Asked by: Alan Brown (Scottish National Party - Kilmarnock and Loudoun)
Question to the Department for Education:
To ask the Secretary of State for Education, with reference to the 2018-19 Main Estimates, how much funding his Department has allocated to prepare for the UK to leave the EU.
Answered by Anne Milton
Her Majesty’s Treasury (HMT) has already allocated over £2 billion of additional funding to departments and the devolved administrations for EU exit preparations so far. This includes the £1.5 billion of additional funding HMT announced at Autumn Budget 2017 for 2018/19. A full breakdown of how this was allocated to departments can be found in the Chief Secretary’s Written Ministerial Statement, HCWS540, laid on the 13 March: https://www.parliament.uk/business/publications/written-questions-answers-statements/written-statement/Commons/2018-03-13/HCWS540/. This money will be paid out in Supplementary Estimates 2018/19 later this financial year.
Asked by: Alan Brown (Scottish National Party - Kilmarnock and Loudoun)
Question to the Department for Education:
To ask the Secretary of State for Education, what progress the Government has made on plans to create three million apprenticeships by 2020; and if he will make a statement.
Answered by Anne Milton
There have been 1.4 million apprenticeship starts since May 2015. Whilst we do want to see an increasing number of apprenticeship starts, we will not sacrifice quality for quantity. We continue to work closely with employers to help them take advantage of the changes to grow their apprenticeship programmes, and to meet our target.
The government is moving away from old apprenticeship frameworks, which employers said were often not suitably equipping apprentices for the job, towards new and higher quality apprenticeship standards with a longer average duration, designed by employers themselves. Compared to this time last year, the expected average number of training hours per apprenticeship has increased by over 20 per cent - from 540 hours to 670.
Starts on apprenticeships standards continue to grow; latest data on apprenticeships in England show there have been 119,500 starts on standards in the first three quarters of the 2017/18 academic year; more than 10 times higher than the 11,000 reported at this time last year (2016/17). This represents just over 40 per cent of all starts reported in the 2017/18 academic year, compared to 2.5 per cent in 2016/17.
In May 2018 we published an update on the progress of apprenticeships reforms, including progress towards the apprenticeships target in England. This can be found at: https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/707896/Progress_report_on_the_Apprenticeships_Reform_Programme_May_2018.pdf.
Asked by: Alan Brown (Scottish National Party - Kilmarnock and Loudoun)
Question to the Department for Education:
To ask the Secretary of State for Education, what steps the Government plans to take to ensure that the demographic and skills requirements of the economy in (a) Scotland and (b) the rest of the UK are met when the UK leaves the EU.
Answered by Anne Milton
The UK Government is investing to create a skills system that enables the UK to compete with the best in the world - and can respond to Brexit as well as other labour market challenges.
As an example, in England we are introducing technical education reforms, backed by additional funding of £500m each year, to create a world-class post-16 technical education system that will give people the technical skills that employers need.
Skills policy is a devolved matter so I am unable to advise on any specific skills strategy in Scotland as that would be for the Scottish Government.