Young people need a clear path to apprenticeships

A huge decision is imminent on how we should spend the apprenticeship levy.

Employers want to spend most of it on older workers and higher-level skills. But the top priority for public money should be young people – and craft-level skills like that of Keir Starmer’s father.

At present a third of all our youngsters are getting no education or training beyond age 17. This is so unfair on them, and it’s not their fault. If you qualify for higher education, you can expect to get in somewhere. But if you want a craft-based apprenticeship, only one in three applicants get a place.

This is truly shocking. It is a major reason for Britain’s low productivity and low pay – and incredibly the number of youth apprenticeships have been halved in the last 10 years.

That policy change is the result of muddled reasoning. Employers will always worry about taking on young people who may well leave once trained, so they would rather someone else did the initial training, while they do the in-service training. But that is precisely why the state has got involved in apprenticeship – to induce employers to give young people a proper start in life. This is in everybody’s interest as the social return is highest on youth apprenticeship.

Until the last decade the Apprenticeship Levy money could only be spent on young people. But when that rule was changed young apprenticeships halved while older, higher-level apprenticeships shot up. The losers have been the young working class.

For a Labour government it should be a top priority to reverse this trend. It was promised in the Labour manifesto, and it should be a decisive new commitment. In 2009 the previous Labour government’s Apprenticeship Act obliged the government to ensure that there were enough craft-level apprenticeship places for all qualified applicants aged 16-18. Under pressure from employers, the coalition government repealed it. That commitment should now be re-established, and ideally it should be extended up to age 21.

It is crucial that this objective be stated clearly – to be achieved “as soon as possible”. It will not be enough just to announce a number of places for the next few years. We can only change the prospects of young people with a clear view of how they can progress.

To make this happen, we should expect local authorities to assess the need for apprenticeship places (as they do for school places) and have a small staff to promote the supply of places, making it as unbureaucratic as possible.

We desperately need a budget that gives people hope. A clear path to apprenticeship would bring cheer to millions of young working-class people and their parents. If the prime minister’s father was able to become a craft-level apprentice, so should today’s generation of young people. It should be a top priority for any Labour government.

Richard Layard is a Labour peer and founder-director of LSE’s Centre for Economic Performance

Photograph by Richard Saker for The Observer