This should be a great time to apply for an apprenticeship. Expanding the number of degree-level apprenticeships is a plank of the government’s industrial strategy. Expanding the total number of apprenticeships to three million is its most eye-catching offer to school-leavers. Up to £27,000 a year to each apprentice has been promised to cover training costs, and an apprenticeship levy has been introduced to make the money available.
If only transforming vocational education were so easy. No one doubts the need for more and better apprenticeships. As Britain leaves the EU, skills shortages will only tighten. Apprenticeships should be a cost-effective way of addressing them and boosting productivity. Yet the system is coming apart at the seams.
The levy has proved unpopular with more than half of the employers required to pay for it, and has caused a slump instead of an increase in the number of apprenticeships. Despite this, hundreds of training companies have crowded into the sector in anticipation of surging business thanks to the government’s ambitious target. Yet Ofsted lacks the capacity to assess the training offered by many of these companies. Two hundred of them have never been inspected at all. Nearly half of those it does inspect are found to be inadequate or to need improvement. The transition from school to work can be difficult even for the most able school-leavers, but getting it right is essential for their own wellbeing and for the economy’s. In an ideal world the government’s role would be only supervisory, but even this role is being fluffed.
In addition to those “independent learning providers” never visited by Ofsted, hundreds more have not been inspected for at least three years. A further 189 have been inspected but found wanting. Nearly two fifths of school-leavers on level 2 and 3 apprenticeships (equivalent to GCSE and A level respectively) receive fewer than the requisite six hours of weekly classroom instruction. Three per cent receive none at all.
More information is needed, but Ofsted cannot cope and the reasons are not complicated. The new apprenticeships target has increased its workload but its budget has been cut by 38 per cent over the last two parliaments: it stood at £200 million in 2011 and will fall to £124 million by 2020. Reversing this cut would be easy to justify if the apprenticeship levy were working, since this would in due course drive up wages and tax revenues as well as skills. But the levy is not working. It was meant to incentivise large employers to invest more in apprenticeships by requiring them to pay into a central fund from which they can claim back some or all of their training costs. Instead it has led employers to recoup the cost of existing in-house training schemes by relabelling them as apprenticeships. The beneficiaries have been largely older employees rather than school- leavers, and the overall number of apprentices has gone sharply down instead of up.
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The long-running pattern of government paying lip service to vocational education while devoting vastly more attention to universities continues. Nearly as many new apprenticeships start each year in Britain as in Germany. The difference between the two systems is one of quality, which employers are failing to maintain and Ofsted is failing to monitor. Both these failings must be fixed. Even as Brexit looms, it is hard to think of a more important task for government.