Apprenticeships Are not the Swiss Army Knife of Skills Training

Apprenticeships are almost universally popular with the public. Opinion polling shows that they are held in high regard by employers, people of all backgrounds, and students. Despite how competitive it is to get an apprenticeship place they are now sought after by high-achieving middle-class young people as well as the less academically successful.

They are therefore very popular with all political parties, and Labour is no exception. This may explain why the temptation is to look to apprenticeships as the answer to all our workplace skills training needs. The former Conservative government introduced degree apprenticeships, which have proved very popular and grown at breathtaking speed. They also introduced flexi-apprenticeships to try and reach sectors where short-term and non-standard employment contracts are prevalent, though these have struggled to take off. In the last year the Labour government has introduced shorter Foundation Apprenticeships, removed the requirement for SMEs to contribute any funding to apprenticeships up to 25, pumped funding into Mayoral Authorities to expand apprenticeships regionally, and committed to introducing “apprenticeship units” in response to the demand from employers for more flexible training models.

So we now have Intermediate, Advanced, Higher and Degree apprenticeships, Flexi-job apprenticeships, and Foundation apprenticeships, soon to be followed by apprenticeship units. It’s like twentieth century particle physics – every time you look, a new one seems to have been discovered.

But is this proliferation of apprenticeship varieties helping us address our skills challenge? It’s true that the challenge has several dimensions, ranging from young people looking for their first start in the labour market (including NEETs), to early and even mid-career professionals looking for reskilling and upskilling. But is a single tool the best solution to such a multi-faceted problem?

Our latest report, on the Derby Nuclear Skills Academy, explores in depth a major skills training project developed and managed through a partnership between Rolls Royce Submarines and the University of Derby, built almost entirely around apprenticeships. Looking at the factors behind its success, the availability of level 3 to degree level apprenticeships in Nuclear Engineering and other fields is the most prominent. When assessing how far the Derby model could be replicated in other industry sectors, the report identifies the key features needed for an apprenticeship-based strategy to succeed, which include having a high proportion of big employers, the prevalence of standard long-term employment contracts, and an established tradition of apprentice recruitment. These “apprenticeship compatibility” features only exist to a limited extent in many industry sectors, such as Clean Energy or Digital Technology. In some sectors, such as Creative Industries, they hardly exist at all, with only a minority of companies offering them.

An apprenticeship is an employment opportunity of at least a year’s length with coaching and mentoring in the workplace and guaranteed time off work to complete mandatory training to nationally-specified standards. As the struggle to establish Flexi-apprenticeships illustrates, it’s very difficult to get them off the ground in many key sectors, especially in emerging sectors where companies are typically small, agile, and very flexible in their job roles and employment arrangements.

The Derby report concludes that the apprenticeship training model is highly effective in certain circumstances, but almost completely useless in others. Just as a spanner is impossible to use to tighten screws or drill holes, so a single training tool can’t be applied to meet all skills needs. Trying to bend it into different shapes through modifying its key features risks making it unrecognisable and delivering only a second-rate, jury-rigged solution. What is needed is the right tool for the job – not some kind of skills Swiss Army Knife -  which is exactly why the government’s commitment to turning the Apprenticeship Levy into a Growth & Skills Levy was so welcome.

Our Derby report recommends using the G&SL to develop a toolkit of shorter, more flexible workforce training strategies, including shorter courses, modular programmes, and online delivery, eligible for funding from the Levy. This is envisaged as a radical departure from the rigidity of apprenticeships, making a new range of innovative options available to employers alongside the well-established apprenticeship mechanism.

But so far all that’s been mentioned is the idea of “apprenticeship units”, which sounds like some form of modularisation of existing apprenticeship frameworks. The problem is that apprenticeships were never designed to be cut up into self-standing pieces - just the opposite. Since the Richards Review of 2012 the whole direction of travel has been to secure the quality of apprenticeships by ensuring they were a minimum of one year in length and included a minimum of 20% off-the-job training. In the words of Doug Richards, “we know that an apprenticeship model delivers the most value when it involves sustained and substantial training, fully integrated within the experience of learning and practising a real job”. Nothing has happened since 2012 to change this fact.

Let’s hope that the phrase “apprenticeship unit” means flexible training modules that can be funded through the Apprenticeship Levy, not some form of Lego building-brick approach to apprenticeship frameworks themselves. Otherwise we’re going to end up stuck between two stools, with a watered-down apprenticeship system that loses its reputation for quality and value, and a workplace training strategy that is trying to shove a single square peg into all kinds of different sized holes.

As the Derby Nuclear Skills Academy shows, apprenticeship training is wonderfully powerful when it’s the right tool for the job.