Oral evidence: Apprenticeships and traineeships for 16-19 year olds, HC 597Wednesday 5 November 2014

Oral evidence, 5 November 2014.

Witnesses

Kirstie Donnelly MBE, UK Managing Director, City and Guilds, Rob Wall, Head of Employment and Education Policy, CBI, Eileen Cavalier OBE, CEO, London College of Beauty Therapy, and David Harbourne, Director of Policy and Research, The Edge Foundation, gave evidence.

Chair

Welcome. Thank you for joining us. I think you have heard the evidence in the first session. There were a few gaps there, where we struggled to get evidence on certain things. Is there anything you picked up that you would like to comment on, having sat and listened to that? Is there anything you would like to fill in or are there any differences of opinion from what you heard on the first panel?

David Harbourne

Almost everything, Chair.

Chair

That is excellent. I will pass it over to you, David. We love a controversialist.

David Harbourne

If we go backwards, on work experience and small firms, the last year in which data were collected was 2008-09, when it was more or less universal in Key Stage 4. About 500,000 young people had work experience placements in that year, with 404,000 employers, of whom 60,000 had not provided placements the year before. There is no shortage of volunteers amongst small firms. The difference was that in those days an education business partnership would ring up an employer and ask, and if the employer could say yes, they would. Losing that network was a big mistake. It was a big mistake to withdraw work experience from that age group. What we tend to do in this country is to look at something and say, “This bit is not working, so either we will get rid of the whole thing or we will start again,” and that is a mistake. It is a similar mistake that we are risking making with apprenticeships for 16 to 19-year-olds. One of your very first questions was: what has changed since 2010 in apprenticeships for that age group? Right now, the answer is almost nothing. The number of apprenticeships of less than 12 months for that age group was always tiny. Right now, the apprenticeships for 16 to 19-year-olds are remarkably similar to the ones the current Government inherited. We are at risk of throwing good practice away because we think there are problems elsewhere in the apprenticeship system. I have plenty more I could say, but for brevity I will stop there.

Chair

No, that was an excellent start.

Alex Cunningham

It is good to start with a double recommendation at the front of what you said there, David. Work experience should be reintroduced into Key Stage 4—that is a clear recommendation from you—and it should be compulsory. Secondly, you think an education business partnership or similar organisation would add value to what we are doing.

David Harbourne

Yes.

Kirstie Donnelly

I would go one step further. Absolutely, we should bring work experience back. We would back everything that David said. Other research we have done with employers around making education count clearly says that is fundamentally what two-thirds of them are saying. I slightly disagree with the colleague earlier who said that a lot of employers are satisfied. One of the big issues is they are not satisfied with the level of knowledge and appetite for work that young people have. They may have technical know‑how, but they do not necessarily have the ready‑to‑work skills. The other thing is it does come back to IAG. We are going to see IAG coming out in pretty much all of the recommendations. How do we bring that back as part of the prevention, rather than trying to adopt it as the cure? The other fundamental thing is about, until we integrate vocational 16-to-18 apprenticeship and traineeship‑type programmes and we measure league tables in the same way as we do for other school league tables, we will never have the true parity we could have, which would really raise the esteem, the attainment and the aspiration for young people going into apprenticeships.

Chair

What does that like that, then? What should that look like?

Kirstie Donnelly

What I am suggesting is, as a recommendation, we would clearly say that 16-to-18 vocational education needs to be recognised alongside further education; it needs to be bedded in and integrated, so somebody doing a one or two‑year vocational programme at 16 to 18 can do it inside further education. For example, if you take a traineeship, it could be done with an employer as a one‑year full‑time programme. Equally, however, those all‑important pre‑vocational work‑ready skills could be recognised and, alongside that, if schools were also judged on the number of apprentices they put forward, just as they are on the number of people who go on to HE, for example, we might see some difference in parity coming back to the measurements. The school league tables are always geared towards people being taken in one direction.

Chair

We start these inquiries as lay people and sadly we end them as lay people and not experts. Be very clear with us about specific recommendations, rather than assuming that we will understand what you mean.

Kirstie Donnelly

The specific recommendation is, just as we have school league tables now measuring the performance of young people leaving full‑time education, we should put other measures in there such as young people leaving into work‑based programmes such as apprenticeships. If we did that, we would raise the profile of the schools.

Neil Carmichael

Can I ask where university technical colleges fit into that description and the set of recommendations you have given us?

Kirstie Donnelly

I am sure David will want to say something on this. Clearly university technical colleges have made a mark in STEM, in the science, technical and manufacturing areas. They have not become fully embedded across the broader range of curricula that I would be talking about. This recommendation would impact across a broader range of vocational areas. There is still an issue about people’s perception, and then we go back to the IAG. Those choices have to be correctly positioned, as they are in Switzerland and some of the countries you might have been touching on earlier when you mentioned international practice. At 14, there is a much clearer choice; there is a much clearer IAG process that allows young people to understand what that broader choice is. We are lacking that at the moment, which is why UTCs are a bit narrow.

Neil Carmichael

But they start at 14 as well, don’t they?

Kirstie Donnelly

Yes.

Mr Raab

We had unanimous evidence from the previous panel that that the removal of young apprenticeships for 14 to 16-year-olds was a mistake. As the more employer side of things, do you agree with the evidence we taken this morning—that it should be there as an option?

