Oral evidence: Apprenticeships and traineeships for 16-19 year olds, HC 597Wednesday 26 November 2014

Oral evidence, 26 November 2014.

Witnesses

Deborah Lee, Chief Learning Officer, BT Group, Charlotte Bosworth, Director of Skills and Employment, OCR, Stephen Overell, Principal, Employment and Skills, New Economy Manchester, and Darren Northcott, National Official, Education, NASUWT, gave evidence.

Chair

Good morning and welcome. I think you heard the evidence in the last session. Traineeships: I made a rather invidious comparison between British Leyland’s famous huge area at the end of their production line to fix the broken cars as a sign of their tremendous commitment to quality, when the Japanese meanwhile just had red buttons on the production line to make sure they got it right first time. Maybe after 11 years of full‑time education and increasing amounts of pre‑school support in education, the idea that six months of a traineeship is magically going to give someone the skills, soft or otherwise, that they need to access the world of work and continue training is a sign of failure. Discuss, Deborah.

Deborah Lee

We find it to be incredibly beneficial, for the employee, the trainee and the employer. 63% of our traineeships, having gone through our programme, which is six weeks and two days, have come out and gone into further education or a role. A number of things happen during those six weeks: they gain confidence; they get an insight into work life. In some cases, they have not had role models in their own households before, because they have come from families that have not been working. Just to understand what it feels like and to work with people who are quite excited about the workplace and work has been really beneficial. We have seen huge success stories with individuals gaining confidence and new skills, and coming out of it feeling quite proud. The graduation process is a point of pride for them. We make a big deal of it.

Chair

The heart of my question there is not whether or not they are valuable. After all, if you have a broken car at the end of the production line you need to fix it. The aim should be though, that when they come out at the end of the adult school system, young people already have that confidence, that sense of esteem and ability to do things. Should that not be possible in the prior 11 years? Do we need to take whatever it is that is good in you traineeship programme and try to inject that in a bit of an earlier time, so we do not have to spend money and time doing it afterwards? Is that fair or not, Deborah?

Deborah Lee

As much as you can build confidence in early years that is going to have a benefit, but there are some practical things that you do not get during school, which is the insight into work.

Chair

Is that not something we could have? We discussed in the earlier session the fact that the Government got rid of mandatory work experience. Good, bad or indifferent, they got rid of it being mandatory at 14 to 16. It could be that a really good programme at 14 to 16 might be able to provide that, so that you have got less to do when they leave school at 16.

Deborah Lee

Absolutely. The more employable students are when they leave school, the better it is for everybody. There are students who will, for whatever reason, fall by the wayside during the schooling period. It does work very well for those.

Darren Northcott

You make a very interesting point about traineeships almost ameliorating issues that arise during school. That is something that you might want to look at and, in the context of work‑based education, that is critical, as your previous evidence session underlined. We are where we are with some young people. Some young people will need help and support to move on to an apprenticeship or good‑quality employment. Currently, there is a role for something like traineeships. Whether the programme, as it is currently constituted, is what we need we could discuss. Given where we are at the moment, there is some kind of role for traineeships.

Stephen Overell

We would very much go along with that. The problem is that traineeships are not going to rectify all the problems there are with schools. Some people come out of school having had an extremely bad experience, but what they do provide, and what is necessary—and listening to your previous session, you made the point—is greater work experience and greater contact with the world of work, in some form or other. A scheme such as traineeships that tries to provide that work experience is of value. That is not to say traineeships are necessarily the right scheme. It is also important to remember that this is a very new thing. August 2013 is not that long ago. It is evolving. There have been quite a lot of movements from the time it launched, in terms of modifying the traineeship programme. As a basic idea, though, a form of work experience for people who are not so far removed from the labour market that it is beyond them, but who are motivated and want to work, is in the right direction.

Chair

Who is it aimed at? Looking at the data, the people in the top half of academic performance are typically guided away from apprenticeships, rightly or wrongly. The people in the bottom quartile think that apprenticeships are for them and then, when they come to actually apply, they find out they are not. Most the people who access them are probably in the third quartile. That was a kind of broad generalisation around the data. Who are traineeships for? Are they to help the people in the third quartile to strengthen their soft skills so they can do it, or are they for the people in the lowest quartile of academic performance and will traineeships be sufficient to help lift them up, so they can access the apprenticeships that too many of them cannot access at the moment?

Stephen Overell

It is a good question. One of the problems with traineeships is, arguably, they are not sufficiently targeted. We do not know exactly who they are for. There is a lot of speculation about precisely who traineeships are aimed at. They are clearly aimed at people with relatively low skills, given the eligibility criteria for them. Are they aimed at NEETs? Are they aimed at people who are jobseekers currently? These are all very valid questions. In reality, trainees are likely to come from that cohort of young people who are currently claiming benefit in one form or another, but there are others as well. In an ideal world, I think they should be aimed at people who are not quite ready for an apprenticeship, but are nearly there. That is not sufficiently clear from the apprenticeships that there currently are. Further learning is one destination. A job or an apprenticeship is another. Perhaps they need to be positioned more as something that leads on to an apprenticeship for people who are not that far removed from them.

Charlotte Bosworth

I disagree with that point, really based on our own work we did with our pilot. We actually spent some time tracking the young people involved in our pilot. 96% went on either to further education, an apprenticeship or a job. 18% went on to an apprenticeship, so there definitely is a requirement for not just those people going on to an apprenticeship within the traineeship.

Chair

Who were your young people?

Charlotte Bosworth

They were 23 mostly NEETs, 80% with mental illness, from the Kent area.

Chair

In terms of academic attainment?

Charlotte Bosworth

Some had achieved Level 2, but the majority were Entry Level 3 and Level 1 learners.

Chair

From January next year, 19 to 24‑year‑olds who already have a full Level 2 qualification will be able to access traineeships, so will we see a repeat of what we have seen in apprenticeships and a big growth in adult numbers at the cost, arguably, of the young?

