Reforms are coming to the apprenticeship system in England and the Labour government has been showered with suggestions about what it should do.
But are there lessons England can learn from the skills paths charted in the last decade by Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland?
England is the outlier; it is the only one with end-point assessments and rigid rules around apprenticeship duration and off-the-job training. Its more prescriptive system has standards, while its neighbours use frameworks.
And whereas England experienced a “big skills revolution” with the introduction of the apprenticeship levy, its devolved neighbours had “evolutionary and incremental” change, says the Association of Employment and Learning Providers (AELP) policy director Simon Ashworth.
Frustratingly for employers, although all UK companies with a salary bill of over £3 million have to pay the levy, only those in England directly reap the rewards. In Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland the money is repaid via the Barnett Formula back to their governments.
None of them spend all of it on apprenticeships, and the amount they do spend on training has declined in the last decade. But having their own government bodies, rather than employers in the investment driving seat, means a greater share of apprenticeships funding is directly channelled into addressing the most critical skills gaps.
Apprenticeship numbers game
England has experienced the steepest decline in apprenticeship starts in the last decade, analysis by London Economics shows.
Wales and Scotland maintained their level of starts from 2014-15 2022-23 and starts grew in Northern Ireland, while in England they plunged by a third.
In 2021-22 (the last period for which comparable national figures are available), FE Week found apprentices made up 0.65 per cent of the Welsh population, 0.62 per cent in England, 0.46 per cent in Scotland and 0.36 per cent in Northern Ireland.
Tom Bewick, author of upcoming book Skills Policy In Britain, believes since England’s “big bang reforms” that followed the Richard Review of apprenticeships in 2012, the quality of apprenticeships “improved to a degree” but the changes have not delivered on quantity.
Funding woes
The amount devolved nations get back from the levy is no longer published. But we know the Department for Education’s apprenticeships budget this year was £2.7 billion – over double the £1.3 billion it received in 2016 – with the devolved administrations getting around £500 million between them.
Over £200 million is raised from the levy each year by Welsh employers and returned to the Welsh government, but only around £130 million of that is spent on apprenticeships, says Lisa Mytton, strategic director for the National Training Federation Wales.
The Welsh apprenticeship budget this year was cut by 14 per cent, which Mytton says has had a “major impact” on delivery, but the system still appears to be more generous to its providers.
Iain Salisbury, chief executive of Aspiration Training, a provider specialising in childcare and health and social care that operates across England and Wales, says Welsh funding rates have risen “across the board” for the last three years (5 per cent in 2022-23 and 2023-24 and 3 per cent this year) for his apprenticeships, while in England rates have stagnated.
He says the Welsh Government are “much better stewards of the market”, and, unlike in England, they “work with the provider network to make sure it does the best for apprenticeships”.
“We’re not having to lay people off in the same way [as in England], and we can afford to give people the pay rises they need,” he says.
But the Welsh enforce a “cap on contracts” which limits the amount a contract can pay out during a set period, which Salisbury believes is “a bit silly”. It meant that in July, Aspiration Training had no starts because it “ran out of money”.
Stuart McKenna, chief executive of the Scottish Training Federation, believes the Scottish government receives over £300 million a year back in levy funding – the latest official figure is £240 million but he believes this is an “underestimate”. He thinks it only spends £100 million of that on apprenticeships.
Funding rates for older apprentices are far lower in Scotland and McKenna describes some as “rubbish”, pointing out how some hospitality apprenticeships for those aged over 24 only receive £300. “How on earth can you deliver an apprenticeship for that? The government says we should be asking employers to pay, but they don’t want to,” he says.
He adds there’s more demand than places, and while the Scottish government’s pre-pandemic target was 30,000 apprenticeship starts a year, it’s dropped that to 25,500, despite a survey of employers showing a further 2,000 places were needed.
McKenna explains that in Scotland, apprenticeships funding is perceived as existing to “plug market failure or skills gaps”, not as a “nice thing for companies to access”.
Similarly, in Northern Ireland, overall apprenticeships funding is less than in England but the spend per apprentice is higher, says Leo Murphy, chief executive of North West Regional College. Apprenticeships there are “treated as high value” programmes to “prepare someone for the future… we’re building citizenship, not just fodder for industry”.
Favouring management
Levy-paying employers in England have chosen to spend a greater share of their money on higher-level apprenticeships, which rose by 9 per cent to 70,780 in the year to 2023-24.
“There’s been this mission drift away from apprenticeships being about younger people getting a foothold in the labour market towards degree apprenticeships in management,” says Bewick.
In Scotland and Wales the number of higher-level apprenticeships has stayed roughly stable in recent years, although both Scottish and Welsh governments have policies in place intended to boost them.
Lewis Cooper, an Association of Colleges director who previously worked on a commission bringing the nations together to learn from each other, describes England’s situation as “a collapse in young people undertaking apprenticeships, from a low bar”.
In Scotland, where under-19 apprenticeship starts have risen every year since 2020-21, funding allocations are split into age brackets (similar to how they were in England before the apprenticeship levy) to ensure young people are accounted for.
