Delivering 100,000 more apprenticeships

On 29 May 2024, the Conservatives announced we will deliver 100,000 more apprenticeships by the end of the next parliament and we will pay for this by cutting low-value degrees which make people poorer.  


We want young people to secure the best opportunities with a good well-paid job which means we need to crack down on university degrees which make people poorer at the expense of the taxpayer.

  • That is why we have set out a clear plan to deliver 100,000 more apprenticeships per year by the end of the next parliament, funded by changing the law to close the poorest performing university courses. This will make sure we continue with the rollout of our successful apprenticeship program which since 2010 has seen over 5.8 million people get the skills and opportunities they deserve. 
  • This bold action will ensure young people have the skills they need to get good, secure jobs. Labour would halve the number of apprenticeships and take young people back to square one.

We are doing this by:

  • Delivering 100,000 more apprenticeships every year by the end of next parliament, securing opportunities for young people. Thanks to our reforms 70 per cent of occupations are covered by apprenticeships but we will go further by expanding the number of apprenticeships with 100,000 more every single year by the end of the next parliament, securing opportunities for the future. 
  • Delivering almost 5.8 million apprenticeships since 2010 and getting more disadvantaged students into university. Since we came into office there have been almost 5.8 million apprenticeships starts, with over 752,000 people participating in an apprenticeship in England between August 2022 and January 2023 alone. In 2023, the number of disadvantaged students applying to the most selective universities continued to rise following a record number of disadvantaged students accepted in 2022 (Explore Education Statistics, Apprenticeships and traineeships, 8 June 2023, link; BBC News, 26 October 2023). 
  • Reforming apprenticeships to boost uptake and cut red-tape for businesses. We are already fully funding young people (up to the age of 21) to do an apprenticeship in SMEs, increasing the amount of money apprenticeship levy payers can give to SMEs to hire an apprentice and putting all apprenticeships on UCAS so young people can compare apprenticeships in the same way they would a university degree.  
  • Closing university courses that make students poorer, driving up values for taxpayers money and securing the opportunities that people deserve. One in five courses make people poorer so our new law would grant new powers to the universities regulator to close courses that are underperforming and have the highest dropout rates. Every penny saved will be invested into new apprenticeship opportunities. 

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Nick Herbert on his visit to flood hit areas of Cumbria

Please note that the post below was published more than ten year ago on 21st November 2009 Nick Herbert MP, shadow cabinet member for the Environment, Food, and Rural Affairs, was in Cumbria this morning to see the areas affected by the flooding. He writes on Conservative Home about his visit. Here is an extract. I’ve been in Cumbria today to see the areas affected by the floods. I arrived early in Keswick where I met officials from the Environment Agency. Although the river levels had fallen considerably and homes were no longer flooded, the damage to homes had been done. And the water which had got into houses wasn’t just from the river – it was foul water which had risen from the drains. I talked to fire crews who were pumping flood water back into the river, and discovered that they were from Tyne & Wear and Lancashire. They had been called in at an hours’ notice and had been working on the scene ever since, staying at a local hotel. You cannot fail to be impressed by the
Read more

Quotes of the day 19th August 2020

Image
"Wise men profit more from fools than fools from wise men; for the wise men shun the mistakes of fools, but fools do not imitate the successes of the wise."  ( Cato the Elder , who lived 234 BC - 149 BC, quoted in "Lives" by Plutarch.) There is a similar saying by Germany's Iron Chancellor, Otto von Bismarck: Benjamin Franklin is supposed to have put the same saying in a more humorous form: "Wise men profit by the mistakes of others, while fools will not learn even from their own blunders." See also this thread on the "Quote Investigator" website . Let us all be wise and learn from the events of the last few days.
Read more

Quote of the day 24th July 2020

Image
I was moved to put the passage below forward as a quote today when I saw a horrible post on twitter from someone writing that it was "excellent" that someone who took a different view from her about Brexit had died. I won't write which way round it was so that all the Remain supporters can assume the post was from a Brexit fanatic welcoming the death of a remainer and all the Leavers can assume it was a Remainiac welcoming one less Brexiteer. There's been plenty of nasty stuff on both sides but if you catch anyone of your own viewpoint  posting something like that who might listen to you, please do call them out on it - and point out that they're giving everyone on your side of the argument a bad name. Anyway, here's the quote from John Donne.
Read more