Deborah Lee

We have already put some people in that age bracket through our programme. We have not put them through the funding model of the traineeships but, for us, this is about people who have not been able to access employment. There is a whole raft of reasons. We have had a graduate go through. The objective of our programme is to make people more employable or give them choice. For whatever reason they have ended up claiming benefits, we see that there is talent out there. Given a chance, given a bit of support, actually you can create and inspire a new generation. For me, saying it is pre‑apprenticeship‑only is too narrow for traineeships. We certainly found that broadening our own perspective from the BT point of view has given us access and given our employees a huge amount of giveback, because they feel quite inspired from working with these young people, bringing them on and giving them confidence. I am all for the widening, because it solves a problem that says there is a generation out there that is lost for whatever reason.

Stephen Overell

I would just like to raise a question about what we are calling a traineeship. If graduates are going through traineeships, that is so far removed from what the Government intended originally that it is interesting. Your point about apprenticeships is very interesting as well. They are increasingly dominated by older people.

Chair

Most of them have already got a job. They are already in work. They are not even new. We do not even have the data to tell us which are new and which are old.

Stephen Overell

Employers, if they had their own way, would generally plump for someone with greater experience rather than a young person, but we are here to talk about the 16 to 19‑year‑olds who are often having a hard time surviving in this kind of environment. Even Government agencies have different definitions of what a traineeship actually is. Jobcentre Plus seems to be running its own traineeship scheme that is not part of the official traineeship scheme that we are actually talking about. What they call traineeships are something a bit different from what we are talking about here, so there is quite a wide variety of what is actually understood by it. If we are talking about the formal scheme, personally I think it is a good thing that it has been expanded to those 19‑year‑olds, because that increases the cohort quite significantly about whom we are talking about.

Chair

It requires the involvement of employers. Are there the spaces? We know for young people the biggest single issue in apprenticeships is the lack of apprenticeships. There are all sorts of other issues, but the danger of extending it up is that they simply do as has been discussed; they choose someone who is a bit older, more experienced, more mature and therefore you cannot access a traineeship. Is there a risk of that or are there going to be enough employers participating to mean that everybody who wants a traineeship can have one?

Stephen Overell

Engaging employers is always a problem with the world of skills. There are lots of them so that, in general, they do not have the time to think about any of this stuff. The question of incentives for employers around traineeships is a good one. There will be lots of employers who do it for reasons of good will, because they believe in it; they believe in bringing young people on. There are others who are doing it for the sake of free labour. In some cases, we have instances where I come from where employers are displacing current staff because they can get trainees to work for nothing for a certain period of time, doing relatively low‑skilled jobs.

Chair

We need to get that balance right. I am sure the unions will say it is dreadful and they should all be paid lots of money, and then you end up with internal economics that do not work because a small number of big, well-funded employers do the right thing and most others do not, because it does not work for them and they are trying to make a profit. Therefore, we have this noble standard that means that most young people cannot access what they need. How do we get the balance right? It has got to work for the employers, so they have got to exploit them to some extent. They have got to make money. It has to make sense for their business bottom line, because most of them are not BAE Systems or Rolls‑Royce, which can take a longer view.

Stephen Overell

Absolutely, but the risk of that is that it is not a good experience for the young person who goes through it and not a scheme that is seen as having value. It is really important that, if it is, ideally employers might be able to recruit from the traineeship scheme. That is the idea.

Chair

I am trying to work out how we get this balance right, because you can be so high‑minded that you end up massively reducing the opportunity. The ones that exist are great, but no one can get on it.

Darren Northcott

The bar is not as high as some might sometimes portray. We are talking about some basic standards about what traineeships should involve. That certainly includes, for example, working in an environment that pays due regard to people’s health and safety. I think it involves paying at least the national minimum wage for work of value.

Chair

There are hardly any now, Darren. The numbers are pitifully low. If you look at the percentage of the cohort, it is tiny, and you want to raise the bar further and you say that the bar is not the issue. I am looking at loads of people who do not get in the workplace, where they desperately need work experience. They desperately need to be part of something to lead them somewhere. I do not want it to be valueless; I do not want it to be grossly exploitative. But somehow, if you want small businesses to do it, you are going to have to make it worth their while. They are not going to do it because their corporate social responsibility document tells them to.

Darren Northcott

Some small businesses do engage in traineeships and other programmes, and do it properly.

Chair

But not many.

Darren Northcott

Maybe not enough, but some do. Part of the way forward is supporting those employers to provide those good‑quality experiences for young people, but the answer is not to say that, because we face those challenges, let’s provide really poor‑quality traineeships where, in fact, young people are in danger of being exploited. That solves no problem.

Mr Ward

Can we take one step back and be radical with a clean sheet of paper? We have 200,000 young people who are NEET and only 7,000, if we look at the numbers, on traineeships. Forget the 7,000 for a moment and look at the 200,000. What shall we do with those 200,000 and which part of that 200,000 group are traineeships going to be successful for? Instead of wrongly criticising the traineeships for not doing it for the others, how much does it not fit those? You have 200,000; what are we going to do with them? Where does this fit in?

Charlotte Bosworth

I personally think that traineeships would actually meet a lot of their requirements, if we go back to what a traineeship was originally set out to do, which was: ensuring progression, whether that is into an apprenticeship, a job or into further education; making sure that there was the basic level of maths and English to allow people to survive; then also building that confidence in young people, who did not necessarily have that self‑belief; and getting them back into re‑engaging in learning. If we take those as basic criteria, when we start thinking about the 200,000 that would actually meet a lot of their needs and requirements.

