Meeting of the Parliament 08 October 2025
I am sorry, but I need to make some headway.
The courses are offered on limited and inflexible days, so apprentices’ work weeks are inefficient, and their travel and childcare expenses are increased as a result. Employers that can afford to do so have therefore started using private training providers to overcome those problems and to develop bespoke courses. Private training providers can afford the latest equipment and will teach specific skills, such as how to install a heat pump, for example, rather than the college doing so. The college will include heat pumps as part of a broader plumbing course that does not necessarily meet the needs of that apprentice. In some cases private training provision is questionable, while in other cases it works well.
I spoke to one apprentice who was apprenticed to a local authority. The local authority had designated itself as both employer and training provider. The apprentice had no formal training standards or provision, and she had no one to turn to in order to complain about that state of affairs. She had no independent evaluation of her learning or of the quality of training that she was receiving. If she complained to the local authority about the poor training provision, she risked failing her apprenticeship—and we are failing apprentices like her.
I have already spoken in the chamber about the gender disparities among apprenticeships and, I suspect, in college course provision, too. Men get apprenticeships that put them into well-paid sectors. Women are channelled into low-paid sectors, which may trap them for a lifetime of inequality. We cannot support that on the public dime.
Mechanisms must be put in place to ensure that women have an equal opportunity to gain skills and employment in well-paid sectors. It begs the question of why we use public money to support certain apprenticeship and college courses at all, if the result is—