Lord Browne of Belmont – 2016 Parliamentary Question to the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills

The below Parliamentary question was asked by Lord Browne of Belmont on 2016-02-25.

To ask Her Majesty’s Government what steps they have taken to ensure that young people gain key transferable skills in order to increase their future employment opportunities.

Baroness Neville-Rolfe

This Government is taking a series of important steps to help young people gain a good broad education with transferable skills such as literacy and numeracy, as well as employability skills from work experience.

This includes our reforms to GCSEs to ensure that they are more stretching and provide greater assurance of core literacy and numeracy than the old GCSEs. We are also reforming Functional Skills to improve the rigour and relevance of these qualifications as well as improving their recognition among employers. The new Functional Skills qualifications will be ready to teach in 2018.

As of August 2015, the condition of funding has been revised, so all 16-18 year old full-time students starting their study programme who have a grade D GCSE or equivalent in maths or English must be enrolled on a GCSE or approved IGCSE qualification in maths or English to work towards attaining a good pass.

We have also built English and maths into the heart of traineeships and apprenticeships to ensure that young people have the literacy and numeracy skills needed by employers. Our traineeship programme is supporting 16-24 year olds to gain the skills and work experience they need to be able to compete for apprenticeships and other jobs. In addition, all of the new employer-led apprenticeship standards must demonstrate acquisition of transferable skills and offer more than just training for a single job or employer. Standards must ensure that an apprentice can adapt to a variety of roles, with different employers, developing the ability to progress in their careers.