An OCR pilot in Kent is offering a group of 16 to 19-year-olds the same three-pronged approach as the government’s traineeships, writes Mark Dawe

About 958,000 (about 20 per cent) of 16 to 24-year-olds in the UK were out of work in the first quarter of 2013. While this is lower than in some EU countries, helping young people to take their first steps into the workplace is important for any economy and a responsibility for us all, including awarding bodies.

After nearly a year of discussion about a ‘pre-apprenticeship’ initiative to help young people bridge the gap between school or college and the workplace, Skills Minister Matthew Hancock published the framework for traineeships in May.

They start for 16 to 19-year-olds this September, with the possibility of an extension to 24-year-olds “in due course”. They will be structured around three core areas: work placements, work preparation training, and a focus on improving English and maths skills.

The employability skills qualifications that OCR provides, with functional skills and Cambridge progression qualifications in English and maths that feed into them, are all relevant to the new traineeships.
OCR will offer a ‘Cambridge traineeship’ package of qualifications and support for those who want the convenience of a
one-shop.

We are currently running a pilot with the Kent Association of Training Organisations (KATO) in Thanet and Gravesend, two areas of relatively high unemployment. The 35 young people recruited for the three-month pilot are being offered the same three-pronged approach: work experience, a focus on core English and maths skills (we have a diagnostic assessment tool to identify individual learner needs in this area), as well as work preparation (vocational skills courses and interview practice).

The pilot focuses on preparing young people to work in customer service and business administration in particular, with work experience in local employers, such as solicitors, retailers and GP surgeries.

By partnering with an organisation such as KATO, feedback from real training providers and learners can inform our planning. The pilot, although not identical, closely mirrors the traineeship programmes outlined by the government. If this shows that the programme works for 16 to 19-year-olds, it is more likely that the government will find a way to extend the initiative.

Those with other Skills Funding Agency and employability funding may be able to utilise various qualifications and/or units available within traineeships for those over 19, as many are already doing.

However traineeships are taken up from August, there is already an enormous amount of expertise in the work-based learning sector in ‘employability’ — the general skills and abilities that people need to get, keep and do well in any job. They are the skills that organisations, such as the Confederation of British Industry, say is lacking in many young people.

Demand for OCR’s employability skills qualifications has certainly grown in recent years and we are updating our qualifications to take account of new technologies and developments in the world of work.

With changes in funding, new targets, and uncertainty over contracts, these are challenging times for the work-based learning sector. OCR is keen to make its contribution and looks forward to providing an update on the impact of the Kent pilot.

Mark Dawe, chief executive of OCR

Millions of people today work in jobs that didn’t exist when their parents left education. It’s a new world that demands more coherent national and local careers provision, says Deirdre Hughes

We are facing a significant economic challenge; there is high unemployment (especially among young people) at the same time as employers struggle to recruit people with the skills they need. As careers diversify, this topic becomes more important and more challenging.

More complex careers, with more options in work and learning, are opening up new opportunities for many people. But they are also making career choices harder for young people and adults; make the wrong one and there are financial and emotional penalties.

About 1.09 million young people are not in education, employment and/or training (NEET), yet at the same time, according to the Confederation of British Industry, more than half of businesses are not confident that they will find sufficient recruits.

This is particularly acute in certain sectors that are vital to the growth of our economy; for example, 23 per cent of businesses face difficulty in getting experienced staff with expertise in science, technology, engineering and mathematics. As recent studies have shown, there is a mismatch between the career aspirations of young people and the reality of the jobs market.

We also have an ageing population with many adults having to work longer. Therefore, it is vital that we create more insights to job opportunities and areas for the development and growth of vocational skills. Something needs to be done — and quickly.

In this new world, people need access to reliable and relevant information about a jobs market that is undergoing rapid, dynamic change. They need, too, to be prepared by their schools, colleges and universities to be resilient to the uncertainties and opportunities of the flexible labour market. From the start, they need to understand and think through the options open to them in terms of their future careers. And they will need to repeat that process throughout their working lives.

The days when a careers adviser could guide a young person or adult into a job or occupation for life are long gone. The role has changed, as has the landscape of careers services. As well as public sector careers services, there are now private-sector consultants, employers, recruitment companies and learning providers, all contributing to a richly varied career development landscape.

Rapid technological developments — notably online provision — mean that our population needs career management and digital literacy skills to achieve sustained employability. There are real risks of social exclusion, particularly for young people and older adults unable to afford technology or with limited access to it. Life skills now include new ways of thinking about careers and the dynamic context in which they evolve. And the pace of change can only increase.