David Harbourne

Scotland is introducing exactly that right now. They are calling it the foundation apprenticeship. That will combine two days of apprenticeship learning with learning in the classroom. They are doing it at what we would call years 11 and 12. It is a subtle difference from the young apprenticeship programme, but it seems to me a perfectly good option and one that is the closest we are going to get to the Swiss model.

Chair

In the predecessor Committee—I am the only survivor of that particular time—we mournfully accepted the shutting down of the Young Apprenticeship scheme by the previous Government on the grounds of cost. My colleague Dominic has been bringing up regularly with me since that it was a mistake. Does anyone have any insight, seeing this is a specific recommendation from two panels now at the beginning of our inquiry? I do not know if you have any expertise on the way they ran, why they were so expensive and what could be done to make a Committee like this not have to accept mournfully their demise in the future.

David Harbourne

Yes, Chairman. The current Government phased them out because of cost.

Chair

The previous Government phased them out.

David Harbourne

No, no. The current Government phased them out; the previous Government capped the numbers to 9,000 per cohort. That meant that if you had a school in which you had four young apprentices, there was a net additional cost. There were no offsetting savings to the school whatsoever. I think I am quoting accurately from the Conservative Party manifesto for 2010, which said that the numbers should rapidly be expanded to around 30,000 and potentially beyond. If you had increased the number of Young Apprenticeship places, you would have achieved the economies of scale that were never achieved when the numbers were capped at 9,000 per year.

Chair

It sounds like this is excellent timing for everybody’s manifesto. It could be embedded in all of them.

Eileen Cavalier

We are in a very specific industry, the beauty industry, which is divided into two main areas. One is beauty treatment and one is beauty retail. For beauty treatment, it is virtually impossible to deliver the qualification as an apprentice; for beauty retail, it is. You have two completely different types of employer. In the beauty treatment sector, the beauty therapy side, they are 87% micro or small businesses, whereas in beauty retail you are talking about large and macro companies. There are two different markets entirely.

Chair

Why is it impossible to deliver an apprenticeship in beauty therapy?

Eileen Cavalier

One, it is that they are micro and small employers, so they do not have the resources to be able to supervise that young person within the workplace. However, the other side of it is predominantly because of the level of skills. It is also highly regulated. In London, it is considered a special treatment under the London Local Authorities Act 1991, and effectively what that means is that a person of whatever age has to be qualified first in order to be able to carry out a treatment on a member of the public. In fact, there are very solid reasons behind that. There is no supporting role for an apprentice in the beauty‑treatment sector. I am talking about it from an employer perspective. The analogy I can draw is if you have an apprentice chef, a chef goes in and they start by learning how to cut vegetables and then doing sauces, and then they will gradually move on. If that apprentice makes a mistake cutting up the vegetables into the wrong size or whatever, it is not going to make any difference to the client, the diner. It is not going to make any difference to the business. If a trainee was to do a treatment on a member of the public and did it incorrectly, it could be a danger to the member of the public and can be a real risk to the business itself. There are very solid reasons why that is in place. Whilst the legislation only applies to London, in fact it is industry practice throughout. What it boils down to is that apprentice is unable to be effective within the workplace and support the employer in the workplace. That is a very solid reason.

Chair

Sweeping up the hair is not great training, apart from punctuality.

Eileen Cavalier

It has nothing to do with hair. Beauty is a completely different sector from hairdressing.

Chair

My apologies.

Eileen Cavalier

It is connected to hairdressing, but it is completely separate.

Chair

Whoops.

Eileen Cavalier

I have no idea why it is the Hairdressing & Beauty Industry Authority that covers it. Beauty treatment sits within Habia, which is hair and beauty, and beauty retail sits within retail, which is People 1st. It is separate.

Chair

On behalf of my size 11s, I apologise.

Eileen Cavalier

No, it is all right.

Chair

Do you have any reflections on first panel?

Eileen Cavalier

It is absolutely right. I completely agree about Key Stage 4—that they should have work experience. We have 20 years’ experience working in schools and running all sorts of programmes. We led on the Diploma in Hair and Beauty Studies, in fact, which we built into something very successful and which disappeared overnight. In fact, at the moment we do not have any schools programmes running or coming in, because of a lack of funding to support it. Schools cannot support it.

Rob Wall

I am not an expert on hair, as you can imagine, but in terms of reflections on what has been said, I would like to add our weight to the call for the restoration of work‑related learning at Key Stage 4. The CBI has been calling for this for some time. Yes, there is a challenge to employers to step up and provide quality work experience, but we also want to be ambitious in our definition of what work experience is to encompass that.

Chair

What is your definition? We have the week. My eldest daughter still claims that the week of work experience I organised through a friend was the worst week of her entire life, and they really put a lot of effort in and made a tremendous effort to make it interesting. She just did not find it that way.

Rob Wall

It should be broader to encompass all those different types of employer interactions—so, the inspiring speaker, the work‑based project, the visit to the factory floor as well as the traditional placement within industry; and the more, the better. We know from research done by others that the more interactions young people have with the workplace, the better their employability prospects.

Chair

Should it be that discrete week or two weeks, or should it be a day a week for a number of weeks and somehow fitted into things? How would that work?

