Independent Training Providers (ITPs) are under pressure to ensure that the apprenticeships they provide are deemed to be of high quality, minimising withdrawal rates and adhering to the Accountability Framework’s achievement rate targets.

However, research by The St Martin’s Group has demonstrated that not all of the reasons why a learner withdraws are within the ITPs control. Indeed, a lack of support from employers was the most common reason for non-completions (37 per cent).     

But how can an ITP manage the aspects that are in their control to increase engagement and deliver the best outcome for learners?   

Blended learning

Blended learning is here to stay and can provide the agility an ITP needs to maintain engagement levels. Virtual classrooms remain predominant, with 97 per cent of organisations now using them as part of their training strategies.   

Following the pandemic rush to online delivery, ITPs have now had time to test and assess which components of online learning work best, enabling them to establish a high-quality and effective delivery model with an improved experience for learners.  

When an ITP understands the multiple touchpoints they have with learners, they can maximise engagement in every moment. The most successful learning programmes include a mix of resources, including:  

• Pre-recorded multimedia like videos and podcasts that appeal to those who like or need to access and revisit learning materials on their own terms.
• Live lessons delivered by experienced tutors are great for people who learn best by listening, interacting and asking questions.
• Live learning workshops like interactive Q&As and breakout sessions, which are an opportunity to spot learners who are falling behind and take quick action. 
• Written resources like handouts and guides that support and build on what’s been discussed in lessons and workshops. 
• Quizzes in the form of SCORM content that reinforce the learning objective and instantly capture results.  

Many other changes are currently happening in the industry, such as faster delivery of learning  which could have a huge impact on engagement levels for apprentices. This involves providers recognising prior learning so that their course content becomes more relevant to apprentices and their learning needs, which could result in learners becoming fully competent sooner.

Easing enrolment and onboarding

Making sure that a learner feels supported and integrates well into their learning are core aspects of the onboarding process.  But trainers should also make sure that they’ve spent time discussing in depth the learner’s ambitions and that the learner understands what’s required of them during the apprenticeship programme.

One of the reasons learners can become disengaged is because the course didn’t live up to their expectations. Making sure that they’re on the right course that will help them reach their goals and that they’re not disillusioned about what it entails will give them the best chance for success. (Not to mention that this is among Ofsted’s key criteria.) 

Monitoring engagement

When tracking the progress of learners, it’s important to monitor engagement levels in real time as a key aspect of their overall performance. If a training manager and employer can see the engagement of every learner on their programme via live data dashboards they can identify learners who may be struggling, intervene and work together to put strategies in place to support them and  minimise withdrawals. 

As mentioned before, engagement is multi-faceted, but ITPs can measure aspects that are within their control such as how regularly learners communicate with their trainer, how speedily they have completed submissions, any positive feedback they’ve received from managers as well as performance metrics.

Working with employers

All parties – learner, employer and training provider – need to be on the same page to prevent non-completion. From enrolment to end-point assessment, employers need to support and understand learners, and be flexible to enable them to complete their on-the-job hours.   

As digital transformation and blended styles of learning continue to transform the apprentice’s journey, the ability to benchmark engagement levels across training providers will allow them to test and learn new ways of empowering that flexibility.

It’s a metric that will not only improve the individual learner’s experience and outcome but will also determine how providers successfully deliver apprenticeships in the future. 

In November 2022, a think tank report using government data found that almost half of apprentices (47 per cent) are now dropping out of their scheme, and a huge 70 per cent of those who drop out report problems with the quality of their training – equivalent to an astonishing 115,000 apprentices every year. But what does poor quality mean to them?

RateMyApprenticeship plays host to over 40,000 reviews of these programmes, which are fundamental to helping young people across the country learn, understand and explore their future career options. So we delved into our nine years of data to reveal the key reasons apprentices are dropping out of their schemes.

Leadership matters

“The apprenticeship programme is not well structured. There is never any set meeting with my assessor and she’s really busy so it’s hard to get regular meetings. The units aren’t really explained and I teach myself the content to complete the apprenticeship.”

This student is not alone. Only 14 per cent of apprentices in our sample felt the mentoring they were offered was well-managed. Informal support is always highly regarded by all apprentices, and it’s important to ensure an apprenticeship scheme incorporates both consistency and structure. Senior managers acting as coaches and junior employees mentoring through buddy systems were cited among the higher-rated reviews.