The National Careers Council challenges the government, employers, education and the careers sector to act boldly and decisively in framing a more coherent national and local careers offer for young people and adults. We need new ideas and approaches; we need high-performing career development and labour market policies and practices, involving the public, private and voluntary/community sectors.

A council report sets out seven recommendations that together would raise standards right across career support services. Based on a greatly strengthened partnership approach, they would help to shape a highly visible careers service to meet the needs of an aspirational nation. If the government acts on them, together we can create a movement to bring about a much needed culture change in careers provision for young people and adults.

Dr Deirdre Hughes OBE, chair National Careers Council

As a leader of a college judged outstanding by Ofsted, I was recently asked what pressures I faced from the structural changes to education and the harsh economic climate.

David Lewis College is one of 60 independent specialist colleges (ISCs) in the UK providing day and residential FE to around 3,000 students with a wide range of disabilities and challenging behaviours.

Students attend ISCs when all other options have been exhausted or shown not to be appropriate.

Our whole team — teachers, learning assistants, speech and language therapists, occupational therapists, physiotherapists, psychologists and a range of medical clinicians — are involved in planning, delivering and evaluating the impact of our students’ learning.

This multidisciplinary approach undoubtedly pays dividends as we manage, very successfully, our students’ learning, medical conditions and complex behaviours.

But it is obviously resource-intensive and comes at a cost. Most students require full-time one-to-one support from a learning assistant.

We feel it is an investment that is fair, proportionate and well worth making. It benefits not only our young people and their families but, ultimately, all of society by developing essential daily living skills and reducing lifetime NHS costs through improving the long-term prognosis of adults with complex medical needs.

How disappointing it was, then, to hear recently from one local authority commissioner that it does not want to pay for a “Rolls-Royce, when a Mini would do”.

At David Lewis we have had to manage cost carefully, having received no inflationary increase in funding for many years.

We believe that we offer exceptional value for money – a balance between quality and cost. But our definition of value is not one always shared by our partners. Many see only the cheapest option.

Under the guise of “austerity” are we starting to see a race to the bottom where the cheapest option for a local authority equates to the best option for a young learner?

Ultimately, is this how we want to provide further education for some of the most vulnerable young people?

The principal challenge that I face is trying to plan for the future of all our students against a background of change and what appears to be a developing reluctance by some local authorities to fund the FE of young people with a wide range of disabilities.

This creates uncertainty — for vulnerable young people and their families who have no idea whether they will be attending college in September or not, for ISC managers who do not know how many students to plan for, and for teachers and specialist support staff who do not know if they’ll have a job.

The new Children and Families Bill, the devolution of funding and the potential for every local authority to set its own funding criteria and different information and data in different forms, makes things far more complicated than they need to be.

It is, of course, for society to decide what level of investment, if any, we are prepared to make in our most vulnerable young people’s FE.

We then could plan in a coherent way, maximising the benefits that we can offer our vulnerable young learners and matching the available funding.

Local authorities have had at least 19 years to work with parents, to plan and decide whether a student will benefit from FE at an ISC and to budget for the costs. There should be no surprises and no uncertainty.

Billy McInally, director of education, David Lewis College, Cheshire

Barclays is determined that there should be more apprenticeships and that young people have the skills they need to be successful in work, writes Lynne Atkin.

Figures for the early part of 2012 suggest that the number of 16 to 18-year-olds entering apprenticeships is declining compared with the same time last year.

These figures highlight the ongoing challenge that school-leavers face when they move into the world of work, particularly as apprenticeships become more popular and more competitive.

While it’s great news that apprenticeships are on the rise overall, it’s vital that employers create opportunities for younger apprentices too.

From the employer’s perspective, the message we hear over and over again is that the barrier to hiring young people directly from school is their relative lack of skills and understanding of the workplace — three-quarters of employers have told us that school-leavers’ awareness of the business world is either poor or very poor.

But beneath this figure is a strong appetite to do more to prepare young people for the workplace.

Small businesses, however, are almost excluded from this for two reasons: the difficulty of establishing a relationship with a school and a cultural bias that stops students considering start-up and small businesses as attractive employers.

The truth is that employers can do a lot more to address the skills gap between school and work through initiatives such as offering work experience and working with training providers.

With training in essential workplace skills, and help navigating career options, school-leavers will stand a much better chance of achieving their job aspirations. Indeed, research from the Education and Employers Taskforce has found that young people who have skills training — such as CV writing or work experience — on average earn up to 18 per cent more than those without.