Rob Wall

It should be flexible. It should be flexible around the school needs and the needs of the local economy. We talk about Key Stage 4, but I know our Director General and you, Graham, went into a primary school. It should be down that pipeline as well. There is something fundamental there about how we view business within the education system. We would like to see a much deeper, smarter engagement to provide that inspiration piece. I know the previous panel spoke about diversity within apprenticeships. We heard the fact that only 1% of young construction apprentices are women. The way to challenge that is through schools—to get that inspiration early on. You cannot tackle it at 16; it is too late.

Bill Esterson

Is this about a fundamental shift in the way we that treat vocational learning in this country? How do we change that?

Rob Wall

It is also about a fundamental shift in how we view the role of education. Whether you want to pursue an academic or vocational stream, you need exposure to the workplace, because what we hear from employers, not just when they are recruiting at school‑leaver age but when they are recruiting graduates, is that that work‑readiness is not there.

Kirstie Donnelly

Can I come in on that? Whether we bring back apprenticeships at 14 is a really important point. In a way, I do not know whether that is the right question. What we are asking is: do we bring back recognised vocational work‑ready programmes that combine all of those skills, so you can develop your technical know‑how as well as your work‑ready skills in a way that does not close you off from still having the option to go into HE? The answer is yes. That does not necessarily have to be apprenticeships, but it could ladder into an apprenticeship or, indeed, a higher level apprenticeship.

Chair

There was this specific young apprenticeship programme, however.

Kirstie Donnelly

There was, yes.

Chair

It had a structure; it had something that you could get your head round as to what it was.

Kirstie Donnelly

But you were talking about expense before. What I am proposing does not necessarily mean that it would not have the same expense, because what you are saying is that you are rethinking the curriculum and you are putting vocational work-ready programmes back into the curriculum. You do not have to call them apprenticeships, but they ladder ultimately into an apprenticeship and you do not have the same cost bearing. That is what I was trying to comment on.

Chair

That is your comment on that. Rob, I want to get the CBI on this point. Should Young Apprenticeships scale up? If they were scaled up, the cost would come tumbling down and they would start to create—

Rob Wall

I am not sure we have come out with a strong view on that specific programme. However, we like the diversity we see within the education landscape. There are lots of different routes and pathways that can provide options to higher skills for different needs.

Chair

You like that.

Rob Wall

Yes.

Chair

Isn’t one of the big fundamental issues around vocational education that it is so un‑navigable? People sit there agonising over the courses their children will do at university and which university they go to as if that is complicated. Try being in the majority of the population who are not going to university and then try to work out where you go.

Rob Wall

There is something about information. This takes us back to that careers piece. We have called for a vocational UCAS‑style system. In one place, young people can go to get a feel for better information around the range of vocational options and apprenticeships available. This will raise that parity of esteem. I know the Deputy Prime Minister announced a pilot; we have seen nothing since. There are things we can do to tackle some of those issues.

Chair

I will resist making any comment on that.

Bill Esterson

Will bringing back work experience, building on UTCs and Young Apprenticeships, change the culture so that vocational learning is valued as it needs to be or is there something else missing here?

Eileen Cavalier

What is really missing at the moment is the careers advice. That is absolutely fundamental to the whole thing. We get massive support from employers in terms of all sorts of work experience and coming in and so on, but it really needs to start in schools themselves. Also, they have such a limited view of what their potential is. That is one of the issues. It needs to be careers advice, employers going into schools, which I know the CBI supports heavily, to give them a very broad understanding of where their qualifications can lead them—what type of careers they can go into. Their view is very limited, and that can very much be their own sort of environment.

Chair

I am not cutting you off because I do not think it is interesting, but we have done an inquiry into that. You are preaching to the choir here. Are there any specific recommendations that would link to apprenticeships?

David Harbourne

If I may, I will pick up briefly on the university technical college question as well, because, as you know, Edge is a supporter of that movement. One of the principal reasons for establishing the university technical colleges is to break from this vocational/academic divide that says that, if you are capable of doing A-levels and university, that is what you will do, and it is only if you are not capable of those things that you will do the so‑called vocational. That was always a false dichotomy. Indeed, apprenticeships for 16 to 18-year-olds already demonstrate that you can achieve success through the apprenticeship route instead of A-levels. By combining the hands‑on learning, the links with employers and the academic curriculum, the university technical colleges are showing that right across the ability spectrum there are pathways for you to follow that will lead to success and can help to answer what someone recently said to me was the most dangerous question in education: why am I learning this? If you understand why you are learning this bit of maths—you are applying that equation in a particular situation—then you will see an improvement in motivation and achievement. In that way—I am now going to paint a deliberately black‑and‑white picture—you will start to see middle‑class and well‑educated parents appreciate that what we currently call vocational pathways can be a route to success for their children and not just, in Alison Wolf’s words, “other people’s children”.

Bill Esterson

Is getting the middle classes interested in vocational learning the key?

David Harbourne

That is where we will get the shift in our perception of vocational education. It is not the only thing we need to do, but it is certainly a big part of it.

Bill Esterson

You mentioned UTCs. What about the majority who do not go to UTCs? How do you cross the divide there?

David Harbourne

There, the issue is back to some of the things this panel has already been touching on, which is what happens before the age of 16.

Bill Esterson

It is that mix.

David Harbourne

Yes.

Bill Esterson

In the last panel, we heard a lot about the difficulty in getting employers involved in apprenticeships. How do we get more employers to take on young apprentices in particular, 16 to 19?

