The apprenticeship levy was introduced to encourage employers to invest in the next generation of skilled workers. But in the face of reformed apprenticeship standards its flexibility has decreased, making adaptation to employers’ needs more difficult.
Combined with the complexity of apprenticeship administration, this puts many employers off using their levy.
In instances where the levy is used, it may be to upskill already highly qualified professionals rather than giving opportunities to new workers.
At The City of Liverpool College we’ve had to pivot and work creatively to meet these challenges.
We’ve worked with employers to create bespoke apprenticeship training courses which use existing standards but add additional training where required. This has included giving gas engineers and plumbers heat pump system training in our Vaillant green skills workshop, and training bricklayers in modern methods of construction in partnership with CITB and ABC Training.
We utilise other standards with enough transferrable skills and relevance as we make an inflexible system work for employers, often at our own cost as an expensive extra.
We also recognise that some employers need modularised training.
To counter this, we’ve created a programme of short courses funded via a mixture of adult skills funds, boot camps or at full cost.
These help employers upskill their workforce, particularly in areas like green skills and retrofit where we have learned that the skills that fit into the green agenda are not always those that we anticipated. Consequently, funding opportunities can be more difficult than they should be.
Overdue change
Expanding the range of foundational apprenticeships will introduce greater flexibility into the system and be a welcome move for training providers. But it may not go far enough for all employers.
The proposal that the levy be ring-fenced with half for apprenticeships and half for other forms of training, although fraught with danger for apprenticeships, could address some of the upskilling gaps that we as an education provider have encountered.
If parts of the levy were opened up for wider training, this could provide realistic levels of funding for courses which currently struggle significantly, such as engineering and welding, as large infrastructure projects with a green angle loom on the horizon.
At present, adult skills funding rates often do not reach the point at which such courses become viable.
Driving green skills agenda
The City of Liverpool College is currently one of only three FE colleges offering complex refrigeration and air conditioning apprenticeships and training programmes.
We work with Alstom UK, helping them upskill their engineers to refurbish air conditioning units on trains rather than replacing them, which drastically reduces carbon footprint.
We have also worked with Marshall Fleet Solutions to develop a shorter standard focused on mobile refrigeration units.
Whilst we can offer the full apprenticeship to any employer, we often cannot offer funded access to the shorter training courses.
Even if the levy is opened up to adult skills funding, this will not help in those sectors for which funding is too low to make courses viable. This means smaller and medium sized enterprises cannot take advantage of these training opportunities in the same way that larger employers with more resources can.
If the levy is opened up, it needs to be done in such a way that the system will not be abused and opportunity is widened for all.
The funding should be directed towards training which is currently beyond the reach of the SMEs that are the country’s backbone.
SMEs are being left behind by the way standards currently work. They do not have the capacity to absorb the additional costs of an apprentice learning on a programme that is not quite the right fit, or have the time to invest in creating an entirely new programme.
If the government wants to meet its green skills targets, it doesn’t need to win over huge companies. It needs to get onside the smaller, local companies that we call when the boiler breaks down.
No skill is inherently green, it’s the way skills are applied that is important.
The skills applied by a data analyst on a renewables project are the very same skills a data analyst would used on a fossil fuel project, just a different context.
We’ve reached the point where pretty much every skill can be described as being green as long as it can be demonstrated to have been used in a vaguely environmentally sustainable way.
May I propose the term ‘potentially green skill’ as a replacement?