Deborah Lee

I would agree. What we find is the traineeship for many of the people who have been through our programme has been the thing that has broken the cycle of “I can’t get a job because I don’t have experience; I can’t get experience because I don’t have a job. I also just don’t know how to turn up, have an interview and converse with people of the world of work”. Giving people that opportunity to experience it in a safe environment, but with some structure, with some very clear rules—and there is a fine balance between work experience and work—giving them that experience, coaching and support is the focus that traineeships can really have. I would not underplay the benefits that companies get back from it, in terms of building engagement and building a feeling of connection to new people.

Chair

Why are there only 7,000 of them if it is that marvellous for employers?

Deborah Lee

It is still very early actually. It has been quite complicated, because we have a long history, 50‑odd years, of doing apprenticeships, working with Ofsted and working with the criteria. That has given us an advantage in BT. The simplification of the programme and the benefits issue helps. Further simplification will help those organisations that have smaller HR departments or experience in that. The up‑skilling of Jobcentre Plus that has been going on as well to really understand what a traineeship is about and to be able to give the right advice to young people has really made a difference, but these are still quite early days, I would say.

Mr Ward

That is not all very radical, I must say. If this is really where schools have failed the young person, which is an argument, should they just stay in school while they are doing all this? Should they stay at the school until they have this additional experience, work experience, English and maths?

Darren Northcott

I am not sure it is necessarily a case of schools failing all these young people.

Mr Ward

I think you were here earlier and heard that 23% of people just disappear from the system.

Darren Northcott

That is a question about the education system more broadly and how we are implementing, for example, raising the participation age. It is an outrage that we raised the participation age from 17 and then to 18. We do not have the system to track those young people in the way that we do when they are 16 or under. That is a real issue of concern. Schools can make a great deal of progress, given the current constraints they work within and the curriculum they have to deliver, with all those young people but, notwithstanding that excellent progress, there may be some young people, and I am sure there are, who leave school not yet in that position to transition to an apprenticeship or to good‑quality employment. They need that help and support. To return to the Chair’s comments at the outset of this session, it is really important to look at what more we can do in schools and what support we can provide, to allow schools to provide even more support to those young people we are talking about here and that you have just referred to.

Craig Whittaker

I was just going to ask Deborah what proportion of young people through your pilot have actually gone on to get a job thereafter?

Deborah Lee

A job is exactly 49%, so just about half. It is rising every day, because we are still waiting for some of the young people to tell us what has happened. We track them even when they come off and we continue to give support. At the end of our programme, we do an interview with them to test for ourselves whether we think they are job‑ready or not. Where they are not, we step in and give extra support. For us, it is about employability as the main objective. That is really important to us, and the employee buddy that they get feels quite responsible for that person beyond.

Mr Ward

Can I just come back to schools? We were talking about incentives. If a student is really bright, they want to keep them in the sixth form because it helps their figures. If they are not performing that well, they do not want them in the school because it affects their figures. Why should we not say, “You have failed the student in terms of making them employable or ready for further study. You can damn well keep them until they are ready”?

Chair

It is an interesting point, but strays slightly off the focus of today’s session.

Mr Ward

It is responsibility. Who is responsible for those 200,000? It appears that many of them just drift away and nobody is actually responsible for them. Who should be responsible for them?

Charlotte Bosworth

This has been very clear on the different programmes and different responsibilities. If I take school, is it that actually their responsibility is making sure people are prepared for the world of work? Then there is some kind of experience of work, rather than work experience that is part of that. Then there is that absorption in real‑life work. For traineeships, often I would dispute whether that would be the responsibility of school. There is more than can be done within a school environment, absolutely, but that real absorption in work is maybe something different.

Stephen Overell

It is perhaps slightly off the area of practical recommendations for reform, but it is quite important to remember, when we are talking about this, the bigger picture about the interaction between education and work. Across the whole of the OECD, young people are delaying contact with the world of work for as long as they possibly can. There are more people staying in formal education for longer, and it is an increasingly eccentric choice to have much to do with work at the age of 16, 17 or even 18. We need to remember that the formal schooling age is, in general, culturally, getting longer and you are also working for longer as well. What is seen as normal in terms of a life pattern is evolving. Schools are terribly worried about their position in league tables and about delivering the qualifications they are expected to. The idea that they are fully au fait with what is happening at work as well is perhaps a bit naïve, because they have so much to take on board in merely delivering the day job that they cannot quite grapple with issues such as traineeships and apprenticeships, because they are beyond their natural experience.

Pat Glass

Before I go on to talk about traineeships, I do not know whether you were all here for the previous session, but we had some discussion about schools that encourage young people to stay at school, and then they leave at the end of year 12 without any qualifications. Should we be holding schools to account for that, perhaps even financially, in that they are encouraging these young people?

Charlotte Bosworth

Yes. There is too much self‑interest happening at the moment and that needs to be overcome, one way or another.

Pat Glass

Given that we are about recommendations, is that something that you would all support?

Darren Northcott

It is about how you might hold them to account. It is wrong that young people are being steered towards routes that are not going anywhere. No one can recommend that, but part of the recommendation has to take into account what we have just discussed, which is that schools are subject to quite perverse incentives about what they focus on and what they do not. Rather than just saying we will hold schools to account, sure, but we will also do something that challenges the pressures that they face.

Pat Glass

For instance, whenever I wanted head teachers at a meeting, I used to put “finance” in the title and they would all turn up. I do not blame them for that, because they need the money in order to run their schools. If we fined them, if there were some way in which we could say, “You’re not getting paid for that young person for that year; we’re going to claw the money back”, would that force head teachers then to think a little bit more carefully about who they should be encouraging to go into sixth forms and who they should be encouraging to go elsewhere?

Darren Northcott

That is solving the problem at the end. A more positive approach would be to look at why these decisions are being made in the first place and what incentive is persuading the schools that that is an appropriate route or policy to adopt, and address that. Much of that relates to the perverse way in which we hold schools to account and the kinds of behaviours that that incentivises.

Pat Glass

Can I just check some figures? Charlotte, your trainee pilot scheme in summer 2013 had a 96% success rate of young people moving into employment, apprenticeships or further education. Did you say that was 23 young people?

