The Government’s announcement to lengthen the duration of apprenticeships will help to ensure better quality workers which is vital for the economy’s growth.

The recent announcement by the Skills Minister John Hayes that apprenticeship schemes are to be lengthened is welcome news for the British economy. It signals the end to what could be seen as a ‘conveyer belt’ approach to vocational training, where ‘any skills’ have taken precedent over the ‘right skills’.

For too long, some industries have been damaging the apprenticeship brand by pumping out apprenticeships, focused primarily on volume and speed rather that the end product. In the midst of quota madness, quality, skill and the type of training that the industry needs to thrive risked being compromised.

The construction industry is an ageing sector, with a significant number due to retire in the next ten years. The retirees will be highly skilled, highly experienced workers, and their replacements will have to be trained accordingly to fill their boots.

Couple this with major changes on the horizon which will warrant a raft of new skills in the areas around nuclear build, green energies and Building Information Modelling. Thanks to Government investment there is also a number of major infrastructure projects in the pipeline such as High Speed 2 and Crossrail. To meet the skills demands that are coming a highly skilled future workforce is simply a must.

In the construction sector, apprenticeships are one of the most important entry points into a career in the sector. For years, the industry has relied heavily on this cohort of new blood coming through ready to pick up the gauntlet. However, despite their importance, we have recently seen an increase in the number of providers who have tried to fast track candidates, badging short-term duration courses as apprenticeships.

Short-term courses in their own right are a great way to up-skill and continue on the professional development path, but the problem arises when some try to shoe horn courses into shorter time frames than can really do them justice.

This is potentially harmful to the apprentices that complete them, employers and the industry as a whole if they are not delivering the right skills for growth. Investment in apprenticeships is an investment in the future of the industry itself and it is self-defeating to support courses that are unfit for purpose, as it damages the industry’s ability to compete on a global scale in the long-term.

As a result, we need to ensure we are safeguarding the skills needs of the industry for when the market picks up. At CITB-ConstructionSkills, we are committed to continuing to raise standards for apprenticeships, and believe the training infrastructure should be largely shaped by employers to help produce high-quality results.

This is why we have rejected claims for qualifications for courses as short as 18 months, and for framework completions for level 2 apprentices achieved between 12 and 17 months. We don’t believe short apprenticeships will support the industry’s needs now or in the future.

What we will continue to support and provide, however, are robust and fit-for-purpose apprenticeships that really do deliver, and our level 2 and level 3 apprenticeships meet those standards. Most level 2 frameworks in construction are achieved between 18 and 30 months – with level 3 frameworks being awarded 12 months after the completion of a level 2 framework.

We will also make sure that flexible finance packages are available to help employers afford them. Last year alone, CITB-ConstructionSkills provided over £49m in apprenticeship grants to 10,000 employers, and helped more than 63,000 people to achieve vocational qualifications.

Apprenticeships are crucial to producing the construction workers of the future. The recent commitment from the Government will go some way toward ensuring the apprenticeship system works well for us all. We must always remember that it is the quality of our future workforce, not the quantity, that will drive growth.

For further information on CITB-ConstructionSkills Apprenticeships, visit
www.cskills.org/apprenticeships.

Mark Farrar,
Chief Executive of CITB-ConstructionSkills

The national awards ceremony for Adult Learners’ Week kicks off a week of similar events across the country this week, alongside thousands of opportunities for people to have a go at learning, often for the first time since they left full-time education.

There will be tears and laughter, applause and inspiration at the ceremonies and there will be thousands of people lured and inspired into more learning as a result of the week of events.

We know from our evaluation that people get involved in learning because of the chance to have a go or because they have seen publicity about one of the awards winners and have been inspired. At the same time, though, our annual participation in learning survey sets out how much more we need to do.

Since 1996 we have asked the same questions about participation in learning and can track changes over that period. This year’s figures suggest that fewer people are engaged in learning than two years ago, reflecting the public funding pressures as well as the reductions in employer investment in learning at work.

Participation in learning and the associated benefits are spread very unequally across our society ”

Overall around one in five adults have participated in learning in the last year and around two in five in the last three years.

The headline figures mask the most important issue though. Participation in learning and the associated benefits are spread very unequally across our society.

Whether you cut the numbers by age, socio-economic class, employment status or prior educational attainment you will find some big inequalities. This is why we must retain a strong widening participation agenda in policy, funding and practice to make sure that the inequalities are addressed.

Our Policy Conference this year as part of Adult Learners’ Week is about widening participation; we think it is one of the most important issues we should be discussing and acting on. There has been much progress in the recent past that we do not want to lose and there is so much more to do before we have a true learning society.

