropping any new measurements on them, as they did with the English baccalaureate? Even with the range of measures, Professor Wolf’s report rightly warns of the consequences if a single performance measure becomes dominant. She says that,

“there remains a serious risk that schools will simply ignore their less academically successful pupils. This was a risk with the old 5 GCSEs measure; a risk with the English Baccalaureate; and will be a risk with a measure based on selected qualifications. It needs to be pre-empted”.

Rather than pre-empt that risk, did the Secretary of State not in fact pre-empt the Wolf report by presenting his English baccalaureate as the gold standard for schools?

More broadly, have this highly prescriptive league table measure and its arbitrary subject selection not already damaged the deliverability of Professor Wolf’s vision by relegating vocational learning to second-division status in the public mind and in the minds of schools? Creative and practical subjects are crucial to the quality vocational education that Professor Wolf advocates, but already they are an undervalued currency in our schools because of the Secretary of State’s action. We ask the Government to think again on the English baccalaureate and allow more breadth and flexibility so that it caters for all students. You cannot design a school system that works for everyone around the requirements of the Russell Group.

The deliverability of Professor Wolf's vision is also affected by some of the Secretary of State’s action in other areas. She rightly stresses the importance of a quality careers service to inform young people about their options, which is surely more important in a world where young people are struggling to make their way. Yet, as we speak, the careers service in England is simply melting away. We welcome the vision of an all-age careers service but ask again: where is the long-promised transition plan to deliver it and will it be adequately resourced? At a time when youth unemployment is at a record high and access to further and higher education is becoming more difficult, is not the web and telephony service that the Government propose only part of the solution?

The Government say that they are focused on social mobility but they are, we believe, systematically knocking away some of the ladders of support that help young people to get on in life. More young people in FE colleges on vocational courses are in receipt of the EMA than in schools or sixth forms. They need the money to buy equipment or support their courses. Will the scrapping of the EMA not hit those young people disproportionately hard and, again, make Professor Wolf's vision hard to deliver in practice? Colleges and students are four months away from the start of the academic year but still none the wiser about what the replacement scheme will provide. Is it not now time to listen to no less than the OECD and reinstate the EMA scheme?

Because time is limited, I will focus some of my contribution on apprenticeships, which I am sure will not surprise the Minister. There were three explicit recommendations in the Wolf report. I want to focus on two of them; I am only dismissing the other in the interests of time. In recommendation 14, Professor Wolf says:

“Employers who take on 16-18 year old apprentices should be eligible for payments (direct or indirect), because and when they bear some of the cost of education for an age-group with a right to free full-time participation. Such payments should be made only where 16-18 year old apprentices receive clearly identified off-the-job training and education, with broad transferable elements”.

That is worth pursuing if we are serious about trying to get more and more employers involved with apprenticeships—and we have a long way to go in that area.

I also want to refer to recommendation 16, where Professor Wolf says:

“DfE and BIS should discuss and consult urgently on alternative ways for groups of smaller employers to become direct providers of training and so receive ‘training provider’ payments, possibly through the encouragement of Group Training Associations”.

If I wanted to amend the report, I would delete that “possibly” as we know that group training associations are a tried and trusted formula. We put in hand a scheme to enlarge and expand upon them but we seem to take an inordinate amount of time before taking a tried and trusted formula and expanding it in the way that is needed. Again, I would welcome the Minister’s comments on that recommendation.

On the general question of apprenticeships, I listened carefully to the Minister and if I have a criticism it is that I wish we would not always talk about high-level apprenticeships—remembering that there are well over 200 types of apprenticeships—as though implying that if you are not doing a Rolls-Royce or a BT apprenticeship, it is somehow second class. We need people in the catering industry and I know that it is fashionable to mock McDonald's but it has a damn good training and apprenticeships scheme. You can progress through to management and get a foundation degree, so there should be a little less focus on implying somehow that those are the only apprenticeship programmes which count. They are not, but we need to ensure that every apprenticeship programme has proper training and educational elements to it. We have all the necessary measures in place to achieve that.

I hear what the Government are saying about apprenticeships, but some of their actions are unfortunate in that they undermine their intentions. It was unfortunate that the Government decided to do away with the guarantee that we had in a previous Education Act that by 2013 every young person who wanted an apprenticeship would receive one. It was an ambitious target, I freely admit, and we might not have achieved it, but it was a real signal of intent, of commitment, by a Government to ensure that we did not waste another generation of young people by leaving them unemployed. This Government really ought to reconsider that because it was the wrong signal to give.

I am also puzzled why, every time they issue a government contract, the employers who benefit from those contracts do not have to indicate how many apprentices they will recruit and what training programmes they have. It does not cost any money to do that, and if the Government are serious about trying to engage more employers then, for the life of me, I am baffled why they have not continued with that.

The comments that have been made suggest that, somehow, only private sector apprenticeships count. That is not true. There are lots of very good public sector apprenticeships. I have a concern about the Government’s economic policy. I do not want this to be a debate where we try to score points off each other, because we can do that in debates about whether we believe in the Government’s current economic policy, but the plain fact of the matter is that, unfortunately, we now have 43,000 more young people unemployed.

We are in a situation where we have to do everything we possibly can. The points that I have made about apprenticeships are practical and I hope that the Government will give them serious consideration. We, too, welcome in general the Wolf report and the recommendations contained therein. I look forward to hearing the Minister’s response.

Apprenticeships

Lord Young of Norwood Green Excerpts

Wednesday 9th February 2011 Lords Chamber

Asked By

[Lord Young of Norwood Green]

To ask Her Majesty’s Government what steps they are taking to maximise the number of apprenticeships for 16 to 18 year-olds.

[The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Schools (Lord Hill of Oareford)]

My Lords, the Government are strongly committed to investment in apprenticeships for 16 to 18 year-olds. The latest data show that 116,800 young people started an apprenticeship in 2009-10, a 17.5 per cent increase on 2008-09, and we are keen to see continued growth. Some 60 per cent of the overall apprenticeship budget for 2010-11 is for 16 to 18 year-olds. We expect there to be more than 131,000 16 to 18 year-olds starting an apprenticeship in 2010-11. Funding for 16 to 18 apprenticeships will increase by a further £19 million in 2011-12.

[Lord Young of Norwood Green]

I thank the Minister for his Answer. I was impelled to ask this Question as this is National Apprenticeship Week, as I am sure he is aware, and we have record levels of youth unemployment. The previous Government achieved a record number of apprenticeships, rising from 65,000 to nearly 280,000. I am glad to see that there will be an increase in spending. The Government are asking businesses to co-operate in recruiting apprentices but what pressure are the Government putting on government departments and local authorities to recruit apprentices, especially in the 16 to 18 years range?

[Lord Hill of Oareford]

I am grateful to the noble Lord for raising the Question in National Apprenticeship Week, as he said. I am very aware that few people in this House have done more to promote the cause of apprenticeships than him. I know that he takes a personal interest in this. During his time as a Minister, he and his ministerial colleagues did a lot to get apprenticeships taken seriously again and to increase the number of them. I personally, and the Government generally, are keen to build on that. In National Apprenticeship Week, we have already seen a number of employers in the private sector coming forward with new apprenticeship schemes. The Government should absolutely keep up the pressure on the public sector to do so. There is an exemption on apprenticeship recruitment in government departments—that is one way we can help. However, I agree with him that we all need to keep up the pressure. I would be very keen to work with him and other noble Lords to raise the profile of apprenticeships and do what we can to encourage the provision of more places.