Business, Innovation and Skills CommitteeWritten evidence submitted by Professor Ewart Keep, Cardiff University
1. Executive Summary
1.1 The quality of many apprenticeships in England is low and much of our provision would not be recognised as an apprenticeship elsewhere in Europe. Government targets for expanding apprenticeship appear to exceed the willingness of employers to provide sufficient places that offer high quality training for young people, particularly at level 3. Caught between targets and weak employer demand, officials appear to have been forced to contemplate trade-offs between quality and quantity in order to help expand apprenticeship volume.
1.2 This situation is symptomatic of a deeper set of problems. The first is that demand for Level 3 skills is limited, partly due to the ability to source skills from higher education, and partly due to work organisation and job design that has de-skilled many jobs. The second is that English employers have a very narrow conception of what skill is, and what learning is needed to support its creation. Even the current, not particularly demanding minimum standards built into apprenticeship standards are often too high for many firms. This leads to pressure from employers and training providers to dilute the quality of apprenticeships in return for them providing places.
1.3 There is an urgent need for government to discuss these issues with employers, and to determine what is needed to help support more employers to raise their demand for skill and to re-think the purposes of initial training for young workers.
2. Introduction
2.1 The author of this memorandum has a long-standing interest in issues to do with apprenticeships in the UK. He recently contributed a co-authored chapter (with Susan James from Oxford University) on the role of employers within apprenticeship for the Institute of Public Policy Research (IPPR) volume Re-thinking Apprenticeships (1).
2.2 This submission of evidence focuses on the role of employers. In particular, it explores the problems which very varied levels of employer demand for skills and employers’ limited willingness to deliver elements of the established apprenticeship frameworks poses for government policies and for those who have to administer them, for example the National Apprenticeship Service.
3. Framing the Problem
3.1 Much of the recent press attention on apprenticeships in England has focused on what appear to be some quite significant failings in terms of apprenticeship quality. These have included:
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3.2 As a result, it can reasonably be argued, as various contributors to the recent IPPR volume on the Rethinking Apprenticeship (2) did, that many European employers, trade unions and governments would not recognise an English apprenticeship as being an apprenticeship because:
Too many are for training (or accrediting the existing skills of) existing adult workers, aged over 25, who have often been in the job for several years—elsewhere in Europe apprenticeship is initial training linked to the initial formation of an occupational identity. Adult training supported by government funds often takes place, but no one would expect it to be labelled as apprenticeship.
Too many English apprenticeships are at Level 2—ie they are operating at lower secondary qualification level, rather than Level 3 (intermediate level).
They contain no substantive element of broader general education (which in many other countries might extend to cover maths, native language, science, a foreign language, and modern history).
They are often far too short in duration, a reflection of their lack of substantive learning content (how can a 12-week course deliver a full Level 2 that is “equivalent” to five good GCSEs?). The European norm is for apprenticeships that last for between two and four years.
Some are not occupational in nature. For example, customer services is not an occupation in any meaningful sense. It is a bundle of often relatively low level competences grouped around structured interaction with customers in a range of service sector settings. In Europe apprenticeship is there to induct the young person into an occupation and its culture (often fairly broadly defined), to prepare them to progress within it, and often also provides the foundations for the individual setting up their own business within that occupational area.
3.3 These are all potentially serious failings, and some of them have existed and been known about for quite a long time now—for example, see the 2007 House of Lords Economic Affairs Committee’s inquiry into apprenticeship (3). The reason for their persistence can be suggested to lie, not with lax administration of the apprenticeship system, but with the fact that they reflect deeper difficulties—they are symptoms of a much larger and more fundamental set of problems. These centre on how apprenticeships and the skills they are meant to impart are conceived of by many English employers.
4. Government Targets Versus Employer Demand
4.1 The first aspect of this bigger problem is bound up with tensions between what government wants, in terms of both the volume and quality of apprenticeship places, and what employers en masse are willing to provide in return for public subsidy. Essentially, government want levels of volume and quality to which too few employers are willing to sign up. This situation leaves civil servants and NAS staff to meet targets set by ministers in a system where employers’ co-operation and participation in apprenticeship is entirely voluntary, and where the vast bulk of employers played no role whatsoever in setting the targets. They are government targets, and employers have no automatic feelings of ownership over them or moral duty to help meet them. Caught between the rock of the targets and the hard place of the number and quality of apprenticeship places that employers and training providers are willing and able to provide, those responsible for managing the apprenticeship system often appear forced into making messy compromises about quality and cutting corners (for example on apprenticeship duration) in order to deliver the required volume and rate of expansion.
4.2 The end result, as a member of NAS’s management team admitted in a 2011 conference paper, is that, “The English apprenticeship will not equate to those in Germany, Switzerland, Austria or France for example, nor does it try to. Instead, in typical British fashion, we have a programme that like our economy operates in the middle ground; between the prescriptive, heavily regulated and highly valued continental European work-based learning models and the low regulation economic ideals and practices of America and the new world economies” (4).
