Education Bill

Debate between Lord Young of Norwood Green and Baroness Gibson of Market Rasen

Wednesday 14th September 2011 Grand Committee

[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.