Lord Layard (Lab)

My Lords, this amendment aims to remedy one of the greatest injustices in our whole education system: the acute shortage of apprenticeships for young people not going to university. If you qualify for university and want it, you can expect to find a place. However, if you qualify for an apprenticeship and want it, you have no such luck. On the Government’s matching scheme for apprenticeships, only one in three people applying finds a place. There is a more shocking fact, from which all thoughts about post-school education should start: by age 18, one in three of all our young people has ceased to receive any education or training. That one in three is of course nearly two in three of the people not going to university. That is how we are treating them—they are either NEET or in a dead-end job without training, heading for low productivity and low pay. The main reason for that is the shortage of apprenticeships. This situation is a disaster for the economy—it is the major reason for our low economic growth—and it is a disaster for our young people. It is the prime duty of the state to give everybody a proper start in life and we are simply failing: we are not doing it. We have talked about this problem for years, but the scale of apprenticeship opportunities for school leavers today is no better than it was in 2009. However, in that year, the previous Labour Government took a major step to remedy the situation. They passed the apprenticeships Act 2009, which obliged the Government to ensure that there were enough places for all 16 to 18 year-old qualified applicants for apprenticeships up to level 3. That would have changed everything, but, unfortunately, it was almost immediately repealed by the coalition Government.