Charlotte Bosworth

Yes, that is right.

Pat Glass

Deborah, can I check yours, because I think you have given us updated figures. 63% of yours went into education, employment or training. How many was that? How many are we talking about?

Deborah Lee

Exact numbers of totals?

Chair

Just tell us the size of the cohort if that is easier.

Deborah Lee

There were around 290.

Chair

In the cohort?

Deborah Lee

Yes.

Pat Glass

Charlotte, yours was particularly successful with some quite challenging young people, but in small numbers. What is it that you think we can learn from your pilot scheme that needs to be incorporated in developing traineeships?

Charlotte Bosworth

That engagement and way of incentivising employers, and them realising the benefits of getting involved in the pilot. It was particularly challenging to get smaller employers involved from the outset. One of the things that also turned out to be really beneficial was actually that peer‑to‑peer support. We found that the young people involved really supported each other in their continued engagement, and a way of making sure that that can happen would help.

Pat Glass

Deborah, yours were a larger number. Of that 37% who did not go on to some other form of employment, training or apprenticeship, what more could have been done? What more needs to be in the traineeship to be able to capture those young people, so that they can be more successful?

Deborah Lee

We have had a few waves of them and, as we have gone through, we have improved the content. Our success rate for the later cohorts that have gone through has been higher than the earlier. We have taken an approach that says, actually, we are going to take the people who Jobcentre Plus gives us. We do not have any sort of selection. The challenge often, with some of these folk, has been that in some cases their decision is that they do not want to go back into further education. We have had a single mother who has gone through and, actually, it has made her feel better, but she has continued to be a single mother. There are those sorts of cases. We do find that the dropout rate for us, in terms of taking folk in who we have to remove from the programme or who leave the programme, usually happens within the first week. Within our cohort where those people do not complete, usually it is that, sometimes for good reasons.

Pat Glass

Are they self‑selecting in that they either do not turn up or is some of it that their behaviour is so difficult?

Deborah Lee

Some of it is that the behaviour is so difficult that we have to take a decision that we want to protect the experience for the rest of the trainees, and we have to remove them. Some of it is a motivational issue. They turn up and they do not want to come back. In some cases, they have got a job, so that is a good outcome, although it has not been as a result of the traineeship. What we have found with a number of the people who find jobs towards the end of the traineeship is that they land jobs, but they still want to complete, because they want to get their certificate. They think it is a good thing to have on the CV and they want to finish something, so there is a mixed story within the numbers and, as I say, we still track. Sometimes it is not an immediate position, but they get positions afterwards.

Alex Cunningham

The Chairman has really covered the section that I was going to cover now, so can I apply that question to apprenticeships instead? What is actually preventing more employers from providing quality apprenticeships? Lots of people are doing lots of good things out there. But there was one programme on Teesside that I have alluded to before here, where there were 100 places on engineering apprenticeships available, but the organisation—Sembcorp and George Ritchie who runs it—could not find the placements for those young people, so they handed the money back to the Government. How do we get more employers to engage and provide traineeships and apprenticeships?

Charlotte Bosworth

There are a number of things in there. This was touched upon in the last session around careers advice and guidance. I can get the exact figures for the Committee. A Labour task force advisory group recently commissioned some work with a number of 16‑year‑olds. 68% knew what an A‑level was; only 6% were aware of an apprenticeship.

Chair

Alex’s question is from the other end. Rather than the young people, how do we get more employers?

Charlotte Bosworth

On the flip side, with vocational learning there has been a number of different programmes running and a number of employers are quite confused. GCSEs and A‑levels have remained since 1988, while we have had a number of different programmes running for vocational. Part of it is that they are not sure what is providing what.

Alex Cunningham

The formerly nationalised industries had huge quality four‑ or five‑year apprenticeship programmes. That has virtually dried up over the years. They trained plenty of people upfront, but those people are now in their 50s and 60s. How do we get employers, because there are much smaller organisations, to start providing the traineeships but also the apprenticeships?

Stephen Overell

The point that has just been made about the confusion of employers is a really important one, because employers in general are bewildered by the variety of different skills interventions there are out there. The idea of pushing more funding towards apprenticeships was that it provided a simplification, something that everybody understands around how you develop people by apprenticeships. Having said that, the numbers of employers actually doing them are currently very low. It is about 4% or so.

Alex Cunningham

Pretty pathetic.

Stephen Overell

It is really low. One of the issues around this is that those apprenticeships are extremely varied in quality, so you will get some extremely good ones. It is a brilliant way of getting on in the professions, in the traditional industries, but you also get some very ropey ones. Where I live, there are apprentice car valets and apprentice chip shop people. These are not apprenticeships; these are low‑skilled jobs. Employers are gaining the funding for that through slightly scurrilous practices from the providers, but they are not really apprenticeships as you or I might understand them.

Alex Cunningham

Sorry to interrupt you, but what should we be recommending in relation to all of that? You have turned my question around to say what is bad out there. I want to see how we create more good ones. What recommendations do we make to Government to encourage a greater volume of employers with good apprenticeships, but also to deal with this nonsense that a chip shop job can actually be an apprenticeship?

Deborah Lee

I think, number one, it is about complexity. The simpler you make it for people to engage in the process and understand it the easier it will be for those companies that do not have the big functions that can support it. For me, it seems an obvious thing to get apprentices because they are incredible. We have representation at the very senior level of our organisation who started out as apprentices.

Alex Cunningham

They are probably some of those people I was alluding to from the days of nationalised industry.

Deborah Lee

Absolutely. We have huge amounts of stories around that. A lot of it is quite a long‑term commitment for some of the organisations, so three or four years hiring someone in and training them up is a big investment. I would imagine that some of the reticence for some of those organisations might be making that commitment and being able to follow through.