4.3 This statement would probably come as something of a surprise to government, who have repeatedly over the last two decades (at least) argued that one of the key reasons for boosting apprenticeship numbers in England is the need to catch up with levels of intermediate and craft level skills in the Northern European workforce. However, it does reflect the reality on the ground, which in turn reflects what employers are willing to sign up to—a point which is explored in more detail below.
5. The Nub of the Problem
5.1 There are two key elements to current difficulties around apprenticeship. First, too few employers in too many sectors have high demands for skill from large swathes of their workforce. Research tells us that demand for skill within the economy is lower than policy often assumes it to be, and that in comparison with employers in other countries, British firms often seem to require less in the way of skill from their workforce. For instance, as Professor Francis Green has observed, “Britain has long been caught in a low-qualification trap, which means that British employers tend to be less likely than in most other countries to require their recruits to be educated beyond the compulsory school leaving age. Among European countries, only in Spain, Portugal and Turkey is there a greater proportion of jobs requiring no education beyond compulsory school. There is some way to go before British employers place similar demands on the education system as are placed in the major competing regions in Europe” (5).
It is also the case that in some sectors, British employers have relatively few job openings at Level 3 for youngsters, with direct consequences for the aim of increasing the proportion of apprenticeships being undertaken at Level 3. In part this reflects the ability of employers to fill some kinds of intermediate/technician/associate professional level jobs with graduates, whose education is paid for entirely by the general public purse and increasingly by the young person themselves via student fees. For example, Foundation Degrees were explicitly conceived of as a means of delivering the technician level skills that employers seemed reluctant to develop through high quality Level 3 apprenticeship provision. In other countries such jobs would form the core of the apprenticeship system, but in England a policy of mass expansion of higher education has opted to offer a mainstream HE-based route (via degrees and foundation degrees) and a subsidiary Level 3 apprenticeship route which is largely restricted to a few sectors (of which engineering is a key example).
5.2 It also reflects the fact that in many parts of the service sector work organisation and job design has taken work and broken it up into jobs that require only small parcels of skill and knowledge which is relatively easily and swiftly acquired, leading to training times that are quite limited, and to a workforce that is easily disposable and a situation where the costs of labour turnover are minimised. In these kinds of jobs, a Level 3 is far more than is required, and there is increasingly strong evidence that even a full Level 2 apprenticeship framework (which as has been noted above is much “thinner” than its counterpart in Europe) looks to many employers as though it contains too many items that are redundant in terms of their immediate needs.
5.3 It is to this second problem—that of breadth and quality in vocational training—that we now turn. There is now a significant body of research that shows that British models of vocational learning and its associated curriculum are narrower and fundamentally different in purpose from those found in other European countries (6, 7). Put simply, in other countries, there is expectation that vocational learning, including within the apprenticeship route, serves a number of roles.
5.4 One, as noted above, is to prepare young people for entry into a relatively broad occupational pathway and to equip them with the skills and knowledge to develop and progress. It is not simply about equipping them with the skills immediately required to perform an entry level job. This approach is sometimes, though not always lacking in many English apprenticeships.
5.5 A second purpose for vocational learning is to equip the young person for their role as a citizen and lifelong learner and to offer a sufficiently broad and deep diet of general educational learning to help support that goal. This second role is normally absent in our apprenticeships (8).
5.6 To give some idea of the scale of the difficulties that this situation produces for government, NAS and those employers who are more ambitious for what apprenticeship can become, let us look at what the official minimum content for a Level 2 apprenticeship now is in England as set out in The Specification of Apprenticeship Standards for England (SASE) (9):
The duration is not directly specified in SASE, but recent guidance from ministers suggests that it is now meant to be at least a year.
Maths (replacing numeracy) and now to Level 2, but previously often well below.
English (replacing communication/literacy) now to Level 2, but previously often well below this.
ICT (sometimes, at the employer’s discretion when creating the framework).
Employee Rights and Responsibilities (ERR)—covers employment rights, health and safety, equality and diversity, careers information, etc.
Personal Learning and “Thinking Skills” (PLTS)—which covers: independent enquiry and decision making, creative thinking and collective problem solving, reflective learning, team working, self management, effective participation.
A minimum of 280 Guided Learning Hours (GLH).
Within the recommended minimum GLH requirement, there is further requirement for a minimum of 100 hours of “off the job/workstation” training. This is quite a small amount of time. 100 hours equates to about three weeks, which is short when compared with the norm elsewhere in Europe (one or sometimes even two days per week for the duration of the apprenticeship). For instance, in Norway, the first two years of the apprenticeship are school-based, and the second two work-based, but with half of the time still being spent on off the job training. Our current minimum allocation of 100 hours is short even when compared with the requirements built into UK’s Manpower Service’s Commission’s two-year Youth Training Scheme in the mid-1980s (13 weeks off the job). In other words, within current apprenticeships our minimum expectations for off the job learning are far more modest than they were for a scheme largely aimed at the young unemployed a quarter of a century ago.
