The Government has committed itself to creating an extra 250,000 Apprenticeships by 2015. This is a challenging target, particularly in an economic downturn, with increasing youth unemployment and dramatic reductions in opportunities in the very industries, such as construction, that have traditionally provided places.

Initial progress was good. By June 2011, the target of an extra 50,000 starts in 2010-11 had been substantially exceeded, with over 103,000 extra places.

But there were concerns that these initial gains were not sustainable – in particular, that small companies that had taken on Apprentices in response to the initial push could not maintain the same level of recruitment year on year.

A strong case was made to the Cabinet Office, and Francis Maude relaxed the ban on Government advertising to help reach the target.

So after national advertising and promotional campaigns such as ‘100 Apprenticeships in 100 Days’, are the employers flocking in? Not perhaps to the degree that had been hoped.

While recruitment has been steady, some sectors (including many parts of the public sector) are notably slow in taking up the opportunity to recruit Apprentices – and recent evidence hints that promotion may be part of the cause, rather than the solution.

One problem seems be employers’ perceptions of who Apprentice candidates are. Last year the Campaign for Learning undertook small-scale research for Pearson on barriers to Apprenticeships – and found many employers had a marked suspicion about the quality of Apprenticeship candidates.

Some equated the Apprenticeships of today with the Youth Training and Youth Opportunities Programme schemes of the 1970s and 1980s, despite extensive promotion of Level 3 and Higher Level Apprenticeships. Promotion of Apprenticeships as a scheme for young people of the very highest calibre seems to have had very little impact on employers’ perceptions.

Indeed, Apprenticeship advertising appears to have had exactly the opposite effect with some, who become ever more suspicious about quality the more they see Apprenticeships pushed in the media.

“These young people must be really poor if the Government has to put in so much effort to get employers to take them on” is the reaction we received from some employers – and Apprentice recruitment agencies report finding the same.

This leaves the Government in a Catch 22 situation – if increased promotion may cause more cynicism amongst some of those employers they really need on board, what can they do to attract new employers to the scheme?

Employers we spoke to who had been initially suspicious but won round reported that it was personal contact that made the difference – with providers they trusted, with colleagues in the same industry with positive experiences to share, and in particular with Apprentices themselves.

So perhaps Simon Waugh’s successor might wish to consider ditching the advertising altogether and throwing the marketing budget into the Ambassadors Network and local promotion.

Local good news stories about known employers and real Apprentices may in the end prove the simplest, most effective way to get the Government’s Apprenticeship messages across.

Tricia Hartley, chief executive of
Campaign for Learning

If you saw FE Week’s front-page headline “Private providers ahead of FE colleges in government learner satisfaction survey” and also visited the FE Choices website ( http://fechoices.skillsfundingagency.bis.gov.uk/ ) you might be puzzled.

Yes: you can bring the data together as FE Week does; but FE Choices doesn’t compare provider types like that and isn’t meant to. Instead, it lets you look at individual providers, and a number of scores for each – learner satisfaction is just one – allowing comparisons against the worst, median and best providers of the same type. The website is designed to be useful to employers and prospective students comparing individual institutions, and may therefore send a wake-up call to under-performing providers.

The data is limited. It only sorts learner satisfaction data by age and level of qualification, not programme area and doesn’t differentiate employer satisfaction at all. Providers with very small numbers of respondents are excluded from the calculations.

This applies to the majority of the private providers serving my own area, including one major national player. It seems that even when calculated, these indicators are commonly based on under one-third of learners.

Providers who have the Training Quality Standard are exempt from the employer satisfaction measure, which reduces its value as a benchmark.

The data actually tell a rather more positive tale about colleges than the FE Week commentary. Their lowest median learner satisfaction score is over 7 out of 10 – I’d normally be delighted to recommend a service rated at that level.

Median level colleges typically had only 7 per cent of users or fewer recording satisfaction ratings of 3 out of 10 or below. More importantly one can’t make any serious comparisons between FE colleges and private providers without like-with-like comparisons – learners from similar backgrounds studying the same types of qualification.

Comparing the employment rates of learners at the different provider types is seriously misleading. In colleges higher proportions of learners want to continue education on completing their current course, including entering university.

This is confirmed by the learning rate data, where the comparison with private providers strongly favours FE colleges.

The combined learner destinations rate is a far better measure of comparative performance and shows an equally high median score (82 per cent) for both colleges and private providers.