Alex Cunningham

How do we encourage them to make that commitment? Everybody is telling me what the problems are, but nobody is telling me what we should recommend in order to make it easier for employers to say, “Yes, I am going to create three‑year apprenticeships in my business that has 120 people and I am going to train them to do this”?

Chair

Sorry to do this, because this is important stuff as part of this inquiry, but today we are focusing primarily on traineeships. As there are so few of those and it is new, perhaps you could particularly focus on those.

Darren Northcott

To answer that question, mainly substituting traineeships for apprenticeships in what you have said, more broadly around employer engagement, there are not enough. That is right. Clearly there is a policy challenge to get more employers involved. I wonder if not all, but part of the solution relates to the fact that many employers do not quite understand what the benefits are of becoming involved in these programmes and the competitive advantage that other employers have by being involved in good‑quality traineeships or other kinds of programmes. I wonder if part of it is an educative process that encourages employers to look at the positive employer experience there can be and why it is in their interest. Some may be involved for altruistic reasons or corporate social responsibility, I understand that, but there could be quite hard‑headed business reasons why you want to provide good‑quality traineeships or other comparable programmes.

Chair

What are those the small businesses then? For a three‑man business, what is the hard‑headed reason why they would do a traineeship?

Darren Northcott

It is about staff quality, training and access to support that you simply would not get otherwise if you were not part of a well-structured programme. There are not enough, but there are small businesses that involved in these kinds of programmes. Some of the testimonies you hear from those organisations show that they absolutely do not regret becoming involved in those programmes, so why? What is the reason they want to become involved and how could the lessons from their involvement be used to help other employers and other organisations get more involved in the programme? There must be benefits, otherwise they would not do it. If we can distil why they are doing it and communicate those messages more widely, perhaps we can encourage more employers to take part.

Deborah Lee

Another reason for them to be involved is that, increasingly, bigger businesses are putting a requirement around their suppliers for having involvement in youth employability issues. One of the objectives around the Movement to Work, which is a Government and business activity that we are involved with, is to put that as a requirement for suppliers, particularly in the SME market. The bigger businesses are taking our suppliers and our small and medium enterprises through the benefits themselves of doing these sorts of schemes and these sorts of introductions. Actually, there is a commercial reason why people would want to get involved. Of course, the more flexible and easy it is to get involved with this, it will show the path and, conversely, it will encourage more people to take on apprentices, because it is a shorter commitment.

Alex Cunningham

So the educative thing is very important around our recommendations. Charlotte talked about the poor quality of careers advice. I would be interested, Darren, in what your teachers are actually saying about their ability to deliver career advice and whether apprenticeship or traineeship advice is included in that package, or are they simply ill-equipped?

Darren Northcott

I know this is an issue that this Committee has looked at before and it came up earlier. I would echo many of those issues, in that schools have been given a responsibility to provide impartial careers advice with insufficient support to do so. It is also a circumstance where, for various reasons, schools find it difficult to provide impartial careers advice, and so perhaps would not suggest that young people might be better off seeking other education experiences at other institutions, because in their interest to keep a pupil at a particular school. They face those challenges—lack of support, but also a context where, because of the accountability regime, there are incentives within the system for schools to try to retain learners who might actually be better served by looking at alternative options. We would repeat those kinds of messages that I know you have heard many times before.

Chair

What counterweight would you support that we could put in place?

Darren Northcott

You were talking earlier about the fact that schools are placed in a very difficult set of circumstances in respect of careers advice. A lot of those responsibilities are defaulting to teachers who have, I think it was described earlier—

Chair

We have agreed on the problem, Darren. The question is what we do about it. There are those incentives; how do we counterbalance them?

Darren Northcott

There are two approaches that could be adopted. One is that there is not enough resourcing into external support and advice for schools. Schools want to get external support. They are not sure where they can go to get it. I understand the points made earlier about Ofsted around the National Careers Service.

Chair

That does not get over their incentives though. If they have no incentive to do it and they want to keep everyone in their sixth form, you can give them as much money as you like, but it is not going to change the fundamentals of how they approach the issue.

Darren Northcott

That is true. Part of the problem is the lack of resources. I am not saying that that is the entire solution, but there is an issue about accessing those. More fundamentally, it is about how the accountability regime incentivises particular behaviours within schools.

Chair

What should that look like? What we are trying to get at is how that should be changed. If you do not know that is fine.

Darren Northcott

No, I think there are a lot of ways it can be changed. One of the ways it can be changed is to try to encourage greater collaboration between schools. For example, if you take the previous Government’s 14‑to‑19 agenda, one of the key planks of that was that schools had to form collaborations. They worked together to meet the needs of all the children and young people in that collaboration. That then led to quite interesting discussions around collective accountability. It is not just one institution in a local area that is accountable; all local institutions are accountable collectively.

Chair

I can see how that confuses the issue. I do not see how it crystallises it.

Darren Northcott

I think it does because if you have more effective collective arrangements at a local level—

Chair

You just have six people with the same incentives to put their own interests ahead of the kids’ rather than one. How does that change anything?

Darren Northcott

I think you have a diversity of providers within that collective. If you move towards more collective accountability rather than the accountability being placed on—

Chair

I have a small sixth form. I need to fill it and I am struggling. Small sixth forms have the worst outcomes. They offer, in 16 to 19, a very poor range. I still need to fill it, however many schools are I am collaborating with. I might send you to some other collaborative school rather than the FE college, because they are part of my team, but it has not changed my incentives. If you have any thoughts, Darren, if you are at some future point able to answer that question, we would love to hear from you.

Alex Cunningham

Surely the answer is independent advice for young people within schools. Never mind your collaboration, surely they should have access to somebody who is a professional person who can look at the whole breadth of options to them and say, “This is it”, without somebody saying, “No, it would be better if you went into our sixth form because we need the numbers”.

Chair

If your members cannot do it, it has to be independent, yes or no?

Darren Northcott

Agreed, yes.