Barclays’ apprenticeship programme addresses the issue by including pre-apprenticeship training to ensure candidates are ready for their role from day one.

This must be followed up by on-the-job industry-specific training to prepare the recruit for a full-time job at the end of the apprenticeship.

This requires real investment, and the best way to maximise this investment is to ensure that there is a full-time job ready when the apprentice has reached the required skill level.

Recognising the appetite among smaller businesses for the structures and support to offer apprenticeships, we’ve recently launched the Bridges into Work programme, which aims to support employers across a broad spectrum of industries to create 10,000 apprenticeships by 2015.

But we realise that more has to be done if 16 to 18-year-olds are going to compete with their older, more experienced, counterparts.

To help build these foundations we’ve also launched LifeSkills, a curriculum-linked programme that helps young people in school develop the skills they need to be successful in work.

We’re bringing together schools, young people and local businesses with the goal of equipping one million young people by 2015 with the skills they need to be successful in the workplace. This includes creating 50,000 work experience opportunities this year alone.

I’m delighted that companies including McDonalds, Waitrose, ISS and Centrica, are already on board as partners, and we’d like to encourage businesses of all sizes to do the same, sign up and offer work experience.

When the age of participation is raised later this year, employers will have a real opportunity to help reduce strain on the FE system while developing their talent pools.

We recognise real change cannot be achieved by one party alone, which is why we’re committed to doing all we can and creating more ways for businesses to get involved.

Lynne Atkin, HR director, Barclays Retail and Business Bank

Establishing and maintaining structural and cultural change in FE is a huge task, a task that needs not only vision but will — and that will is lacking. We have always had the sufficient but not the necessary conditions for success.

It is why hours of Institute for Learning professional development were never used to innovate, to develop communities of practice, to foster new relations with business and employers.

It is why the Pathfinder Projects shone like beacons and then were quenched as the funding dried up; why the ambitions of the 2001 regulations and the firmer ambitions set out in the 2007 regulations are now threatened with full revocation.

When the licence to practise was introduced (QTLS) in 2007, it established a concrete sense of what ‘professionalism’ might mean.

Autonomous CPD (mutually beneficial to employers, learners, staff), an entitlement to have time for that CPD, a sense that professionalism meant the upkeep of certain standards and values, and that employers had to have due regard for these professional ambitions meant a ‘professional space’ had been cleared and could be developed.

But the sector’s illusory centre meant that it lacked the necessary conditions for such change.

Incorporation has constructed an image of coherence that has no accountability to anything but each corporation. This is the governance challenge to the newly established Education Training Foundation (aka FE Guild).

The critical juncture teaching staff face is deregulation of the 2007 Workforce Regulations, ironically given in the Learning and Skills Improvement Service guidance on the new qualifications (an admirable example of how we have moved from Cinderella to Alice in Wonderland).

While ATL is, and will be, consistently positive in its endeavours to improve the professional lot of our members, we are not reeds in the wind. We need to ask at this juncture: whither professionalism?

Can professionalism in FE survive increasingly fragmenting employers’ and private interests in the governance of the sector, and in the post-19 funding changes?

Is not the fitness of qualifications, teacher standards, curriculum design, pedagogy, research, the preserve of a particular group of professionals: lecturers? Just as accounts, marketing, income generation, premises and HR belong to another occupational sphere: business leadership?

Is there not sense in seeking the support and expertise of teacher trainers in universities, researchers and experts in education and skills policy to help our policy formation?

What we are shaping in post-16 education is what Ken Spours of the Institute of Education describes as an ‘outlier’ status. Not European, not Scandinavian, not American, certainly not Welsh or Scottish.

In fact, some argue we are not even on the map: we don’t have a coherent sector at all from a European perspective. (Test: try to define the post-16 sector to somebody who does not know it.)

Deregulation will introduce a race to the bottom, and further hinder our ability to engage with other labour markets and manufacturing standards. So, no matter how well meaning some college principals are, they are in a sector that has been for too long shaped by following funding and, for the past 20 years, constructing a perverse corporate ethos. Policy design and execution have never been properly coupled together.

This has now reached an overly critical point with an employer-led sector body (ETF) affirming government ideology to deregulate.

And in September, we return to the years before 2001 when evidence and argument were building up that we needed standards and initial teacher training for FE staff… but that’s yet another story.

So it’s ‘back to the future’. We have to solve the same problem again, but in a different way.

Norman Crowther, national official for post-16 education at the Association of Teachers and Lecturers