1. What action is the Welsh Government taking to improve the employment prospects of school leavers in Wales? OAQ55168

Llywydd, I thank the Member for the question.

During this Senedd term, the Welsh Government will create 100,000 new, high-quality apprenticeships, strengthening the repertoire of actions we take to help school leavers and others into skilled employment.

Thank you very much for that answer, First Minister. Figures show that about 10 per cent of 16 to 18-year-olds in Wales are not in work, education or training. In England, people have to study or train until they're 18, either going to college or sixth form, doing an apprenticeship or studying part-time while working or volunteering. The Institute for Public Policy Research says that a similar mandatory two years learning requirement, with core skills participation, should be introduced in Wales. First Minister, will you agree to study this report of the IPPR to see if taking the action they recommend will indeed improve the prospects of our young children and people getting good quality careers on leaving school in Wales please?

I thank the Member for that supplementary question. Of course, we'll look at all evidence, and this is a very longstanding debate that we've had over many years, as to whether or not compulsion is the best way to secure better routes into employment for young people, or whether the attractiveness of the offer is what we should reply upon. And, every time we've had this debate, we've come to the conclusion that it is better to put our focus on making sure that the range of opportunities for young people is compelling enough to make those young people want to go into the different routes to employment. 

And I think we can claim some success for that approach, Llywydd. We don't compel young people to do it, but our employment rates of young people in Wales are higher than those across the United Kingdom, and higher than those places where compulsion is the method that is used to secure those outcomes. I want the programmes we offer in Wales to be so good that young people will always find something that will assist them to turn their lives from where they are today to where they will want to be in the future. And while we will study evidence, of course, for now, we still prefer that way of assisting young people. 

As you'll be aware, the current national minimum wage for first-year apprenticeships is £3.90, and this is very low and can hinder people who have employability concerns, who will then want to take on or may have to take on other jobs as well as doing an apprenticeship. I understand that, in the past, there has been a reluctance to follow recommendations for a living support grant or bursary for low-income apprenticeships, over concerns that it will classed as a taxable benefit. But, given that most first-year apprentices are well below the basic tax rate threshold, I wouldn't have thought that this would be too much of an issue for you to begin to look into as a Welsh Government. 

So, what would you be able to do in this regard, and can you commit to looking into this issue, because many apprentices have raised this with me as an issue as to why sometimes they may be stopping going into this particular avenue of education?

Well, Llywydd, as a Government, we want to deal with any obstacles that young people face for taking up offers that they think will be of benefit to them. It's why we've retained educational maintenance allowances here in Wales, where they've been abolished elsewhere. I'm familiar with the technical arguments that there have been as to whether or not, if you were to pay apprentices in a particular way, they would find themselves losing that money because it would be clawed back by a different part of the system. Of course, we keep that under review, and I'm very happy to take a further look at it in the light of what the Member has said this afternoon. 

First Minister, the Construcciones y Auxiliar de Ferrocarriles train manufacturer in my constituency is a very welcome addition to the local economy, and it's been a pleasure to visit there and talk with management about the future of the plant. They do have one frustration—well, they may have more than one, but one frustration is the lack of women and girls coming forward to take engineering jobs at the plant. In the Basque Country, I think it's around half of their engineers who are women, but it's just a small number at the Newport works. They're working with local schools and colleges, but I just wonder what you could say in terms of Welsh Government's ambition to ensure that these opportunities are more open to our girls and women, and indeed employers have a wider talent pool to draw upon.

I thank John Griffiths for those important points. It was a pleasure to meet, with my colleague Ken Skates, with the whole of the CAF board when they came to Wales in the second half of last year. They came to our meeting directly from having met the workforce in Newport, and they were absolutely at pains to stress how impressed they were with the calibre of the people who'd been recruited to work for them in Newport, the commitment of those people to making a success of the new CAF enterprise there. But, of course, the point that John Griffiths makes is a more general one. We are making inroads into this agenda, Llywydd. When I met recently with Tata in Shotton, and with Airbus in Broughton, to meet their young apprentices, there were young women engineers in every group that we met. But they are still a minority. There are still far more young men who find themselves going down that route. We are committed to taking positive action to make those possibilities known to young women, accessible to young women, that there are role models there who they can see, and who they can follow, and to make it clear to them that careers in this part of the employment spectrum are as open to them in Wales as they would be to any other person.