Skills for life

“I feel the qualification merely asked me to answer questions to show the knowledge I already should have to fulfil this role rather than adding to these skills. I don’t feel as though the scheme has taught me any new skills.”

Over the past five years, we’ve seen a substantial increase in the number of apprentices rating their learning highly, from 23 per cent to 29. But that means some 70 per cent still don’t. 

The best-rated programmes offer apprentices responsibility and practical experience, allowing them to develop a blend of soft skills and technical skills. Apprentices see their scheme as part of a long-term continuous growth plan.

Part of a culture 

“I have not been invited to any social or team event at work since the second month of my employment, and even that was only by accident.”

One of the main considerations for young people who follow this route is missing out on the university experience. Networking opportunities, extra-curricular activities and an inclusive culture go a long way to ensuring young people feel valued and that they belong.

In addition, learners are passionate about an organisation’s impact and purpose. CSR and sustainability initiatives are often cited in higher-rated reviews as empowering and communicating a wider purpose to their programme.  

Passion projects

“The work is mundane at times, although I did not expect to come into this apprenticeship and love all the work I did.”

With low unemployment levels, apprentices have high expectations of the company and programme they join. They want to feel engaged and inspired, proud of their work, and match up the work that they do with a broader overall company mission.

Encouraging apprentices to pursue passion projects alongside their everyday tasks can enhance the enjoyment of their schemes. This could be joining a social impact teams, shadowing other members of the business or supporting other tasks that aren’t part of their assessed activities.

Cushioning the cost

“My salary just covers my outgoings each month. It costs a lot of money to get here each day by car, therefore I have to get alternative transport but this is still quite expensive.”

More than one-third (38 per cent) of apprentices found their travel costs challenging. To make an apprenticeship programme more viable, organisations need to think longer-term and pay their apprentices enough to minimise financial pressures.

If they do, research suggests they’ll get more out of the apprentice too. A recent report from ISE shows organisations in the graduate labour market offering interest-free loans, sign-on bonuses and transportation allowances to help cushion the rising cost of living.

Drop-out rates represent a massive loss of time and talent for businesses. But the solutions can’t be found among employers and providers alone. It’s crucial we listen to apprentices themselves to drive up quality as apprenticeships take centre-stage in the nation’s economic planning.

Apprenticeship completion rates averaged 51.8 per cent for standards in 2020-21 in contrast to a government target of 67 per cent, prompting skills minister, Robert Halfon to say to FE Week last month that “achievement rates are one of my priorities and we’re working very hard to try and improve that”. To do so, he will need to look closely at functional skills.

A significant factor in non-completion is the many thousands of learners who cannot achieve their functional skills, which are a mandatory part of an apprenticeship unless the learner has a grade 4 or above GCSE or an equivalent-level qualification.  The damage of course is really being done to apprentices because they are struggling to get through functional skills; they are failing and leaving, which is disheartening, frustrating and damaging for learners, providers and businesses.

Employers regularly comment that functional skills, as structured, are too in-depth for their current needs. For example, why do chefs need functional skills with the current breath required, which they are never likely to use in their chosen career path? Should we really be requiring them to:

• use coordinates in 2-D, positive and negative, to specify the positions of points
• draw and interpret scatter diagrams and recognise positive and negative correlation
• draw 3-D shapes to include plans and elevations (a new requirement)?

Unless you are regularly using or applying these skills in your everyday working life, you will simply not retain them or commit them to your long-term memory, which leads to higher failure rates in exams and reduces the perceived value for learners and employers. This is not skills for life; it is teaching to a test. This results in learners being demotivated when they cannot see the value of what they are being taught. It also has a negative effect on apprentices’ mental health when they walk away from completing their apprenticeship because of knowledge they know they will never need or use.

There needs to be an urgent review of the curriculum for functional skills to ensure that what is required is more relevant to apprentices and the majority of employers. We should also consider ‘fusion skills’ as an alternative. These are competencies, characteristics and tools which individuals need to flourish today are gaining momentum. They include oral communication skills, problem solving, organisational skills, resilience and creativity and arguably equip learners to operate in today’s world much more practically than our current set of functional skills.

