Kirstie Donnelly explains why she thinks the teaching of soft skills need to be incorporated more into apprenticeships and wider vocational training.

Soft skills get little respect but can make or break your career, according to American leadership coach Peggy Klaus in her book ‘The Hard Truth about Soft Skills’, and it’s a mantra we would do well to adopt over here.

The jobs market in the UK may be picking up, but employers tell us that they are still struggling to find young people with critical skills they need, such as creativity and problem-solving.

It’s no secret that our education system is not currently preparing young people adequately for the world of work.

Somehow we have lost our way and education and employment has become disconnected — it’s time that we resolved this.

We know that this conundrum is partly why the currently the Government has put such a huge amount of effort into remaking the current apprenticeship system.

Currently we have a crazy situation where we have people without jobs and jobs without people — this has to change

The theory is that allowing employers to take control and reshape the system will help them get the skilled workers they need.

However, to make this work we must make sure that core transferable skills are embedded into these apprenticeships giving young people the skills they need to progress throughout their careers.

Additionally, teens need at least basic employability skills to even enter into an apprenticeship in the first place.

‘Employability’ is the buzzword of the moment — even our friends in higher education have begun to track their success at finding jobs for their young people.

Coming out of education with a piece of paper is no longer enough, young people really do need to have the ‘skills to pay the bills’.

And the current NEET [Not in Education, Employment, or Training] stats ably demonstrate that — one in 10 young people is still locked out of employment.

We can’t allow this to continue.

The City & Guilds Alliance commissioned Bill Lucas and Ellen Spencer to carry out research to consider how we embed employability skills in an FE setting, from traineeships to apprenticeships and beyond.

‘Learning to be Employable’ identifies the key attributes employers look for and a set of supporting transferable skills such as communication, self-management and problem-solving.

Similarly to the apprenticeship reforms, ‘Learning to be Employable’ identified that the biggest catalyst for change will be joint action from business, educators and the Government.

Developing partnerships will be key to sharing best practice, learning from mistakes, and ultimately demonstrating joined up thinking to ensure that young people are properly prepared for the modern work environment.

And this is something we desperately need to get right.

Currently we have a crazy situation where we have people without jobs and jobs without people — this has to change.

It’s why we have worked with employers to rework apprenticeships during the reforms and create curriculums such as our new TechBac which have those all-important employability skills baked in.

With the Government’s increased focus on the apprenticeship agenda through their target of delivering 3m by 2020, there has never been a better time to continue to stimulate debate.

This should be around the quality and delivery of apprenticeships, and other vocational routes, to ensure they are providing young people with a successful pathway into the career of their choice and equipping them with the most vital employability skills. That’s why we are all here after all.

Visit www.cityandguilds.com/learningtobeemployable to read the research.

 

Kirstie Donnelly is the managing director of City & Guilds UK

John Hyde calls for as demand-led apprenticeship funding allocation system.

The Government’s target for 3m apprenticeship starts in this parliament was well trumpeted throughout the election campaign.

One would have assumed the civil servants concerned with apprenticeships would have planned how to implement this election promise by securing funding from the Treasury to meet this growth.

Internal systems for contracting and funding should have been reviewed to ascertain if they were suitable to manage and deliver this growth, and any barriers to achieving this target removed.

Given the current state of affairs, the Conservative electoral victory was as a big surprise to them as it was to the rest of us, including the pollsters.

However, that was last June and it would appear the opportunity to obtain funding to meet a manifesto promise and to review the systems needed to guarantee the delivery of the election promise has been missed.

The failure at the first growth review last month to fund additional 16-18 year old apprentices sent shock waves around the sector.

The main deterrent to achieving growth is the current allocation system

Ironically growth funding was available for the 19+ group, but internal rules prevented funding being transferred.

So do internal processes and procedure take precedent over a manifesto promise and political will?

To persuade an employer to involve their business with the apprenticeship programme usually takes considerable time.

It is a big decision for any company, whether small, medium, or large employer, involving most decision makers within the organisation.

From the initial consultancy meeting to an apprenticeship actually starting their programme usually takes several months, especially if the recruitment of an apprentice is also involved.

Planning ahead, training providers usually have a pipeline of future leads and potential starts as well as detailed charting of current apprentices progress and completion dates.

Let’s hope they are not just trusting to luck the 3m will be achieved in the final two years when the levy has kicked in, or failing that by the public sector being coerced to help meet the target.

Two thirds of apprenticeships are delivered by small and medium sized companies and they will be need to contribute to this growth, although currently we have no idea how they will be funded in the brave world of the apprenticeship levy.

