- guardian.co.uk, Thursday June 14 2007 10.31 BST
The Conservatives have voiced their strongest intention yet that they will scrap the Learning and Skills Council (LSC) if they come to power.
All state-supported vocational training should be funded via local authorities, recommends a report by a party committee published in advance of Labour's unveiling of its "skills pledge" to improve training.
The government's full response to the Leitch review on skills, originally expected today, will be published later this year.
The report, which has the support of the Tory front bench, accepts Leitch's poor prognosis of the UK's skills and his proposal that publicly-funded training should be "demand-led". Employers and trainees should have a much greater say on what is taught at the taxpayer's expense, it says.
However, it envisages keeping the sector skills councils, bodies created by Labour, to represent the interests of employers.
The report by the party's Economic Competitiveness Policy Group, chaired by John Redwood, stresses the importance of apprenticeships but echoes the severe criticisms by John Hayes, shadow skills spokesman, of the current programme.
Though government figures show that increasing numbers of youngsters are doing apprenticeships, the numbers pursuing the level 3 "intermediate skills" qualification offered by the "modern apprenticeships" launched by the Tories in the mid-1990s are dropping, it says.
Some apprenticeships - for instance those in engineering - are of a high calibre, says the report, but trainees in sectors with no apprenticeship tradition are often denied the same level of technical education.
"This lack of consistency is reflected in the vastly differing lengths of time it takes to complete different apprenticeships," it says.
"Apprenticeships have been 'academicised' and we've ended up with virtual apprenticeships, tickbox tests that are taught in the classroom," Hayes said. "The brand has been weakened."
The Tories would "re-professionalise" apprenticeships to produce a standard of vocational education to match the A-level academic gold standard, he said.
Hayes believes that the 1.3 million "neets" - the 16 to 24-year-olds not in education, employment or training - is an indictment of further education under Labour.
"When Blair looks at his legacy he should look at the blighted and shattered lives of these young people and of their mums and dads."
Mark Haysom, the LSC's chief executive, said he was "puzzled" by the economic competitiveness report's recommendation to scrap the quango.
"Compared to what went before, the LSC now saves the taxpayer over £100m a year in administration and our running costs are a tiny fraction of the £10bn pounds we invest each year for the government in learning and skills."
