How do you value a library?

Here is a question I encounter all too often as Shadow Minister for Culture: how do you value a library? There are a few ways of doing it. You can look at profit and loss: by that measure libraries, along with many other public services, are a dead weight. You can widen the criteria to…

University, but what next?

Melanie Aplin

A generation ago, school leavers chose to go to university giving considerable thought to what they would enjoy studying for three years and perhaps less thought to where it might lead them in terms of a career. In the majority of cases, it was a given that, with a university degree, there would be little…

Life after Gove

Fiona Millar

Is there such thing as life after Gove? The current education secretary’s ceaseless and frenetic activity sometimes makes this hard to believe. But one day he will be gone and the chances are that a Labour government will have to pick up the pieces. The stand-out issues that must be faced are becoming clearer. How…

The five giants: Ignorance

Estelle Morris

The terminology is different but 70 years after the Beveridge report, ‘ignorance’ is still a giant to be slain. In the decades since the report the lives of hundreds of thousands of people have been transformed by the opportunities that came from the post-war education and welfare reforms. Despite this, we have never broken the…

Giving a voice to apprentices

Tricia Harley

Last year, the Campaign for Learning did a piece of research for Pearson into why some employers don’t get involved with apprenticeships. The results were pretty depressing. The in-depth telephone interviews we did revealed several reasons why some employers hadn’t taken on apprentices in the past and seemed unlikely to do so in future. I’ll…

Apprenticeships: the ethnic minority gap

Vicki Butler

Despite their high unemployment rates, ethnic minority young people are far less likely to have a place on an apprenticeship than white young people. Given the need to tackle the unacceptably high unemployment rates of this group, along with the emphasis all parties are placing on the importance of apprenticeships, this is a real missed…

The business case for apprenticeships

Nigel Milton

Heathrow Airport is one of the largest employment sites in the UK and apprenticeships are vital to our plans for the future. Over 75,000 staff are employed at Heathrow, 10 per cent work for us as the airport operator, the rest for airlines, shops and other businesses based at the airport. Heathrow support many more…

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