Meeting of the Parliament 08 October 2025
I absolutely agree with Lorna Slater’s point about the importance of apprenticeships in delivering skills for the future.
The SNP’s response is to mess around with quangos, transferring responsibility for apprenticeships and national programmes from Skills Development Scotland to the Scottish Funding Council. It is hard to find any stakeholder who believes that that is the right move at the present time, and the transfer is likely to consume precious resources that could be spent elsewhere.
We need a restoration of funding to our colleges and apprenticeships, because they are vital to the economy of the future. They deserve investment, not cuts. That is what my motion calls for.
I move,
That the Parliament recognises that future economic growth is reliant on providing the right opportunities to create good jobs that allow businesses to expand; notes with concern the findings of the recent Audit Scotland report, highlighting a 20% real-terms cut in funding to the college sector over the past five years, and believes that this has a negative impact on the economy and limits opportunities for young people to get ahead; acknowledges the concern from business representative groups about the future of apprenticeships, and the harm that a restriction in apprenticeship numbers causes to job creation in Scotland, and calls on the Scottish Government to restore funding to Scotland’s colleges and raise the number of modern apprenticeship places from 25,507 in 2024-25 to at least the 34,000 identified by Skills Development Scotland as necessary to meet Scottish economic growth ambitions.