Shortening the minimum time to complete an apprenticeship to eight months risks pushing England further adrift of other leading nations, ministers have been warned.
The government this week confirmed it will reduce the current 12-month minimum duration by four months from August “subject to the legislative timetable”.
Three “trailblazer apprenticeships” in key shortage occupations have been chosen to “pioneer” the new approach, with apprentices in green energy, healthcare and film/TV production set to be the first to take them.
The Department for Education said this change means apprentices will “achieve occupational competence more quickly, where that makes sense, for example because they have significant prior learning, or their industry works to a different rhythm”.
Ben Rowland, chief executive of the Association of Employers and Learning Providers, said the reform “should help learners and employers access priority skills needed to boost their careers and boost their industry at shorter notice”.
He added: “Time served is not a measure of quality, and apprenticeships will still be substantial training programmes where apprentices will need to evidence full occupational competency, but the flexibility allows providers and employers to lean into different delivery models that enable accelerated learning.”
But Stephen Evans, who heads up the Learning and Work Institute, warned that “lowering standards” in this way, coupled with reforms to functional skills requirements, was a “mistake” and only gives the “false illusion” of increasing opportunity.
In technical education-leading countries like Germany, apprenticeships last at least two years but usually run for between three and four years.
And the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) recently pointed out that general education in apprenticeships in England is limited to functional skills courses typically lasting around 100 hours in total. That compares to 400 hours in Switzerland, around 480 hours in Germany, and 588 hours in Norway.
The 12-month minimum duration rule was introduced in 2012 after some employers and providers were accused of cutting corners by running apprenticeships in as little as 12 weeks, which led to a BBC Panorama investigation called The Great Apprentice Scandal.
Evans said: “England is already an outlier compared to other countries with shorter apprenticeships and far less general education like English and maths. Lowering standards in this way will increase this disparity and only gives the false illusion of increasing opportunity.
“If training doesn’t require 12 months, it can still be valuable but isn’t necessarily an apprenticeship.
“Apprenticeships should prepare people for future careers, which will increasingly need good English and maths. We should invest to make that work, or risk limiting opportunity and growth.”
Short standards
The three apprenticeship standards chosen to introduce the first shorter-length apprenticeships are: level 2 dual fuel smart meter installers, level 2 healthcare support workers, and level 3 production assistants screen and audio.
Healthcare support worker is the most popular standard of the three, with 1,160 starts in academic year 2023-24, but attracts the lowest funding with a £3,000 maximum. It currently has a 12-month minimum duration.
Production assistant apprentices currently have a “typical” duration to gateway of 15 months and dual fuel smart meter installers is listed as taking 14 months. They attract maximum funding of £9,000 and £12,000 respectively.
The DfE told FE Week it would not reduce the funding bands for these standards when they’re delivered over a shorter duration.
The department added that one of Skills England’s first orders of business will be to identify which other apprenticeships would be best served by the shorter duration approach.
Federation of Small Businesses executive director Craig Beaumont said shorter apprenticeships “should help SME employers fill skills gaps faster”.
Shortening duration just for the sake of increasing the flow rate through the skills pipeline effectively devalues meaningful experience.
You can’t teach experience. You can teach from experience and you might learn more quickly from someone with personal experience of what is being taught, but it is not a substitute for exposure to and learning from real world encounters.
Keeping to the theme of fast tracking. You wouldn’t train a sprinter exclusively indoors in isolation, on a hyper intensive training regime, then enter them directly into the Olympics in an outdoor race competing with the worlds best, real-world experienced sprinters. Stage fright, self confidence, atmospheric and underfoot conditions would all be critical barriers to success, yet not previously experienced.
The word experience is not a synonym for theory. Shortening duration without compromising the value of experience would require RPE (recognition of prior experience), but that doesn’t appear to have come up yet.
I didn’t even know apprenticeships had a minimum of 12 months these days
It took me 4 years to complete my apprenticeship.
I then went from apprentice to journeyman
It then took me 2 more years to go from journeyman to craftsman.
So overall you could say it took 6 years to go from the beginning to begin fully qualified and competent.
Again, the bar is being set by nonsensical university educated morons who’v never worked with their hands (or heads) a day in their life.
Load of b*******
Just to advocate…
I believe it would be possible to shorten a lvl2 apprenticeship to six months or even one, my son is focusing on the lvl2 business studies and the modules include knowledge of pidgeon hole mail systems and email and how a stapler works, this is the basics that would be taught in an office in one morning!
There needs to be context within the requirements of the level of study, practicle learning and theory.