To put the learner satisfaction data in context, it helps to see them in relation to those for past years, and for other sectors.

The FE Choices data indicate a marginal deterioration in the median learner satisfaction rating for FE colleges (and for employer satisfaction across all types of provider). Whether this constitutes a trend is too early to say.

The last National Learner Satisfaction Survey commissioned by LSC in 2007 revealed that 90 per cent of FE learners and 91 per cent in WBL were fairly satisfied or better, with 27 per cent & 26 per cent respectively extremely satisfied. The equivalent numbers expressing any dissatisfaction were only 7 per cent & 6 per cent.

FE compares well with equivalent data for other sectors, The 2011 National Student Survey for higher education indicated that 83 per cent were satisfied overall, and 8 per cent dissatisfied.

Many of the highest ratings, incidentally, applied to HE in FE colleges. The most recent customer satisfaction data for retail banking and for energy supply are much less positive.

The real story ought therefore to be that learner and employer satisfaction levels across all types of FE provider are reassuringly high.

Setting one type against another risks confusing this message, for the media and the general public alike.

FE Choices may help inform user decisions and assist providers to improve quality; and publishing this information encourages providers to help make the data better, as quickly as possible.

Peter Davies, researcher and
consultant, Policy Consortium

It’s great as Shadow Skills and FE Minister to celebrate this fourth annual Apprenticeships week. Looking back on Labour’s record in Government, our revitalisation of Apprenticeships remains for me one of our most substantial achievements.

Lifting the number of starts from a mere 65,000 in 1996/97 to just under 280,000 was buttressed by the then Secretary of State John Denham launching the National Apprenticeship Service alongside National Apprenticeship Week.

Being the Shadow Minister covering Apprenticeships has allowed me to continue my previous work as chair of Parliament’s Skills Group and on the Select Committee – championing both skills and the FE sector and arguing for a continued focus on take-up, progression and quality.

It has been a particular pleasure to see the contribution that FE Colleges have been making countrywide engaging with employers and apprentices alike.

Having worked with John Hayes in the Skills Group, I don’t doubt his longstanding commitment to the vocational route and desire as Minister to build on this strong Apprenticeship legacy we left.

But there’s much more his Government, BIS and especially the Department for Education should be doing to expand access and safeguard quality.

The vast bulk of their expansion has now been shown to be on the back of 25-plus apprentices, many following courses previously covered under Train to Gain. In many cases these have value, but they do little to tackle the huge challenge of the sceptre of a generation of jobless young people.

That’s why I’ve just been putting forward ideas from Labour to help do just that. We recognise Apprenticeship strategy has to go hand in hand with boosting growth in the regions on the back of an active industrial strategy – which this Government has failed to do. Skills and growth policy must be linked on the ground.
It’s no good Government pushing apprenticeships, if there’s not enough pull from employees. We also need to see FE Colleges as a crucial link here – which is why Labour believes they must take a central role in the new Local Enterprise Partnerships.

We’re calling on Government to make a step change in the quantity of quality apprenticeships available to young people.

That includes a major expansion via SMEs – incentives for large companies to buddy up with supply-chain smaller partners in taking them on.

We would use the unspent and so far unfocused Growth and Innovation Fund – and use the £60 million there to boost the work of training organisations – GTAs and ATAs – and to enable FE colleges and learning providers to work effectively with HE and LEPs to build collaboration helping more businesses to take on apprentices as part of local growth strategies.

There’s much more [the] Government, BIS and especially the Department for Education should be doing to expand access and safeguard quality”

This builds on our existing commitment to ensure all public procurement contracts handed out over £1million come with taking on apprentices.

This would expand the range and reach for apprenticeships and create the new opportunities young people are crying out for. Expanding the quantity of apprenticeships must not come at the expense of their quality.

Already BIS Ministers’ race for numbers has brought some casualties here – that needs to be remedied urgently, not just for 16-18 years but also for the cohort beyond it – as I urged the Government in Parliament’s debate on apprenticeships before Christmas – with new safeguards on minimum course duration.

They need to take heed of what the Select Committee’s Apprenticeship enquiry will say – and make sure the unexpected departures at the top in the National Apprenticeship Service and Skills Funding Agency do not throw up further problems.

The priority must be for a sharper view of what Apprenticeships are for, with clear progression strategies – including into HE – and real jobs on completion.

Gordon Marsden, shadow minister for further education, skills and regional growth