I can understand why many will welcome the government’s changes to reduce the minimum duration of apprenticeships from 12 to 8 months and remove the requirements for adult apprentices to pass functional English and maths qualifications to complete their apprenticeship.
It’s clear that some current apprentices don’t need the full 12 months to do their apprenticeship and that some employers are filtering out apprenticeship applicants who don’t already have functional skills. So these changes will better match people’s needs and open up opportunity more widely, right?
Wrong. England is already an outlier compared to apprenticeships in many other countries. Our apprenticeships are shorter than best practice countries like Germany, where they typically last two, three or four years. And they have less general education like English and maths. The OECD pointed out that general education in apprenticeships in England is limited to functional skills courses typically lasting around 100 hours in total. That compares to 400 hours in Switzerland, around 480 hours in Germany, and 588 hours in Norway.
So apprentices in England are getting at most one quarter of the general education of apprentices in other leading countries, and even this requirement is now going to be removed for apprentices aged 19 and over.
But the government’s kept the English and maths requirements for apprentices aged under 19, so isn’t that fine? No. One in five adults in England has low literacy or numeracy. This is woeful. It holds back people’s career prospects and their ability to access public services. And these skills are only going to become more important over time.
A recent OECD survey found that young people’s English and maths had improved over the last decade, the result in part of policy efforts to change this such as the condition of funding rule in further education. But adults’ scores had gone backwards, the product of reduced focus as government austerity led to a 63 per cent fall in adults completing English and maths qualifications.
With 80 per cent of our 2035 workforce having already left compulsory education, and the bar of skills required for life and work rising, we need a renewed focused on these fundamentals for all. Not to take a step backwards.
The net result of these changes will likely be more people completing apprenticeships than would otherwise have done so. But those apprenticeships will be of lower quality than they could’ve been and prepare them less well for their future careers.
That is not a trade-off we need to make. If something is important but not working, the answer surely is to fix it, not just give up on it.
We need investment to test new ways to help apprentices succeed in English and maths, a focus on building these skills into occupational learning so people can see the relevance, and to reflect the extra time that this all takes in funding and support for employers.
We also need to be clear about what an apprenticeship is and what it isn’t. It is meant to be a job with substantial training and about your future career not just your current job. In trying to make everything an apprenticeship, in part because people recognise the brand, in part because large employers wanted to recoup as much of their levy payments as possible, the last Government lost its way somewhat.
This Government has a chance to change that, with a more flexible Growth and Skills Levy allowing valuable training that’s not an apprenticeship to be funded and focusing apprenticeships on what they’re meant to be about.
These changes take us in the wrong direction. And they won’t ultimately benefit apprentices or employers. Lowering standards only gives the false illusion of raising opportunity.
The German system…for a start they have 342 recognised trades – whereas we have over 700 apprenticeship standards. Germany also has 30-50% off the job (typically a 2.5-3.5 year duration). Employers and trainers require a licence specific to the profession, not an army of generic assessors. They also have a completely different economy, heavy on industry and manufacturing (albeit with the high energy consumption & risk that goes with it), with over half of people by age 22 completing an apprenticeship.
Our system views skills, education and people primarily as a cost to be managed downwards or as a vehicle for a financial product (loans). Most other countries view education, skills and people as an investment to be managed upwards.
Having apprenticeships covering all occupations, ages, levels & abilities is just plain unrealistic. Tinkering with exit requirements and duration to get flattering numbers are indicators of a broken system.
Where entry requirements are needed, they should be pre-set and universally agreed, not left to the whim of specific employers or providers. (e.g. do you really want candidates with low Eng/maths on the Lvl 6 nuclear scientist standard? )
Whole heartedly agree, its a race to the bottom of the barrell where we find India, China and more emerging countries beating us hands down with untrained manual labour on pay rates we are unable to match. I work with a younger generation that are unable to convert Imperial sizes to metric in an engineering company and previously in a company developing the manufacturing technology for home grown Small Modular Reactors where despite the wealth of degrees owned by some of the design engineers they were unable to understand that an M6x1mm standard screw would not fit into a 1/4-20 UNC hole???
Do not get me started on the levels of knowledge of the engineering directors at some of these companies… it beggars belief.
We truly are a third world country pretending to be otherwise 🙁
I fully agree with the authors view and the comments. The change to functional skills is short sighted and misguided. The notion that it will enable growth in apprenticeships is ill informed, especially in sectors such as health and social care where this will remain a requirement for Level 6 standards. The decision flies in the face of widening participation from a Labour government where we expect more than merely appeasing employers.