Inspiring people through our awards ceremonies and have a go events is not going to be enough; we need learning providers to do the outreach, engagement and delivery which meets the needs and motivations of different groups of people in different settings and we need policy and funding to recognise that reaching out does cost more and needs support.

That is why we are working with The Open University on this issue. They have done more than any other organisation to broaden Higher Education to hundreds of thousands of people who otherwise would not have attended university. The conference will hear from other organisations who are vital in achieving wider participation.

The WEA will be talking about how the opportunities on people’s doorsteps can revitalise communities. We will be hearing from Hammerson’s about the progress made for people learning in the workplace, particularly for those in low-paid jobs and for those that are perceived to be unskilled.

Finally, but perhaps most crucially for the future BT will be giving us a glimpse into what the future possibilities are for technology to open up access to millions of adults – as the internet, for instance, has done.

Adult Learners’ Week has always been about reaching out and engaging, inspiring and motivating; and for people’s careers, for their families, their health and the communities they live in, we need more of that during these tough times.

David Hughes,
Chief Excecutive, NIACE

Recommendations in the latest report from the Commons education select committee offer an opportunity for a parallel, if not unified, approach to raising standards of teaching and learning throughout our schools and colleges. It is an opportunity that must not be wasted.

The select committee’s report, ‘Great teachers: attracting, training and retaining the best’, calls for a new ‘college of teaching’, along the lines of the royal colleges and chartered institutions in other professions. It also recommends a thorough review of teacher training to ensure all staff have high-quality continuing professional development (CPD).

The further education and skills sector already has such a body in the Institute for Learning (IfL), and our experiences very much echo the findings of the committee. Moreover, our surveys on the effectiveness of CPD in colleges and providers over the past three years show how much effective CPD can be delivered through collaborative professional learning activities, created and led by teachers themselves and backed by IfL (or a similar college of teaching).

As well as working, this kind of CPD can be efficient and cost-effective. Teachers do need protected time to share and learn together, and the research evidence shows that this is wise investment.

When the committee searched for training models for schools, it looked – as such committees usually do – beyond the field of education. But there are models of excellence closer to home in the FE and skills sector that should be explored with a view to greater cooperation, collaboration and sharing.

There are political and strategic imperatives too, given the importance of 14 to 16-year-olds and 16 to18-year-olds increasingly learning across schools and colleges, and in academies and studio schools sponsored and housed within FE colleges.

Since April 1 2012, college lecturers with the professional status of Qualified Teacher Learning and Skills (QTLS) are entitled to teach in schools, giving those institutions an additional source of vocational and wider pedagogic skills, and opening up greater scope for schools and colleges to share the teaching of programmes for young people.

This supports a significant political theme for the government since it accepted all the recommendations in the Wolf review. The quality and accessibility of vocational education and training for young people is a massive opportunity, which, surprisingly, this select committee report did not touch on.

IfL has contributed to the development, so that teachers in FE are valued in our sector and in schools, and to the CPD of teachers in FE. Last year, IfL supported over 18,000 teachers’ and trainers’ CPD.

With others in the sector, IfL successfully campaigned for teachers and trainers with QTLS to be recognised as qualified teachers in schools as well as further education, for individuals to have status and career flexibility, and to enable colleges to develop more strategic partnerships with joint teaching in schools.

The further education sector itself is currently subject to a detailed review of professionalism, chaired by Lord Lingfield. IfL questions the recommendation in its interim report that initial teacher training should not be required by government policy but should be optional.

And we believe the thrust of the select committee report is about raising the bar so that having qualified teachers is the minimum, with no suggestion whatsoever that teachers being qualified is above a baseline minimum for schools and young people taught there.

We trust that the Lingfield review will consider closely the content of the select committee’s report before publishing its full report this summer.
The interim report was written in a climate of the coalition government calling for deregulation and, as such, it called for IfL to become an independent, voluntary and professional, rather than statutory, membership body for teachers and trainers.

Whatever shape we take, we have confidence in our future and the thousands of teachers and trainers who have chosen and will continue to choose to engage with IfL as their independent professional body.

But this article is not about banging the FE drum or any special pleading for particular organisations. It is about recognising the common educational landscape where schools, colleges, private training providers and indeed universities need to work together to achieve excellence, which starts with good teacher training and CPD.

Read together, the Lingfield review and select committee report suggest deep-seated contradictions in emerging government policies for schools and post-compulsory education and training.

Nevertheless, more positively, they do show the urgent need for very similar supportive structures, for a membership association for teachers, and for a strong emphasis on CPD throughout schools, FE and probably higher education, which needs careful consideration – and considered actions.

Toni Fazaeli,
Chief Executive, Institute for Learning (IfL)