Siobhain McDonagh

What evidence is there about the quality of traineeship placements offered by employers? What can a young person do if a placement is not really working out to them or is not up to scratch?

Charlotte Bosworth

There has been an issue with the evidence, because data has only just started to be collected on how traineeships have got on. We welcome the move to having that measurement in place now. That data has not been readily available up until now.

Stephen Overell

It is a very big worry, and it is a worry for training providers and it is a worry for individual schemes. The surveys there have been so far, and there are very few because we do not have the data yet at a national level, indicate that it is a very new scheme. It is evolving and there are some anxieties around the quality of what is on offer, as indeed there are with apprenticeships as well.

Chair

We are back to where we started with the balance and whether someone is better stuck on the dole or being exploited but having work experience. How do we get that balance right? The last thing I want is for them to be exploited; on the other hand, it has got to work for the employer.

Deborah Lee

I do not think every traineeship is exploitation though.

Chair

BT, BAE, Rolls‑Royce, Bentley, for apprenticeships, traineeships, great, but there are just hardly any of them. All over the country, there are 200,000 young people just stuck on the dole, being left and scarred by unemployment at an early age. We have to get them out of that. If we want people to do it who do not have your capacity, then we will have to find a way of incentivising them and not be high‑minded about it. We have got to get that balance right and not get caught up. We can get so caught up in being politically correct that we just carry on. Leaving them on the dole to rot is fine, as long as we do not allow them to be exploited somewhere. We have to get that balance right somehow.

Stephen Overell

The thought I want to throw in, which we have not talked about too much, is the nature of the labour market. Traineeships and apprenticeships are, in theory, oriented towards the needs of the labour market. What do employers actually need? When you look at apprenticeships, the ones that are growing are not our traditional apprenticeship sectors. They are things like customer service, retail, and health and social care, not necessarily everyone’s idea of high‑quality jobs in themselves. That will reflect somewhat on the nature of apprenticeships. It is the same with traineeships. There has been no attempt to match up the development of traineeships with the needs of the labour market in any locality. It is a national scheme that operates in ignorance of the needs of employers that there are in any particular locality. One way around this and one way you might try to address this problem of incentives that we have just talked about is perhaps to route funding to localities. They are perhaps best placed to recognise the needs of employers within their particular area, rather than a national scheme. Maybe they could incentivise higher‑quality apprenticeships and monitor those apprenticeships in the areas that are growing and likely to deliver decent‑quality jobs. These are just possibilities, but there is some movement in this way around the settlement in Manchester, so we have some control and influence now over the apprenticeship grant for employers. Perhaps we ought to go the whole hog, though, and say that that part of apprenticeship funding should be given to local areas. Maybe that is the direction to head in, rather than to try to run these national schemes.

Deborah Lee

One of the things that we have found in our traineeship scheme, talking about collaboration, is that we have over‑trained for the needs that we have, which is why I would break the link to apprenticeships. We have collaborated with some of our suppliers and our partners, and other companies in the area, to involve them in the graduation. Because we have the facilities to train the people, we are quite happy churning out more employable people who get a job with other people in the area. One of your incentive questions was about how you encourage, and maybe getting big companies to train more than they need to would help local companies.

Chair

We probably do not have time to explore that now, but would it be possible for you to write to us if you have any further thoughts on how that could be delivered? Getting the big companies, which have the capacity, to do more certainly seems to me to be part of the solution, as well as trying to get the incentives right for the small companies.

Craig Whittaker

I just want to come back on the scheme, because in the Calder Valley, which I represent, 20% of the people work in high‑end manufacturing. We only have a 1.8% unemployment rate and the problem for us is, if that money was sent to us to train, there are not enough people within our area looking for work to use that money. What we need is places like Manchester to send us some high‑school‑qualified or potential high‑school‑qualified people. That is exactly what Deborah was talking about as well. There is no question, just a statement, Chair.

Mr Ward

In Bradford, we have got one of the highest levels of youth unemployment in the country, but we also have a very large number of vacancies. We have got more apprenticeship offers than we have people who want to take on the young people to do it, whilst we still have youth unemployment. One of the arguments that I have heard is that they are not employable, hence the need for traineeships, so they are not at the level at which they would take on the apprenticeships, because they failed at school or whatever other reason, hence the traineeships, but they are not taking on traineeships because they are unpaid. We have mentioned the shortage of employers, but 7,000 out of 200,000 is a very low proportion. How much of that is due to the fact that they are not paid?

Stephen Overell

Is this traineeships specifically?

Mr Ward

Yes.

Stephen Overell

Traineeships are not jobs, and that is the key point of distinction between an apprenticeship and a traineeship. An apprenticeship is a job; a traineeship is not a job. In a way, the problem afflicting both with this unfilled vacancies issue, is the same. It is a mystery we need to understand more about, so this is slightly speculative but, from what research I know of into this question of how come there are all these unfilled vacancies, it is partly an issue of unattractive roles. Regarding apprenticeships, the pay is often way below that advertised on the National Apprenticeship Service official website. It is often below the national minimum wage, for all I can tell, for apprenticeship roles as well. With traineeships, there are obviously unwaged placements, and it is a difficulty getting young people to see them as attractive. Arguably, they see the comparisons between a minimum‑wage job and a traineeship. It may not be realistic for these young people to be thinking of getting a minimum‑wage job, which is why someone is trying to steer them towards an apprenticeship, but that is the thing they are weighing up in their own minds.

Mr Ward

What message does it send out about the value of the traineeship if we are not actually going to pay you anything to do it?

Stephen Overell

It is a good question, but I just do not think employers will participate in the scheme if we turned it into a waged scheme. There is a solution around allowances.

Mr Ward

It could be Government‑funded.

Stephen Overell

Perhaps a more productive route might be a recommendation you could make that trainees should command an allowance—not a wage but some kind of allowance—to help with travel and lunch, or something like that. At present, there are too many disincentives to taking one, and I think that is why you have problems with the low take‑up of traineeships; it t is very unclear what the attraction is.