5.7 Overall, the key point is that, by anyone’s standards, this is not a particularly rich, deep or broad offer if the aim is to create a workforce skilled to meet the challenges of both the 21st century workplace and 21st century society/life. However, the problem is that for many employers it appears to be far too rich a diet. In 2009 DBIS ran a consultation on the contents of apprenticeships. There were 357 responses from a range of stakeholders, including trade unions, employers and training providers. As the government’s response to the consultation reports (10), only 30% of respondents agreed that Functional Skills in English and Math should be required in all apprenticeship frameworks, 68% did not want an ICT qualification to be mandatory for all apprenticeships, and only 53% of respondents agreed that all six of the Personal Learning and Thinking Skills are necessary in all apprenticeships. In terms of the government’s original proposal that there be a minimum of 250 hours off the job/workstation training, only 35% of respondents agreed that this was an acceptable minimum. The rest wanted greater flexibility—ie fewer hours—to which the government agreed.
5.8 It should be stressed that many employers want to and do aim far higher than this. The training they provide far exceeds the minimum requirements. However, the employer population is extremely diverse, varying in its training needs by sector, size and product market strategy within sectors. All too often skills policy talks about employers as though they were a simple, undifferentiated group. They are not. The divergent needs and demands posed by a very diverse set of employers pose a major challenge for government and for NAS. Catering to the skill needs of those at the leading edge by setting and maintaining high, world class standards is liable to mean disengagement by employers closer to the trailing edge. Moreover, government rhetoric has consistently been that apprenticeship design is “employer-led”, which makes it harder to then tell some employers that what they have specified or are demanding is inadequate, or to enforce minimum standards with which at least a proportion of employers do not agree.
5.9 This situation raises a number of questions, to which answers are needed if apprenticeship policy is to make much further progress:
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5.10 These questions need to be directed, not towards government officials or NAS, but towards employers and those who seek to represent their views. One of the key failings in policy on apprenticeship has been the general unwillingness by government to openly debate the issues raised above with a broad range of employers. The result is that we have not had a serious conversation with firms and their representatives about the nature and purposes of apprenticeship.
5.11 If a substantial number of employers want simply to offer a very restricted and narrow form of low level job-specific initial/induction training for new young staff, then the case for public financial support for this needs to be discussed, as does its relationship with the broader concept of, and ambitions for, apprenticeship. Public money is scarce, and there seems little point in expending it on training that is of limited quality simply to reach an arbitrary government target.
5.12 It also seems worthwhile for government and NAS to think about how they might do more to determine what is needed to help support more employers to raise their demand for skill and to re-think the purposes of initial training for young workers. This support does not necessarily mean direct financial support for individual training places. It could, for example, be about helping to companies to re-think work organisation and job design. Even in terms of training itself, rather than simply money for more places, support might better be focused upon training more in-company trainers and those who supervise apprentices so that they are able to tailor-make better packages of both off and on the job learning inside individual workplaces.
5.13 The often very limited expectations and demands for skill specified by employers for many lower level jobs in part underlies the problems noted by the Wolf Review (11). These concern the ability of a lot of our lower level vocational qualifications to deliver a wage premium, have much traction on recruitment and selection decisions, or support progression and/or a return to learning. From a public policy perspective, understanding the causes of limited employer demand for skill and for broader types of learning, and finding ways that this can, over time, be changed is extremely important if progress is to be made on apprenticeship and other forms of vocational learning for young people.
27 January 2012
References
1. E Keep and S James 2011. “Employer Demand for Apprenticeships”, in T Dolphin and T Lanning (eds.) 2011. Rethinking Apprenticeships, London: IPPR.
2. T Dolphin and T Lanning (eds.) 2011. Rethinking Apprenticeships, London: IPPR.
3. House of Lords Economic Affairs Committee. 2007. Apprenticeship: a key route to skill, 5th Report (2007–07), HL 138, London: House of Lords.
4. R Marsh 2011. “Apprenticeship growth and quality in England”, paper presented to the Education and Employers Taskforce annual conference, University of Warwick.
5. F Green 2009. “Job quality in Britain”, UKCES Praxis Paper No. 1, Wath-upon-Dearne: UK Commission for Employment and Skills, page 17.
6. M Brockmann, L Clarke and C Winch (eds.) 2011. Knowledge, Skills and Competence in the European Labour Market—What’s in a vocational qualification?, Abingdon: Routledge.
7. M Brockmann, L Clarke and C Winch 2010. “The Apprenticeship Framework in England: A New Beginning or a Continuing Sham?”, Journal of Education and Work, Vol. 23, No. 2, 111–127.
8. Brockman et al, 2010 ibid.
9. Department for Business Innovation and Skills. 2011. Specification of Apprenticeship Standards for England, London: DBIS/NAS/SFA/DfE.
10. Department for Business Innovation and Skills. 2010. Consultation on the Specification of Apprenticeship Standards for England (SASE)—Government response, London: DBIS/NAS/DCSF.
11. A Wolf 2011. Review of vocational education—the Wolf report, London: Department for Education.