Rob Wall

From our perspective, what has been really positive about the reform programme is the enthusiasm that has been shown by employers. So far, over 1,000 employers have been engaged in the trailblazer process of piloting the new standards. The feedback we have had from CBI members on the new process has been really positive. For many years, employers have been calling for a system that delivers training that is relevant to the workplace and a process that is simpler, and that is what the designs are there to achieve. If you want more employers to engage, then drive through the reforms we are seeing, and then, as the other panel said, provide a period of stability so that employers have the confidence to invest in those programmes going forward.

Kirstie Donnelly

Clearly there are still issues, although I agree with everything Rob says. We are very heavily involved in a number of the trailblazers and there clearly are some very successful models. The digital trailblazer is a very good successful model, where they have take large employers and the value chain of small employers, which is really where the success needs to be. To your point before, how do you really engage and get SMEs engaged in apprenticeships? I wonder whether we need to look at the routes such as licence to practise, which is technically what is operating in industries like hair and beauty. In many respects, we already have a successful apprenticeship system operating through a licence to practise register. It is about how we could take that further and embed that so that we get more and more SMEs involved, because until we get SMEs involved we cannot really say the reforms are going to be successful.

Eileen Cavalier

Talking about our own model, it has always been the same issue, this licence to work issue. All of our 16 to 19-year-old learners are in classroom‑based learning, but we are a centre of educational excellence, so we are at the heart of the industry. We are totally immersed in employers. We set out to give the young person a very broad experience of all types of employers, because it is a very diverse sector. Therefore, they have a very clear understanding of all the different types of opportunities and career opportunities—which are vast within the beauty industry—that they can go into. Employers are involved; they are in the college every single day. There will two or three employer talks going on; there are visits to all of the sorts of things you are talking about. That happens as a matter of course. We do things like provide the comfort zone at the Ideal Home Show. All of the students are down there on continual work experience all the time. It is a vast, different array of different types of work experience. When that young person is qualified and going out, they fully understand the industry they are going into and they fully appreciate where they can find a long‑term career path, which is what happens. We have 90% job outcomes, because we have our own in‑house jobcentre. It has been going for 12 years.

David Harbourne

There are two separate issues. There is business involvement in the creation of standards and there is business involvement in providing apprenticeships. Very briefly, I am not a fan of the Richard review. It seems to ignore the fact that employers were involved before. I got involved 25 years ago helping the master bakers create the first national vocational qualifications, then the first modern apprenticeships, then the first national traineeships, which, incidentally, is what they were called before they became intermediate‑level apprenticeships. Employers have been involved throughout those processes, but we have come back to the classic position that, because some employers did not like what their Sector Skills Councils were doing in their name, we are saying, “What was in the past was clearly all awful and we have to start again.” I do not agree with that, not least because 1,000 employers being involved in the trailblazers sounds like a large number until you find out how many businesses there are in this country. The majority of businesses do not want more involvement than they have now. The Government’s own research demonstrates that only 16% of businesses wish they had more influence over the design, content and delivery of apprenticeships. However, when you come to the question of how you get more businesses to provide apprenticeships, and particularly the 16 to 18-year-olds that are the focus of this inquiry, I would draw your attention to one of the biggest success stories in this field of this Government’s period in office, which is the apprenticeship grant for employers. It provides a cash payment to small businesses that recruit apprenticeships. When it was launched in February 2012, they started to count the number of grants awarded. Up to April 2014, 83,500 grant payments were made, of which 53,600 were for apprentices aged 16 to 18, and an independent evaluation of the programme has shown that the majority of employers receiving grants are small—80% employ fewer than 25 staff—and around 85% of grant recipients had never previously had an apprentice. That is a carrot that has worked very well.

Mr Ward

How many stayed on after the apprenticeship ended?

David Harbourne

That we do not know. That raises another issue. In this country, we have a terrible tendency not to do longitudinal studies. In fact, I had a conversation with Kirstie separately a while ago about how we believe that we should be commissioning more longitudinal studies to find out what happens to people who start a vocational programme in a variety of settings over a period of years. We have it for graduates through a programme called Futuretrack, which followed people through university and beyond, and it is a very rich set of data, but we do not have it for people who follow vocational programmes.

Chair

That is a recommendation.

David Harbourne

Yes.

Chair

If you want to flesh that out any more, if you have not done so already to us, then please send it to us. We like recommendations.

Alex Cunningham

I wanted to ask you about the quality of these places. You said you do not know what happened afterwards. I am interested in the quality. How much of it is a case of another pair of hands in the workplace who can do the photocopying and do the run‑around stuff rather than a proper apprenticeship? How do we know the quality that is being delivered for the young person for whom the grant has been paid has, in fact, been of a high standard?

David Harbourne

Very quickly, I would say first of all that, because the mix of apprenticeships for 16 to 18-year-olds has not shifted substantially and as a result of the monitoring of the public funding by the Skills Funding Agency and Ofsted, we have a fair idea of the quality of the apprenticeships being provided. Of course, whatever one thinks of the current apprenticeship standards and how they are created, they have to be approved at a national level by an employer‑led organisation. Whilst it is inevitable that people will ask questions about 16‑year-olds doing the photocopying, first of all you have to start somewhere—and it is where you end up that matters.

Chair

You said you would be brief, David.

David Harbourne

Secondly, a great many of the apprenticeships have been shown to achieve very good results.

Chair

We have limited time left and we have so far managed to cover the first question. Bill, can we have short, sharp questions and answers from here on?