Chair

Where is the bigger problem with traineeships? I know it is early days, but is it that young people do not want to do them or that the employers are not offering them?

Stephen Overell

It is both. It is making them attractive to employers and it is making them attractive to young people.

Chair

It would be unusual if they were entirely equal. Normally there is one thing more than another. For young people’s apprenticeships, we know there are many more applicants than there are apprenticeships, so the obvious problem is that.

Charlotte Bosworth

I think it is how we are selling it, both to the learners and to the parents. I am the owner of an 18‑year‑old, and if he had come home and said to me, “Somebody is going to give me the opportunity to really get prepared for work, give me work experience and allow me to have some bite‑sized learning to make sure that I am ready to go for a job”, I would have bitten their hand off if it had been sold to me in that way. There is this element of how we sell the value of that traineeship.

Deborah Lee

I think awareness is one of the things and providing some status to going through it, which is why we always have a qualification and a big graduation ceremony to make it feel like a status activity. We also cover lunch and travel, because we did find that early on that was quite a disincentive for some people, who just were not able to travel to our centres. There is a combination of things that could be barriers, but putting more status on getting involved with this, with some high‑profile campaigning about some success stories, some of those young people who perhaps at the moment are a bit “Why would I do it because I am not getting paid?” would see that it leads to something greater.

Siobhain McDonagh

Do traineeships adequately prepare people for undertaking an apprenticeship?

Chair

Early days, but are they working for apprenticeships in particular?

Deborah Lee

9% of our folk have gone on to an apprenticeship, not always with us. One of our traineeships is a lovely story of a 17‑year‑old girl who certainly did not really enjoy maths at school. She went through our traineeship and is now doing a finance apprenticeship with us, in the company, and has huge confidence. In some cases, it will prepare them. In others, it is just about getting them the confidence to be able to walk into the workplace, sit in front of the interviewer and present themselves in a confident manner. It depends on the student or the young person.

Charlotte Bosworth

With the young people who we had on our pilot, a lot were totally disengaged with learning. That is where the traineeship played a massive part in re‑engaging them in learning, moving away from questioning why they were doing something. That work experience actually gives them that.

Siobhain McDonagh

Should there be an expectation of progressing from a traineeship to an apprenticeship with the same employer? Should traineeships have a greater connection with business sectors?

Stephen Overell

From what I said earlier, I think so. The link between traineeships and a vocation is currently very vague. It is general work experience rather than preparation a lot of the time for a particular career that you might pursue. Just touching on your earlier question, I do not know specifically whether traineeships prepare people for apprenticeships, but it is important to note that apprenticeships are increasingly tough. The standards that are being developed currently around apprenticeships imply that apprenticeships are getting tougher and more academically challenging for individuals. That probably has a knock‑on effect to traineeships, in that they would probably tighten their eligibility criteria in the future. For those people who are some distance away from being ready for an apprenticeship, I suspect it becomes even more challenging for them to get into.

Deborah Lee

I would have a real concern about making it a pre‑apprenticeship programme, because you then get a way of pre‑selecting candidates onto apprenticeships, which is not what traineeships should be about, in my view. They are about preparing people for the world of work, whatever work looks like. If it is about solving employability of the 200,000, keeping it wider makes a better case. I do know that some people are using it as a way of pre‑selecting apprenticeships; I just do not think that is right. You get apprenticeship funding for apprenticeships. It could therefore become an extension of the apprenticeship funding. I just think you have got to keep it separate.

Pat Glass

Do you think the success criteria for judging traineeships at 16 to 19 are effective, and are the Government proposals going to make that better or worse?

Chair

Changed success measures.

Darren Northcott

A greater focus on destination outcomes is something the Government have emphasised quite strongly. You can understand why that would be considered. The danger, in terms of having a fair and equitable way of holding providers to account, is that those destination outcomes can be influenced by factors that are beyond the control of individual providers. For example, if one of the destination outcomes is around movement into employment, to some extent that is influenced by local labour market conditions, the availability of work and so on. I would have some reservations about relying too strongly on destination data, because it is not really telling you everything you need to know about the quality of the work that the provider has undertaken, because those destinations are influenced by things a provider cannot always control.

Stephen Overell

What people get out of the traineeship is a very good question. It is quite vague and varied at present. One possible way of addressing that would be some kind of qualification at the end of it. The best providers currently, as well as running a traineeship, run in parallel some kind of vocational qualification, so it is not just work experience; there is something definite that comes out at the end of it. The open‑ended nature of traineeships at present is a problem, both for getting individuals to do them and for employers to see the value of them. What comes out of it apart from an exit interview at the end?

Chair

Is it a hand‑holding exercise though? The whole point is you should leave at any time, as soon as you get a job. It is basically that you do not have a job now, so therefore you can have this hand‑holding exercise; you have somewhere to go; you have people talking to you about how to make your letter better, how to make your CV better and doing interview training with you. If you get a job on day three, they are delighted. That is the whole point of it. Therefore, if you build it into something where the whole point is to get the qualification at the end, you are going to entirely turn the thing on its head.

Stephen Overell

That’s great, but, remember, a traineeship lasts for up to six months and if you do not get a job at the end of it—

Charlotte Bosworth

This is where do know that a lot of people like recognition for their achievement. That does not necessarily mean it has to be a big bulky qualification. If we can build some kind of bite‑sized recognition in that would be really useful, but I agree that progression should be the destination we are after here, whatever that looks like.

Pat Glass

Do you think a payment‑by‑results system would put off providers?

Charlotte Bosworth

We need to be very clear about what we mean by progression, but by saying automatically that a qualification has to be a measurement of that progression will turn a number of providers off.

Deborah Lee

Purely paying by results means that you would encourage people to be selective to begin with. Therefore, you end up with an even more reduced pool of folk. It is right to have some outcome metrics in there, but we should hold true to what traineeships are about. If they are about creating employability for people who are not in work, then you would actually need to think very carefully about how you would measure that success.

