Thank you for your statement. I think it's really important that we look at this with a very hard-nosed approach, because there's been a lot of concern recently about young people being encouraged to go into university education, which doesn't actually give them the sort of skills they need to get a decent job, and that all it does is load them with a lot of debt. So, there's quite a moral hazard there in terms of what universities may be doing in the case of some young people who, actually, are not going to get what they need out of university education. And it seems to me that apprenticeships are a way in which we somehow re-engineer the UK economy, which is far too overbalanced by the emphasis on what goes on in the City of London and the financial services industry, as opposed to what needs to be going on in manufacturing, particularly in new industries as new technology changes and evolves.

I have a particular concern about the numbers of women going into higher paid areas of the economy. Obviously, there are quite a lot of women going into apprenticeships, but they tend to be in the lower paid jobs like childcare and hairdressing. Whilst, obviously, childcare is a fantastically important career, it's not where the money is to be made. In the meantime, there's a huge need for precision skills in construction and engineering. It doesn't require you to be physically strong, it requires you to be precise and have good design skills. It's noticeable that there are only 360 female apprentices, compared to 8,300 men. That's one woman for every 23 male. You get the opposite story in healthcare and public services. 

So, I just wondered if you agree with the suggestion that there could be positive action, such as reserving places for protected groups who are under-represented in particular fields, or whether ensuring that, where there are equally good candidates, we take the one who is under-represented. Equally, I think it's of concern that there's a really small number of people with disabilities registered as doing apprenticeships, because it seems to me that they may have a disability but that doesn't mean they aren't very well qualified to do a lot of different types of apprenticeships. Only 1.5 per cent of those on apprenticeships are, I believe, disabled. 

The area that I'm particularly interested in, as well as the construction and engineering industries, where I think new ways of construction require those precision skills—there's also the need for new skills to enable us to add value to the food industry. We're very good at being primary producers of food, but we're not so good at actually processing it here in Wales to enable us to add value to the Welsh economy rather than to somebody else's economy. I just wondered if you could give us any indication as to how we could improve the numbers of apprenticeships going into new forms of irrigation, understanding how computers can be tracking what the soil balance is, and additives—these are all things that require precision skills and certainly don't require you to be necessarily physically strong.