Bill Esterson

Yes. I was talking to a 17‑year-old apprentice the other day who started in September, and he was telling me he spends two days a week doing great stuff in college, but so far has no work placement. How common is that situation? Does it suggest there is a problem about apprenticeships meeting the needs of employers and, for that matter, the needs of the young people?

Kirstie Donnelly

He thinks he is on an apprenticeship.

Bill Esterson

He has been told he is getting an apprenticeship.

Kirstie Donnelly

He is signed up and doing it, but he technically is not on an apprenticeship. He has been mis‑sold in that context. You cannot be on an apprenticeship unless you are clearly assigned to an employer. However, in a way, going back to that earlier point this morning, which was about the supply and demand issue. How do you get colleges, local industries and employers to work harder together so that you do not have that disengagement? It is exactly that kind of disengagement that then gives apprenticeships a bad name, because he is not on an apprenticeship.

Bill Esterson

The point about the example is this: are apprenticeships meeting the needs of employers and the needs of young people?

Kirstie Donnelly

In a number of areas they are, as David says. In the current reforms there is a lot being done to make sure the end assessment and the work that is done on the framework ensures that happens. It goes back to what I was trying to say earlier: we need to get better at redefining what we mean by “apprenticeships” and stop using it as a broad‑brush term. What we mean by “apprenticeship”? That it lasts for a minimum of so many years—two years?—and it is at Level 3?

Chair

Is that your bid?

Kirstie Donnelly

My recommendation is there has to be a minimum level of time.

Chair

There is: 12 months.

Kirstie Donnelly

I am saying we should raise it. We should have progression from Level 2 to Level 3, and that is how we should recognise an apprenticeship.

Chair

I like specific recommendations. There we are: we have got to raise it above 12 months. Are there any comments from the rest of the panel?

Bill Esterson

Does anybody think differently from that?

Rob Wall

I am not sure we would agree, because if you are genuine about having employers in the driving seat it needs to meet the industry need. You could have a great 12‑month programme; you could have a poor 24‑month programme.

Chair

The point about an apprenticeship is it has this badge with an imprimatur from Government at some level. You might get a fabulous 12‑week course that is really brilliant, but it should not be an apprenticeship, should it? It is not just about it being a useful, fit course to have gone on linked to an employer, which is alright. It has other elements, hasn’t it?

Rob Wall

The key element for us is that it is a means to an end. It is not an end in itself. Sometimes this arms race around numbers is damaging, because there is only a finite number of apprentices at any one time in the economy if they are to lead to a job. Yes, apprenticeships are a job with substantial training.

Chair

You would like to cut the 12 months.

Rob Wall

No, it has to have a degree of weight to it.

Chair

It does, does it? Kirstie is simply saying she would like it to be longer, and you have accepted that it should have a length.

Rob Wall

Yes, 12 months.

Chair

The Government have magically picked on exactly the right period in the CBI’s view. How very fortuitous that is.

Eileen Cavalier

I do not agree with that, because you cannot compare apples and pears. What is right for engineering, for example, which is three years, and what is right for retail are two completely different things. It should be an industry‑led decision.

Chair

You would abolish the 12 months.

Eileen Cavalier

Yes, I would. Until 2011, we used to deliver 1,000 apprenticeships for beauty retail, and today we do not deliver any. It is because the imposition of the one year, the SASE—240 hours off the job. There is no retailer in the world that is going to agree to that. We used to deliver it in seven months. We did it in a very specific way, agreed with the employers, because it fitted in with the retail trading pattern.

Kirstie Donnelly

I do not want to go into a history lesson, but if we remember what apprenticeships were really about, they were about starting as an apprentice, going on a journey and becoming the master—having mastery. All we are trying to say is, in redefining apprenticeships, we need to define what we mean by an apprenticeship. I am hearing evidence around apprenticeships and it is interesting. Even in the construction industry and even in your sector, they are all saying, “You do not get to journey and progress until you have at least served one year.” Often in construction it is two or three years. All I am trying to say is that if we redefine what we mean by apprenticeships, we should put in minimum standards on length and quality of learning. Inside that, you can have licences to practice and other recognised qualifications in areas that allow you to deliver what you need to do, but we should not confuse apprenticeships with everything.

Chair

Isn’t Kirstie right, Eileen? They were good courses and it may have been convenient to call them apprenticeships up until now.

Eileen Cavalier

I agree with that.

Chair

Maybe they should not be apprenticeships, because they are not genuinely delivering mastery, and mastery might be the core thing to bear in mind when you are designing it.

Eileen Cavalier

I am talking about Level 2 apprenticeships. It was a stepping stone. There was a Level 2 apprenticeship and that was how we delivered it. If they were going to go on to the Level 3, which would be a supervisory/management level within the sphere I am talking about, it should then be a while. I do not have an issue with that.

Bill Esterson

Should Level 2 be an apprenticeship?

Eileen Cavalier

It is this generic term that we have come up with. This is what we call it. We call it an apprenticeship. It does frighten employers. We deal with huge numbers of employers and it frightens them, because it seems to be very complicated and they are reluctant to go into it, because it is so heavy.

David Harbourne

On the “time served versus competence” issue, we moved away from time‑served apprenticeships when we introduced modern apprenticeships on the basis that people develop their skills and competence at different rates. I do not see a problem with that personally.

Chair

Could there be three‑month mastery?

