Skip to main content

Apprenticeships - why Labour are wrong to scrap the Intermediate Apprenticeship

The Deregulation Bill is called as "Christmas Tree Bill". That is because it has lots of different baubles attached to it from a legislative basis. I happen to have been on the pre-legislative scrutiny committee for this as well as the regulatory reform select committee. In fact a lot of the issues in the Bill are both interesting and important.

Yesterday, for example, there was a discussion about Apprenticeships. These are important as they are a good route into work for young people. There has been a big growth in apprenticeships under this government. Labour have been critical because many of the apprenticeships are at NVQ level 2 rather than level 3 or 4. In fact about 60% are at level 2.

Labour, therefore, proposed an amendment to the bill to ban apprenticeships that are level 2 (ie scrap the Intermediate one, the Advanced one is Level 3 and the Higher one level 4).

I will hunt up the record of the debate from yesterday when it is published. However, I think that is wrong. It is not a bad idea to do what we can to increase the standards. However, there are over half a million young people on Intermediate Apprenticeships. Scrapping this type of apprenticeship is not something that seems to have merit to me.

It would be better to simply aim to increase the quality and skills involved without excluding people from the process.

The debate is here

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

NHS reorganisation No 3,493,233

Followers of my blog will have seen the NHS question about how many reorganisations have we had. We've yet another. The number of PCTs (Primary Care Trusts) nationally is to halve. This means merging East and North. (and then probably HoB and south). It would be nice if people would stick with one structure. There is a quotation ( Which sadly does not appear to be a true quotation ) We trained hard . . . but it seemed that every time we were beginning to form up into teams we would be reorganized. I was to learn later in life that we tend to meet any new situation by reorganizing; and a wonderful method it can be for creating the illusion of progress while producing confusion, inefficiency, and demoralization. But has to have been originated by someone. The web link shown goes through the derivation which appears to be more linked to an anonymous British Soldier WW2 than any Roman or Greek General called by a name perming 2 out of (Gaius, Galus, Petronius and Arbiter). From the...