Another long-standing issue with functional skills is that the funding is insufficient. As part of an apprenticeship, £471 per learner simply does not cover the base costs of delivery. Once registration and certification costs and a decent platform have been secured and paid for, together with any resit costs, circa £400 remains to cover either English or maths.

This can’t possibly be enough to help someone who has already been let down by the system. It is only sufficient to cover a maximum of four learner visits (not all learners can learn remotely, of course) whereas to cover monthly taught sessions, the cost would be more like £150 per month or £1,800 per annum. This underlines the extent of the current shortfall and why the functional skills qualification is failing.

The government should establish a free online system for every learner who wants to do functional skills, similar to the portal built for “Multiply”, with free access given to all providers.  

There are other complicating factors. Because of the time needed to coach a learner through functional skills, some employers are now starting to prescribe passes in English and maths before taking on learners, and even though we have a serious skills shortage in this country, migrants struggle with functional skills when their underlying skillsets are often excellent.

Clearly it’s time for another wholesale review of functional skills (curriculum, funding and platform) with strong employer input if we want to  improve the apprenticeship brand.

At next week’s 9^th Annual Apprenticeship Conference in Birmingham, we’ll be launching our latest research: Raising the standard: Sectoral approaches to raising apprenticeship achievement rates, which we’ve been working on jointly with City & Guilds. The publication explores the underlying detail behind headline achievement rates, but also makes it clear that we need to do far more to increase the perceived value of apprenticeships.

Easing skills shortages

At AELP’s national conference last June, then-skills minister, Alex Burghart announced his desire to see apprenticeship achievement rates reach 67 per cent, up from 51.8 per cent in 2020/21. That’s an ambitious goal, requiring some real thought about how the skills sector works with government, employers and learners to achieve it.

Last year’s City & Guilds report, Great Jobs also prompted this study, given its focus on skills shortages in essential industrial sectors across the UK. That report showed that half of the jobs in the UK are categorised as ‘essential’ by the government, and predicts the number of roles in key industries will grow in the next five years. This is despite employers facing acute skills shortages already.

Apprenticeships could make a significant contribution to tackling these skill shortages, but the achievement rate is still a critical problem. So Raising the standard investigates the factors affecting the withdrawal of apprentices from providers’ perspectives through interviews, but warns we must also look at improving the value and currency of apprenticeships themselves.

Reducing withdrawals

Through interviews and focus groups, our research identified a variety of sectoral and cross-sectoral issues around why apprenticeship achievements are not all they could be, and we explore these in some detail.

Apprentices can withdraw because they receive a better-paid job offer, or find faster options such as bootcamps and/or NVQs to get the qualifications they need to get the job they want. Some potential apprentices never start at all because of the way the compulsory education system appears to prioritise higher education and academia as a preferred route structurally, portraying apprenticeships as a lower-level or second-rate option.

But it seems that fundamentally the underlying reason for apprenticeship withdrawal is very often simply that the thought of completing the apprenticeship is not valued as much as the other factors affecting this decision – competing pay offers, better conditions elsewhere, more suitable learning environments in other settings and so forth.

Providers and employers both know how much completing an apprenticeship can positively enhance future job and learning prospects. Yet it seems this point is still not made clearly enough – particularly in the wider labour market, which does not regularly cite an apprenticeship as a requirement for a vacant job role. This means apprentices do not see clearly the benefits of completion.

Modelling the change we need

Nearly half of apprentices withdraw before completion. This is a serious problem which compounds skills shortages and must be addressed as quickly as possible. Our report contains fifteen recommendations outlining how we can do this, alongside some further reflections on sector-specific issues that came to our attention.

However, almost all of the factors and themes can ultimately be reduced to a single overarching conclusion and recommendation: much more work needs to be done to raise the perceived benefit and value of apprenticeship study.

We need to spread the message about their value much further and ensure that the time and effort employers put into training apprentices is reflected in their wider recruitment strategies. This is even the case in roles advertised within the skills sector itself – and if we aren’t doing this, how can we expect other employers to?

There is a strong need to show more clearly the value and benefit of taking an apprenticeship, differentiating this from other options in order to motivate and incentivise learners to keep pursuing them – as well as evidencing their value in real-world labour market situations.

I hope the release of this report will add some evidence to an important challenge for the skills sector and will reinforce the need for us to be clearer – with actions as well as words – about the importance and value of apprenticeships, and the very real benefits they bring to both individuals and employers.