David Harbourne

That would be an extreme case, wouldn’t it? I cannot imagine a 16 to 19-year-old mastering a craft or a skill in three months. However, it would be equivalent to saying you cannot take your driving test until you have had one year’s minimum of practice on the roads. Perhaps that is a good thing, but demonstrating competence is an important part of what an apprenticeship is. As to what they are called, I am ambivalent, because, as I say, what we currently call a Level 2 apprenticeship was introduced—following Ron Dearing’s report in 1996—as a national traineeship. The name was changed because employers said, allegedly, that it was confusing to have two names in the marketplace, national traineeship and modern apprenticeship, and that it would be better if we had one name to cover them all. I do not really mind what they are called; what I do believe is that we do need Level 2 forms of provision for that age group.

Eileen Cavalier

Yes, definitely.

Bill Esterson

How easy is it for SMEs to employ 16 to 19-year-old apprentices? What effects are the changes in funding going to have?

Eileen Cavalier

They are just massive; they are not supporting it. It is as simple as that. It goes back to this issue of employers, whether they are small or large, not seeing a 16‑year-old coming out of school having any kind of understanding of what working practice is. An SME in particular, whether it is my industry or any industry, really just does not have the confidence in young people.

Bill Esterson

Is there an infrastructure we could put in to make that possible?

Eileen Cavalier

It would be very difficult. Whatever the funding system, you get this and you get that and it comes back; it is going to make it much more complicated when funding is going to go directly to the employer as from next year. It is seen as incredibly bureaucratic. You need to make it as simple as possible for that SME to be able to take on an apprentice.

Chair

You would like us to—

David Harbourne

Kirstie was going to say yes.

Chair

I was just going to get to that. Would you like us to recommend in our report that the Government thinks again, and the imposition of direct funding to the employer, whether they like it or not, regardless of industry circumstances is a mistake, and you need some kind of more sophisticated approach?

Eileen Cavalier

Yes.

Chair

David?

David Harbourne

It is an emphatic yes.

Kirstie Donnelly

Mine is another emphatic yes. Just on that, there is the philosophical point you were making before about how we get interaction between schools and industry, even SMEs, in local communities, with your ticker tape of how many people are coming in to schools to talk about work experience. That is a philosophical CSR, or whatever tag you want to put on it, that we need to try to drive. However, on your specific point about whether there is a system, through funding, performance league tables and the management of destinations—if we get schools to recognise the value of managing those destinations to an SME—we would see that go up. Whilst it is all focussed on A-levels, GCSE results and university, that will not change.

Rob Wall

We would disagree with that recommendation.

Chair

That is because you represent great big companies, and they are very comfortable.

Rob Wall

No, we represent businesses of all sizes and all sectors from across the UK, but we see giving employers real purchasing power as integral to the whole reform programme. Yes, the test will be how it works for SMEs. It has to work for SMEs.

Chair

What about if it were a hybrid system? Why not say, “This is the direction of travel”? I cannot remember which trade organisation it was, but I spoke at some conference once and they were saying they would like a hybrid system. Do not force it on some sectors where they have micro SMEs who are so scared of it they will all drop out and we will lose a bunch.

Rob Wall

Yes, we need a system that works for all sizes. We have yet to see what the funding mechanism will be. It has to be piloted and phased out carefully to explore some of these issues, but there is also a side issue here, which is around industry leadership. In terms of supporting SMEs, there are businesses in the supply chains that are doing that already. Rolls‑Royce, for example, will take on more apprentices than they need to support the supply chain. I have been to see Toyota, who will provide apprenticeship training to their tier 1 suppliers. There is industry leadership within the provision of apprentices, as well as ensuring that Government systems are more effective.

Mr Ward

To be an apprentice means you cannot yet do, and it has got to cover what you can do when you get there. I will condense it, because we have covered many areas. There is an issue with low‑engagement sectors and what can be done. There are some that are more involved than others. What can be done to broaden it and encourage more sectors?

Chair

That will do; that was a good, clear question.

Mr Ward

You mentioned being frightened, and I wonder whether that is justifiable fear—or do they just not know and fear things that are not true?

Eileen Cavalier

Generally speaking, it is seen as being very bureaucratic. As a provider, you work under the agency. We have the agency rules, Ofsted rules and the awarding‑body rules. Delivering any qualification is a very complex thing. The funding is constantly changing. There is constant change of funding; there is constant change of focus. As a training organisation, we have to cope with that; we have to deal with that. For an employer‑led apprentice, I am talking about them delivering it themselves. They have to cope with that themselves. Any conversation I have had with employers—and that includes very large ones, because obviously we work with them—they find it so complex that it is a big turn‑off for them.

Chair

In areas or sectors where there is low take‑up of apprenticeships among employers, what can we do specifically?

Eileen Cavalier

It is very easy to say “reduce the bureaucracy”, but it is fundamental.

Chair

Reduce the bureaucracy.

David Harbourne

We undervalue the role existing training providers and colleges play in helping to hide the wiring.

Eileen Cavalier

Yes, very much so.

David Harbourne

Most small businesses do not need to know about the detail. The training provider will do it for them

Kirstie Donnelly

It is about the relationship between the training provider and the employer and introducing the licence to practise more widely. To be very clear on the point we were making before about the employer and the funding system, it is right that employers should have more ownership. All we are asking for is a review to make sure that it works across the broad brush of employers including SMEs. That is what is broken. We just need to be clear on that. It is not counterintuitive to what you are saying. It is just that there needs to be more de‑complexity when it comes to the SMEs.