The main deterrent to achieving growth is the current allocation system which does not provide for any growth.

Funding is allocated each year based on a formula applied to the volumes achieved in March at period eight.

Therefore, any growth achieved in the final quarter is not added to the new contract from August onwards.

This means every year a provider, who has achieved growth in the final quarter of the previous year, will start the new contract year with insufficient funding for their current cohort and have to wait until the first growth point, four months in, before even considering any additional growth.

This puts all the risk onto providers to achieve this growth and we hear this allocations system will remain in place for at least two years after the levy is introduced.

This problem is further compounded by the reduction of contract management staff at SFA with no one available to discuss a growth case on its merits, just allocation by computer.

To further complicate the situation, the SFA seems reticent to claw back under-delivery from certain providers, and in so doing has created a market in sub-contracting.

Many providers refused growth now have insufficient funding to support apprentices already on programmes.

Unscrupulous brokers, who exist to take advantage of a system that is not managed effectively, appear by magic.

How do these brokers find out the names of providers who have had their growth cases refused? They offer, usually for a 3 to 5 per cent one-off fee. Is this any way to run an allocations system?

Unless the SFA/EFA can implement a demand led system of funding allocation, there could be a serious problem that the current methodology will defeat the manifesto promise.

 

John Hyde is the chairman of HIT Training

Harvey Young explains why, in his view, the Government is wrong to obsess over apprenticeships and should look to improving basic skills to improve national productivity.

The BIS Select Committee’s report on the Government’s productivity plan raised several concerns about the lack of focus on a variety of policy areas, including apprenticeships, but what has escaped most attention was the call to address the poor level of basic skills in the workforce.

The committee concluded that the plan “does not provide specific or measurable actions to solve the problem of the lack of basic skills in the economy”.

It recommended that the Government should outline what policies will be put in place to improve basic workforce skills and to clearly state how they will contribute towards enhanced productivity.

This was the very first recommendation of the report, aptly reflecting the fact that the basis of all productivity is founded on having good competencies in both English and maths.

There are millions of employees who will not be suitable for an apprenticeship

The recent trend in skills policy development to tackle sluggish productivity appears geared towards putting all the eggs in the apprenticeships basket.

I frequently meet with employers who tell me their workforce lack critical skills, and that an apprenticeship is often not appropriate for their workers, many of them middle-aged with families.

If the Government is serious about raising the country’s productivity, there needs to be recognition that there are millions of employees who will not be suitable for an apprenticeship.

A comprehensive strategy must be launched to tackle this, as the committee explicitly pointed out.

The productivity gap between Britain and our international competitors is estimated to be the biggest since records began in the 1990s.

Recent Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) figures suggest 9m working age people in England do not have sufficient literacy and numeracy skills.

The Government argues the surge in new apprenticeships will help improve literacy and numeracy proficiency.

This fails to acknowledge that they are aiming to create 3m new apprenticeships by 2020 which, if all assigned to the current workforce with poor literacy and numeracy, would still leave out 6m people in desperate need of basic skills training.

There is no doubt apprenticeships bring significant advantages, helping young people move into work, thereby bringing down stubbornly high rates of youth unemployment.

However, solely relying on apprenticeships fails to address the millions of older workers who form a huge chunk of the labour market.

Furthermore, many apprenticeships require a minimum standard of English and maths, meaning workers with existing poor functional skills cannot be considered for a training position.

There must be firm policies in place to cater to this group, otherwise we run the risk of a generational gap between older employees and those entering the workforce for the first time.

English and maths training for adults in the workplace is a great way of boosting employees’ basic skills without disrupting their day to day work.

Employers tell me how their staff are more motivated and time taken to carry out basic tasks is slashed.

In research commissioned by BIS, Ipsos Mori found that 11 per cent of employers with a basic numeracy skills gap reported that they incurred costs through lower sales or lower profit margins. Furthermore, 52 per cent of employers said that following basic skills training for their employees, they were able to introduce new, more technical processes which help increase efficiency.

Workplace learning clearly increases the performance of businesses across the UK, which contributes to a more productive workforce.

The Government needs to support this part of the skills sector through ring fenced budgets and support for colleges who would like to fund this critical element of training.

Critics argue that previous workplace learning programmes have not led to any notable gains in literacy and numeracy.

As someone who has been involved in these programmes, I would argue it is not that they necessarily failed, but that in-work learning was poorly targeted and there was not a comprehensive strategy to deal with the sheer scale of the problem.

 

Harvey Young is chairman of the National Consortium of Colleges and Providers