Pat Glass

So it is a balance with access.

Deborah Lee

It is a balance, but I am very supportive of the recommendations that the Government have made.

Mr Raab

One of the things the Government are doing is proposing to collect and publish more detailed data about the outcomes of traineeships. I would be interested to know what the panel thinks of that. I know that NASUWT has concerns about data protection so maybe, Darren, you would like to go first, but I would like a get a view across the piece as to how important that is. Darren, from your point of view, are the concerns surmountable? Are there proposals, amendments or changes that could be made that would overcome your concerns?

Darren Northcott

We made clear in our evidence that we did have those concerns around how you could have destination data, but also protect the data of individual participants. The current systems, as I understand it, are difficult to use for that purpose. Whether they are surmountable or not, I would be very interested to see proposals that might address those.

Mr Raab

Would you have any though?

Darren Northcott

I would not have any proposals, no. I think I have identified the problem. I would be interested if the Government want to use that data. It is incumbent upon the Government to set out how that data could be used in a way that meets those data protection expectations. Going back to the point I made earlier, our fundamental concern around destination data is whether it tells the Government and whether it tells potential participants in traineeship programmes, and all kinds of stakeholders. Does it give them really accurate data about how effective a particular provider has been because, as I say, some of those destination data indicators can be influenced by factors that are behind the control of the current employer?

Mr Raab

That is always the case with data. The question is: if the data protection aspect can be overcome, is it better than nothing? Is it still going to be of some value?

Darren Northcott

There are several barriers. One is data protection, but the other barrier is important as well.

Deborah Lee

I would say that more sharing of information is beneficial for the young person and for companies, because then you start to see what the benchmark is. If I saw that my colleagues in the same area were achieving much higher outcomes, it would make me think very hard about how good my scheme is and vice versa. The collaboration of sharing of what is working, particularly in this space, because it is not a competitive environment, has got to be for the benefit of the young people.

Stephen Overell

It is a competitive environment. Providers are competing with each other, and so there are grave sensitivities around data, always. If one provider is doing particularly well, particularly if there is some prospect of payment by results, it is incredibly sensitive stuff. I kind of slightly disagree with Darren, because I am not sure what the data protection issues are here. We do destinations data at Key Stage 4 and at Key Stage 5. Why would destinations here be any different from that which we already produce? In the higher education world, there is the higher education leavers’ survey every year. Further education colleagues are getting into destinations as a requirement imposed on them by Ofsted. I do not quite get that point. On Darren’s other point that you cannot just judge institutions on what happens after, I agree wholeheartedly, because the labour market is very different in very different parts of the country. You cannot really hold institutions to account necessarily on the basis of things they are not responsible for. Destinations as a whole is something that applies to the whole of further education. We need better understanding of what happens to people afterwards. We are trying to rectify that locally by doing our own surveys, as well as the national ones, but the results might be slightly alarming when you get them. There are an awful lot of people who go to college but end up unemployed as a result, quite apart from the traineeship scheme, so it is part of a bigger debate.

Charlotte Bosworth

I totally agree with Deborah.

Mr Raab

That is a nice succinct answer. Final question: we have had a lot of evidence given to us by witnesses about young apprenticeships, which were introduced by the last Government and phased out. Their value in terms of the success rate of getting youngsters into further training or a job was very high and, for 14 to 16‑year‑olds, the spike in truancy rates means this seems to be a vocational option beyond the pure academic setting. Therefore, we are looking as one of our recommendations, possibly, about whether they should be revived, whether as they were done previously or in a modified form. I would be very interested in a quick sense from each of you as to whether you think that would be a good or bad thing.

Charlotte Bosworth

It would be sad to actually get rid of the traineeship brand just as it is beginning to gain some momentum.

Mr Raab

It is a different model for the young apprenticeships for 14‑to‑16‑year‑olds. It is two years, about half the time spent doing numeracy and literacy, the basic academic, and then half your time work‑based training.

Charlotte Bosworth

I would welcome appropriate learning for that young person. If that happens to be vocational learning, brilliant.

Mr Raab

Stephen, any views on bringing back young apprenticeships in some form?

Stephen Overell

None in particular. I would echo the point that traineeships are a new scheme. It needs refinement but it is in the right area. What people need is greater experience of the workplace. I would be very loath to modify it too much.

Mr Raab

I should have been clear that we are not talking about replacing or removing the traineeships. They seem to be dealing with a rather different set of demands, as Deborah has articulated rather well. It is a much broader question—we are getting lots of witnesses coming before us—of whether the young apprenticeship model would also plug a gap.

Chair

It might reduce demand for traineeships, but it certainly would not reduce the requirement for them.

Darren Northcott

We were involved with the last Government in developing its young apprenticeships programme and it had a lot of promise. It is a shame that it was not pursued quite as rigorously as it could have been, but it certainly has the potential to address some of the issues that you, Chair, raised at the outset. They are how we can ensure that some of the issues that traineeships are now currently trying to address are addressed in the 14‑to‑16 phase or maybe even earlier, rather than post‑16. That is what the young apprenticeship is intended to address. It did not quite get the support that it should have done and it is worth at least looking at again.

Deborah Lee

Anything that helps prepare young people for work, particularly for the group that you are describing where school is not the right answer, is worth exploring and running some pilots around whether it makes a difference. If the issue is not education and is not access to work, and it is something else, some sort of social issue, then it will not solve the problem.

Mr Raab

The pilots were very successful; it was just very expensive, but that is a taxpayer public policy issue.

Chair

It was never scaled up to the point where it was less expensive, so who knows? Thank you very much indeed. If you have any further thoughts or reflections following this, particularly around recommendations, please do be in touch. Thank you very much indeed. Oral evidence: Apprenticeships and traineeships for 16-19 year olds, HC 597 12