Eileen Cavalier

There also needs to be more flexibility in the ability to be able to use the funding provided for best purposes to achieve for the learners and the employers. At the moment, however, it is very static; it is very prescribed. We have to work within the rules that have been prescribed. That does not always work.

Chair

We have covered quite a lot of sectors. I suggest we move on to Question 35, Alex.

Alex Cunningham

I think we have got 31 and 32 first.

Chair

I thought we could skip past that.

Alex Cunningham

I wanted to ask specifically about the exclusive way that things are funded in the future. The CBI has welcomed the approach to employer involvement in apprenticeships as standard. The Edge Foundation says that smaller firms want to rely on their professional bodies. With the money going to employers, is this not making it rather exclusive for bigger employers at the expense of the people who provide most of the jobs in our economy?

David Harbourne

Yes.

Chair

“Yes”, says David. That is good.

Rob Wall

I would say no, but that comes back to that challenge. We cannot have a system that just works for some; it has to work for all.

Chair

It is the small employer’s voice.

Eileen Cavalier

Large employers have always been able to access direct funding. It has always been on the table.

Kirstie Donnelly

If you look at the digital trailblazer and how that is set up, it is working as a good example of where you are getting the best of both worlds: large employers and SMEs.

Alex Cunningham

Should we be worried about the new funding systems or not?

David Harbourne

Yes, definitely.

Eileen Cavalier

Yes, definitely.

Kirstie Donnelly

How they are implemented is what we should be worried about.

Alex Cunningham

Can I ask you about improving the image of apprenticeships? We touched on this in the previous panel and you have touched on it yourselves, but how can we encourage young people to say, “That is the real way for me to go,” and for parents to perhaps advise them or help them to make that decision?

Chair

Obviously you do not have to add anything if you think you have already said it.

Kirstie Donnelly

It is IAG.

David Harbourne

It is also about opportunities to go and see work for themselves at an early age.

Kirstie Donnelly

There should also be more choice in the vocational curriculum at 14.

Rob Wall

It is role models as well—young people seeing their peers who have taken a different path succeeding. There are lots of programmes that now showcase ambassadors.

Chair

As we are broadcasting—we all slip into these—“IAG” is information, advice and guidance.

Alex Cunningham

You mentioned guidance. Your final question is around careers advice and the quality of that in schools and the role of employers. I do not know how many employers are getting involved. It seems to be getting dumped on schools or dumped on employers to pick that up. How adequate is it?

Kirstie Donnelly

It is not at all adequate. There is a lot of research. We can all, I am sure, submit bits of research after, if it was not already included in all of our entries, but there is huge research now. We have just done some recent research where only 28% of the 3,000 young people we spoke to had had any form of careers advice and guidance. Parents are being left to make those decisions. They do not feel competent to be able to make those decisions. It is not fair to put that on a teacher anyway. That is not to say the old system was right either. It was not perfect. Whatever we bring back has to be modern, relevant and different. Nonetheless, not having it in the system, not having mandatory work experience and not having industry people on school governing bodies are all hampering that problem.

Alex Cunningham

Perhaps we need some professional people who know what they are talking about.

Kirstie Donnelly

Yes, exactly.

Chair

Bill, do you want to move on to question 40 or somewhere around there? We have limited time, but we have already covered so much. It has been fantastic. What a panel.

Bill Esterson

I asked about Level 2 before. Are all Level 2 apprenticeship frameworks of equal value?

David Harbourne

They are certainly of great value.

Chair

That is a politician’s answer.

David Harbourne

I can bring in an additional figure to bear, in that case. Two-thirds of the people who start an advanced-level apprenticeship previously did an intermediate-level apprenticeship.

Bill Esterson

Is that where the greatest value in them lies—or a great value?

David Harbourne

It is twofold. Because we are talking about 16 to 18-year-olds, there is a risk on both sides. There is a risk that the 16‑year-old has made a mistake in thinking they want a career in a particular area. This gives them the opportunity to try a job and, if they realise it is really not for them, they can move on. However, that risk is also felt by the employer. Taking someone unknown on at that age is a risk. Starting them at Level 2 gives them the opportunity to assess their potential and, if they have the potential, help them move on to Level 3 later. Because there are Level 2 jobs and there are people who want to do them, they have great value.

Bill Esterson

What can young people do if apprenticeships are not meeting their needs?

Kirstie Donnelly

Do you mean what their recourse is? That is back to the point we were making about the still important role of the provider, the college or the middle body.

Bill Esterson

Is that strong enough?

Kirstie Donnelly

It needs to be stronger, but the point is it certainly should not disappear in the reforms. We certainly should not undermine what should be a very effective tripartite relationship between the provider college, employer and the young person doing the apprenticeship. We should strengthen that, whether through LEPs or GTAs.

Bill Esterson

Your recommendation is there needs to be what?

Kirstie Donnelly

There needs to be a strengthening of that independence.

Bill Esterson

There needs to be someone there who the apprentice can turn to to back them up.

Kirstie Donnelly

Yes, absolutely.

Mr Ward

Just for the record—I do not know if we were going to go back to it—you mentioned in passing licence to practise. If an apprentice is somebody who cannot yet do, presumably somebody with a licence to practise can now do.

Kirstie Donnelly

It certainly progressing to the next stage or continuing.

