What a difference a year makes. In January 2107 Britain was lauding the creation of a government levy to fund the revival of apprenticeships. Now, 12 months on, there has been a sharp fall in apprenticeship numbers; employers are fed up with the scheme; and most young people are opting either for university or a job with no training. So was the push for apprenticeships a mistake?
My great grandfather, JJ Thomson, had been destined for an apprenticeship in 1880 in Manchester, but his father died and his mother couldn’t afford to pay for him to train as an engineer. Instead, he went to Cambridge University to study maths. In his case, this was a lucky break; he became a physicist and discovered the electron.
Back then, for most of his contemporaries, an apprenticeship was a far better career choice than a degree, and there were 340,000 of them a year available by the start of the 20th century.
But then their long decline began, as they were pushed aside by degrees. By 1999, there were only 59,000 available a year. Despite the cost of a degree rising sharply — young people will leave university with average debt of more than £50,000, according to the Institute for Fiscal Studies — its value has not, with an increasing proportion of graduates failing to find jobs that match their education.
So the government’s ambition of three million apprenticeships by 2020, funded by a new levy on larger employers, seemed to offer young people new choices while helping to tackle Britain’s chronic skills shortage.
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Instead, in the first year of the scheme, there was a 49 per cent fall in the number of apprenticeships, with 48,000 people starting one in the last three months of the educational year to July 2017, compared with 117,800 in 2016. Employers blame this catastrophic drop on bureaucracy; EEF, the manufacturers’ organisation, says that “employers have struggled to get their heads round the complex rules and restrictions in accessing funds”.
Larger employers resent paying the levy, smaller employers find that the red tape puts them off accessing it. They are also finding it safer to use the levy cash to train existing staff, branding even MBAs for executives an “apprenticeship”. Rather that than spend the money creating schemes for youngsters who might never apply or prove unreliable when they do, because they have never had a job before, they argue.
The apprenticeships that do exist are hard to find. Paul Johnson, the director of the Institute for Fiscal Studies, made waves when he wrote in The Times this month about his struggle to find out about apprenticeships for his son.
“I spent a large part of the Christmas holidays helping him to apply for higher and degree-level apprenticeships,” he wrote. “It is staggeringly hard even to find the right opportunities.”
Sir Peter Lampl of the Sutton Trust has another worry. In November he said: “It is very concerning that people from low and moderate-income backgrounds are much less likely than their peers to take up high-quality apprenticeships.”
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So there are significant problems, but none of this means we should give up on apprenticeships. Too many universities deliver poor-quality degrees that don’t translate into better jobs after graduation; apprenticeships are the answer. But the government’s scheme is doing more harm than good, damaging the reputation of apprenticeships and undermining employer goodwill.
Anne Milton, the minister responsible, who didn’t go to university and says her current appointment “fits me like a glove”, needs to turn this policy around now — it is too important to be allowed to fail.
Case study
Alex Hills has had a passion for vintage clothing since his teens, writes Emma Lee-Potter. He collected menswear from the 1920s and 1930s and started making his own clothes at the age of 17.
After taking AS levels in history, fine art, archaeology and politics at Bexhill College in Bexhill-on-Sea, East Sussex, he considered studying for a degree in bespoke tailoring at the London College of Fashion but had second thoughts. “I was going to be [part of] the first year to pay £9,000 a year tuition fees, so I applied to do a bespoke tailoring course at Newham College in east London instead,” he says.
Hills, 23, was halfway through his level 3 qualification at the college when he got the chance to do a level 3 apprenticeship in coat making at Dege & Skinner, a family-run bespoke tailor in Savile Row in London. The company has been dressing members of the royal family and the military for more than 150 years.
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Hills completed his coat-making apprenticeship in 2016 and has embarked on a level 5 cutting apprenticeship, learning from the company’s head cutter, Nicholas De’Ath.
“I went from being taught in a class of 20 at college to having one-to-one tuition every day,” says Hills, who was a finalist in the 2017 Golden Shears award, a national competition for tailoring students and apprentices.
“One day I might be cutting out an ordinary worsted suit, the next I might be cutting out a uniform for the Yeomen of the Guard. I feel very proud when I see someone wearing a suit I’ve helped to make.
“In maths classes at school I used to ask, ‘When am I ever going to use this?’ but in this job you do. I’ve realised that there are practical applications for maths.”
To produce The Times Guide to Higher & Degree Apprenticeships the independent market research company High Fliers Research contacted more than 250 employers of school-leavers, graduates and young professionals during December 2017.
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The research identified how many higher or degree apprentices each organisation recruited in the previous 12 months on courses that lead to level 4 qualifications or above.
Employers who offer training schemes outside the apprenticeship frameworks: by sponsoring places on existing undergraduate courses; providing their own degree courses at university; or through programmes leading to professional qualifications were included.
Advanced or intermediate apprenticeships aimed at 16-plus school-leavers, which lead to level 2 or 3 qualifications, have not been included. The 50 organisations that recruited the most sixth-form school-leavers for higher or degree apprenticeships, or comparable schemes, took on more than 4,600 trainees in 2017.