Clause 4
Education and Skills Bill
6:45 pm
John Hayes (Shadow Minister, Innovation, Universities and Skills; South Holland and The Deepings, Conservative)
The explanatory notes say that the clause
“defines appropriate full-time education or training as efficient full-time education or training suitable to the person’s age, ability, aptitude and any learning difficulty they have, provided at a school, college of further education or otherwise.”
My hon. Friend the Member for Bognor Regis and Littlehampton drew this to my attention. We want the Minister to comment on "otherwise". It is certainly true that some full-time education and training currently provided would struggle to meet the definition in those explanatory notes.
We have talked about the test for the kind of education that we discussed at length today—vocational education in particular—as being its likelihood to provide the trainee with increased job opportunities and greater employability. That seems to me to be a test on which the whole Committee can agree. If a qualification does not confer real competence and does not teach and test practical skills, it does not meet the definition in the clause. There is evidence that a substantial number of qualifications do not add to employability.
I wish at this juncture to highlight the effect that certain training has on the employability of young women. There is a substantial disparity between the outcomes for young women and for young men in pre-apprenticeship training and apprenticeship training itself, as the Minister will know. Some academic research, including that by Professor Lorna Unwin, who gave evidence to the Committee, suggests that there may be no benefit to women who study apprenticeships—level 2 apprenticeships in particular—in sectors such as retail and hospitality. The sectors in which employability is increased most significantly tend to be those that disproportionately train young men, such as engineering and construction.
While the economic outcomes of apprenticeships and other training vary enormously, the gain in wages for men who complete an apprenticeship is about 7 per cent. for the system overall and about 14 per cent. for level 3 apprenticeships. Level 3 apprenticeships are equivalent to the level that all apprenticeships used to be at, which we now call advanced apprenticeships. For women, the results are much less impressive. There is a positive return for vocational qualifications at level 3 and above, but there is no statistically significant return for many women in completing a level 2 apprenticeship in the service sectors that I have described.
The clause states that the training provided should be suitable
“to the person’s age, ability and aptitude”.
However, and as we discussed earlier, the lack of adequate advice means that some young people do not get the kind of match that they need between their aptitude and ability and the training provided. That matching is very important. In speaking about apprenticeships earlier, the Minister talked about the matching service and I welcomed that new direction. Nevertheless, if we are going to pass the Bill into law with the stipulation that the training must meet people’s aptitudes and skills and reflect their abilities, tastes and strengths, it is important that we be absolutely certain that the training provided will do the job.
I hope that the Minister will give us some assurances about the changes he envisages being made to ensure that the clause’s stipulated requirements can be met—not just in theory or as an ambition, but as a reality for young people. In the eyes of many, the Bill puts the cart before the horse. It establishes compulsory participation before the system has been reformed sufficiently to provide training of a quality in line with the requirements in clause 4. I hope that the arguments that we have put forward throughout the Committee’s deliberations will go some way toward encouraging the Government to bring the horse back before the cart and to reform the system properly, instead of creating extra pressures and demands on the unreformed system, which will surely lead to disaster.