Mr Ward

Could you tell us a bit more for the record what that will entail and how you see that as being a good way forward?

Kirstie Donnelly

It was UKCES who did some research on this quite recently. What I am suggesting is, if you look at occupations that already have coverage of a licence‑to‑practise type training programme, it is already something like 30% of occupations. There are quite young people working in them on a licence to practise—i.e. they are registered and they have to demonstrate their competency in some way. They cannot get on a building site, for example, without having their card to say they are competent to a particular degree. It is the same with some land‑based sectors, where you cannot operate a chainsaw unless you are at a particular level. All of those things are still competencies that could be inside a broader apprenticeship, but, equally, they could be outside of a full apprenticeship and part of a licence to practise that is still stamping and demonstrating someone’s competency and ability. That is essentially what I recommend.

Chair

What do you think about the thing we started the first panel with, talking about the income‑transformative impact of an apprenticeship? If it is not that, it is not an apprenticeship. If the data could be gathered for that, would you have sympathy with the idea that something like that could lead to something being de‑designated as an apprenticeship? It might still be a useful thing to do, but it would not be an apprenticeship unless it led to income transformation. I am concerned about people deferring their gratification, to use the phrase I used, and being paid a bit less for a period, but at the end of it they are not really earning a great deal more.

David Harbourne

I wrote the deferred gratification point down. I agree. If you are going to defer gratification, there needs to be gratification. However, I would say that it should not be solely measured on immediate earnings benefits, because the fact of being in employment for longer at that early stage of your adult life is enormously beneficial. We know that the opposite also applies: a length of time out of work leads to enormous disbenefits.

Chair

You get people who have little or no experience of vocational education in their own lives. They talk and think about apprenticeships as being for kids who do badly at school, as you talked about, and they are not. Statistically, that is not why people do it and it is not what it is about. It is about mastery of something that is valuable in the workplace. There is a real challenge to get people in the lowest deciles of academic performance and, indeed, of disadvantage up to the level where they can access this wonderful route to mastery and a great income. The point would be that the processes that lift people up so that they can get on to this pathway to mastery are not apprenticeships. The danger is that we say, “It is a really valuable thing,” but calling it an apprenticeship is to dilute its value to people. They should know that, if you get an apprenticeship, you are getting mastery and you earn good money, and is that not a fair point to make?

David Harbourne

“A pathway to mastery” I absolutely totally agree with. However, it is exactly the same issue as whether studying history at university guarantees you a graduate premium. No, it does not. However, if it is absolutely what you what to do, why prevent anyone from doing it?

Chair

It is not the same. That is the whole point. The whole point of the apprenticeship is it is linked to the workplace, and studying philosophy and history at university is learning for its own sake. The point about an apprenticeship is that it is not; it is designed very much to make you more valuable in the workplace.

David Harbourne

Let me choose the specific example of hairdressing—and I am deliberately not bracketing it with beauty. Someone starting a hairdressing apprenticeship at Level 2 needs to know the average earnings of a fully qualified hairdresser are below the national average. However, if that is what they want to do, they should have the opportunity to do it.

Kirstie Donnelly

Obviously, I have already shared some of my thoughts about this whole notion of redefining what we call apprenticeships, which is what you are trying to suggest, Chair. I definitely have some sympathy with locking it down to progression in pay, but also progression on that journey to mastery. There is an expectation. There are jump‑off routes as well; you are not constrained. However, we need to redefine it with some measurements.

Chair

I just worry about people being conned. Maybe people do get on a pathway to employment and they get to sustained employment. That is great. However, it should earn them money and it should afford something in the way of progression. Again, you would not do it in one year, but over time you should be able to do a time series that shows whether this gets you up to something a little above the minimum wage. Otherwise, we will sound like people preaching, “You should do apprenticeships for your children,” whereas we never do it for our own, unless it is linked to income.

Kirstie Donnelly

There needs to be social mobility in some way, and that is income.

Chair

The worst thing is you sell somebody a pup. They get something they think is adding value, and it does not.

Neil Carmichael

Do we need a bit of policy stability in this field or should we continue to tackle the remaining issues? You were nodding until I asked the second half of the question.

Kirstie Donnelly

We have just published a report called Sense & Instability. We are having a big review. We look at the skills system over the last 30 years, the 61 Secretaries of State we have had in the vocational skills arena and all of the change we have had compared with mainstream education. It tells a very interesting story to that point. The point about instability and stability is that we absolutely have to do some more changes before we get stability. Some things we are talking about here are going to take a couple of terms of office, whoever is in, in order to get to that level of stability, because we still are going to have to make some fundamental changes to address the past 30 years of treating vocations as a political football.

Rob Wall

Yes, we want to see the apprenticeship reforms delivered and then a period of policy stability to let them bed in.

Eileen Cavalier

I absolutely 100% agree.

David Harbourne

I am all in favour of stability.

Chair

You would say it is better to forgo nominal improvements that might come from reform and have a period of sustained stability in preference.

David Harbourne

I quoted Doug Richard in my submission to this Committee, who said, “We are venturing into the unknown.” I am a bit scared of the unknown, Chair. I would much prefer to say, “We know what works. Why don’t we do a bit more of it?”

Chair

What an excellent note on which to end. Thank you very much indeed. If you have any further thoughts to share with us, particularly around recommendations, please do be in touch. Oral evidence: Apprenticeships and traineeships for 16-19 year olds, HC 597 2