Similarly until last year in Northern Ireland, only those under 25 were eligible for most apprenticeships funding. In 2021-22, 83 per cent of the country’s new starts were aged 16 to 24, compared to 58 per cent in Scotland, 54 per cent in England and 48 per cent in Wales.
The greater sway of market forces in England has led to more pronounced declines in apprenticeship starts in deprived areas, as levy funding has been poured into management training for businesses based in London and the South East.
In Wales, skills priorities are thrashed out by four regional skills partnerships, representing the country’s respective regions, which is partly intended to ensure that deprived areas do not lose out.
Strategic apprenticeship oversights
In England there has been no strategic body to align apprenticeships funding into priority sectors, leaving it with chronic skills gaps particularly in the construction and health and social care sectors.
Both Wales and Scotland have witnessed a rise in starts into the construction and health and social care sectors since 2014-15.
FE Week’s analysis shows whereas in England the most popular apprenticeship in the first three quarters of 2023-24 was in business, admin and law (27.6 per cent of apprenticeships), in Scotland construction apprenticeships came top ( 25.3 per cent) and in Wales health and public services apprenticeships were the most common in 2022-23 (44.5 per cent).
SkillsDevelopment Scotland is an arms-length agency that looks at the country’s skills needs, as Skills England is expected to do soon.
And the Welsh this summer launched the Commission for Tertiary Education and Research. It goes a step further than the ambitions of Skills England by linking up the whole post-16 education system under a single funder and regulator.
Apprenticeship rules and regulations
It’s only in England that apprenticeships have to be at least 12 months long and only English apprenticeships contain rigid off–the–job time requirements, although these were relaxed this summer from being monthly to every three months.
McKenna says in Scotland, “the feeling is there’s no point in having people sitting in a face-to-face classroom situation if that’s not what the job intends”.
Off-the-job requirements are flexible in Northern Ireland, where Murphy says because the economy is so strong in its neighbouring republic (particularly when it comes to house building), many apprentices head to Dublin for work worth “£1,000 Euros a week in their pocket”.
Who are the providers?
In Scotland, McKenna says colleges get only eight per cent of government contracts – rising to 20 per cent when work subcontracted by private providers is taken into account. Private training providers get the bulk of the work.
In England colleges in 2022-23 were responsible for around 17 per cent of apprenticeship starts and private providers 66 per cent.
In Wales, Salisbury says seven of the 10 apprenticeships contracts made this year were with “colleges or [providers] owned by colleges”.
Salisbury believes contracts are inevitably “more relationship based” in “any devolved area”, including England’s mayoral regions, because of their smaller footprints.
And he says the Welsh system is more stable with many providers being in the game for more than 10 years.
He adds: “You haven’t got people going bust all the time. You get better practice because nearly everyone in business is trying to do the right thing.”
Ashworth concedes England’s system is in some ways “not very employer friendly”, partly because of the “complexity” involved in having over 600 occupational standards and 1,500 providers.
In Northern Ireland, while colleges “tend to do the heavy lifting that industry needs”, private training organisations make up around 15 per cent of the apprenticeships market doing “the lighter stuff – retail and wholesale”, says Murphy.
A legacy of the peace process in Belfast is that the community and voluntary sector is “quite strong”, and “far better” than colleges at “introductory skills because they’ve got reach within their communities”.
Assessment differences
England is the only nation to have end-point assessments (EPAs). Cooper believes there is “no evidence” they have driven up quality. The other nations instead use ongoing assessment – which many English providers would prefer, says Bewick.
Whereas English apprentices “get nothing” in terms of qualifications until their programme is completed, McKenna says Scottish apprentices are “working on units of qualifications all the way along” which “still count, even if they don’t finish the apprenticeship”.
But Ashworth sees the Welsh and Scottish systems as being “mark your own homework” models with “outdated frameworks” which are “a bit stuck in the past”, compared to our “employer led” and “relevant” standards.
Pick and mix the best
Cooper believes that if England could cherry pick the strengths from each UK jurisdiction it could create an “incredible system”.
So what could be borrowed?
Salisbury praises how in Wales recent immigrants eligible for work can do an apprenticeship, whereas in England they have to already be a resident for three years. Salisbury’s own analysis for the DfE showed how around half of Aspiration Training’s learners in Wales would not have been eligible for an apprenticeship in England.
Northern Ireland is currently expanding its traineeship programmes, and Ashworth praises “effective” pre-apprenticeship programmes in Wales and Scotland for “getting more young people to join routes into apprenticeships”. He hopes the Labour government could learn from them, amid ongoing “discussions” at DfE about what a reintroduction of traineeships would look like.
The last government scrapped traineeships in 2023 due to low take-up.
There’s been much criticism in recent years of England’s functional skills qualifications – particularly for maths, which Ashworth lambasts as “probably harder than GCSEs”. Curriculums have become “too academic” in recent years and “not contextualised enough with job roles”.
Scotland has “more sensible” core skills qualifications, akin to the ‘Key Skills’ programmes England had in place previously, with “softer curriculums” and a “more inclusive approach to assessment”.
Salisbury describes the equivalent (Essential Skills) in Wales as being made up of much shorter and broader courses, with a focus on “communications” as well as English and maths, and without the “need to know probability”.
“They’re much more practical and don’t get the same vitriol that we get for functional skills,” he adds.
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