Hansard

It is amazing how quickly apprenticeship week comes around each year. I am looking forward once again to hosting an event in the Parliament. It takes place next week, with the help of the Scottish Training Federation and Skills Development Scotland. I hope to see many members there. The event is not just an opportunity to talk about apprenticeships; it is an opportunity to meet some of the apprentices and to recognise some of their extraordinary skills. It is also an opportunity to hand out an award, so I hope that members will be there to see that.

Clearly, the Scottish Government is doing the right things. I was interested in Iain Gray’s comments about what happened in the past and the comparisons of the numbers. I do not want to get into that debate. What is important is that Skills Development Scotland is making sure that it knows what skills are required and doing its best to match the apprenticeships with the required skills. That is a pretty obvious piece of management across the nation, and I am grateful for it.

A number of businesses in my constituency take on apprentices. I will highlight two of them to the chamber and to ministers. Whittaker Engineering is a large, very specialised and very skilled business just outside Stonehaven, which provides extremely clever and well-engineered bits of kit to the oil industry. It has, I think, 23 modern apprentices, which gives members an idea of the scale of the operation. Whittakers is clued up on what to do with the apprentices. It is an extremely good and innovative employer, which I had the privilege to meet a few weeks back.

Even more recently, I went to a smaller business called Blaze Manufacturing Solutions in Laurencekirk. It, too, is a very sophisticated and skilled business, which provides fire and safety solutions largely, again, to the oil industry. When I asked about apprenticeships, Blaze made the point that, for a small business, it is difficult to find the information on apprenticeships. It just does not do that. It makes clever bits of kit; it does not have a large human resources department. Given the Government’s aspiration to get apprentices into small and medium-sized businesses, it might be wise for it to consider how the information is provided to businesses that are better at making widgets than they are at looking to see how such matters can be handled.

I heartily endorse Gordon MacDonald’s comments about pay rates, to which I have nothing to add, but I would like to bring to members’ attention the comments of the Civil Engineering Contractors Association with which, as convener of the cross-party group on construction, I have quite a lot to do. CECA is enthusiastic about foundation apprenticeships, which are being piloted in two regions. It feels that they are good, because they enable even younger folk to get involved. It seems to me that foundation apprenticeships offer a real opportunity to ensure that youngsters at school can get some real workplace experience and some understanding of what that industry might be about and of the opportunities that might exist in it by going somewhere once a week during their last two or three years at school rather than just when they leave school. Foundation apprenticeships will allow them to understand where such experience might lead and to gain some of the personal skills that are so important in getting on to an apprenticeship.

I note the comment that one of the supermarkets made that it recruits on the basis of personality and attitude, and that skills come afterwards. The ability to understand the workplace is important. Someone might have the right attitude, but they might not understand the workplace. Understanding what the world of work is about is extremely important to our youngsters. As an aside, I note that when my two children went on work placement as teenagers at school, they did not learn very much at all and it was not a terribly useful experience. I hope that foundation apprenticeships will turn out to be much more useful.

I turn to a subject that is a bit of a parliamentary hobby-horse of mine—research. In a relatively recent report, Audit Scotland made the point that it was quite difficult to evaluate the effectiveness of apprenticeships and, indeed, of many other of the training opportunities that we provide. Perhaps we need to encourage the Government to do more longitudinal studies on what happens in our society. Only by following a group of people—which will, necessarily, be relatively small; such a process costs money—through their teens, their 20s and maybe even into their 30s will we discover how effective such well-meaning and well-organised programmes are. Only by learning from that will we do better in the future.

In the meantime, I encourage the Government to carry on doing what it is doing. I think that foundation apprenticeships represent a serious opportunity and that they are to be commended. We need to promote gender balance, as has been mentioned; we need to improve as best we can the liaison between schools and industry; and we need to recognise that all apprenticeships build skills, build confidence and build our economy for the future.