Oral evidence: Apprenticeships and traineeships for 16-19 year olds, HC 597Wednesday 10 December 2014

Oral evidence, 10 December 2014.

Witnesses

Ian Taylor, Chief Executive Officer, SkillsActive, Tony Moloney, Head of Education & Skills, National Grid, Kate Stock, Managing Director, Smart Training, and Brian Wisdom, Chairman, Federation for Industry Sector Skills and Standards, gave evidence.

Chair

I do not know how many of you were in the room for the earlier session and heard the evidence that we had. While you are getting yourselves together, we will move on to Alex.

Alex Cunningham

I wanted to talk about the background to Trailblazers and the operation of the programme. First, however, is there any real need to reform the apprenticeship standards?

Ian Taylor

Wholesale, I would say no. A one-size-fits-all solution just does not work, particularly in the light of the understanding of the sectors and the complete changes of direction. SkillsActive covers about 15% of all 16-to-18 apprenticeships very successfully, both at level 2 and at level 3. We are very employer-led and, through our Trailblazer, we engaged with 323 employers. Unfortunately, the process managed to disenfranchise and disenchant them in the skills and apprentices because there was a constant change of direction. The guidelines that were issued were then changed and they were told that funding was not part of the Trailblazer process, but then it was introduced halfway through. We had employers walking away and saying, “We won’t be bothered with this.”

Alex Cunningham

There is some suggestion that the system is actually working quite well, various standards are being brought in and people are being attracted into these new roles.

Ian Taylor

Yes, and the employers concluded that what we had wasn’t bad. It could always be improved and bettered, but it wasn’t such a bad thing.

Alex Cunningham

Tony, would you agree that the Trailblazer thing is a bit of a mess, or is it really effective?

Tony Moloney

No, I don’t think that it is a mess at all. The history of apprenticeships for many organisations like us who have been doing them since the year dot is that we have seen various reforms, but most employers will do them because they are valuable—they see it as a long-term investment. That is the way to view apprentices: as a part of your talent. I think the debate we are probably having now is: how do you make a comparison with something that you have just put in though a Trailblazer, which responds to a lot of things that employers have been asking for, such as more flexibility and the ability to configure them a little differently, and not be restricted by certain standards that define apprenticeships as opposed to what a particular sector or employer would say? We have yet to see how they will pan out, but the standards for the last 20 or 30 years have been pretty robust. In fact, much of what has been going on in good Trailblazer apprenticeships will be lifted from that and applied in a slightly different configuration.

Alex Cunningham

But there are organisations out there that did not have high standards.

Tony Moloney

I totally agree.

Alex Cunningham

There needs to be something in the system that says, “This is a baseline.” Is Trailblazer not providing that?

Tony Moloney

We have yet to see. We got all our standards agreed in March—we responded very quickly to get the standards from last autumn constructed for the power industry in power network craftsmen level 3—and we will see how that pans out. We had about 80 new starters in September, so it is early days. I think the initial signs—I heard some of the previous discussion—are that the intended standards, revisions and flexibility, as well as the potential to have a more mobile labour force that could work across many organisations, particularly within a sector, are appealing. It is unlikely that we would have got behind them if we felt that they were less than what we had already got.

Alex Cunningham

So if it is not a mess, Kate, is it too much of a straitjacket on the way that organisations have got to operate?

Kate Stock

I think you have sectors where apprenticeships are very well established. In child care, the apprenticeship is very well established, which has allowed the private day-nursery sector to expand to meet demand over the past 20 years.

Alex Cunningham

It has some way to go yet, judging by the shortage of places.

Kate Stock

It is possible that it will never be perfect, but that is probably a whole other conversation. Where apprenticeships do not work is outside of those established sectors, because the qualifications that traditionally have sat within those apprenticeship frameworks are not good enough. The really good frameworks add value over and above what a learner would pick up in their day-to-day work. Some standards are fabulous, but there are standards that are rubbish. Within that, you have hundreds of apprenticeship frameworks, thousands of different qualifications and millions of different jobs. This comes back to one size fits all: you are never going to manage to have an apprenticeship framework that meets the job requirements of individual employers within niches. The niches do not get addressed within the apprenticeship methodology. The Trailblazer methodology is no different from any of the previous four or five iterations that we have lived through.

Alex Cunningham

Is it adding value to apprenticeships across the different sectors?

Kate Stock

Trailblazers are adding value where they are bringing in new apprenticeship frameworks, but I think you would add more value if you said that an apprenticeship framework should be a certain number of credits, at a certain level of difficulty, of a certain size and take a certain length of time and you then allowed employers to mix and match. We talked about construction where—

Alex Cunningham

So we are back to the straitjacket.

Kate Stock

It is a straitjacket. Within child care, the Department for Education sets the rules, so the Trailblazer is the Department for Education saying, “Bam—this is what it is.” When you go outside of Government setting the rules, there are a lot of people doing a business admin apprenticeship who do not want to be doing that, but that is the only apprenticeship that is available. That is not adding value; it is not delivering quality. A big reason for companies not getting involved in the apprenticeship scheme is that the qualifications they want the learners to be doing are not fundable through that scheme. The Trailblazer and the Richard review do not address that far more fundamental problem.

Alex Cunningham

Is that a view you share, Brian—that it does not really address what industries actually need?

Brian Wisdom

If you look at the positives of what has happened, the first thing is that the language expressed in the new standards is much more readily understandable by employers and learners. That has to be a good thing. Sitting behind that, however, is the same real complexity in terms of the detail of the competencies—let’s call them competencies rather than standards. That is what employers want to see at the end of the day; they want that level of competence to be achieved. How do you express that? In the previous standards, they were expressed in a way that training providers and awarding organisations understood, because they had to create qualifications out of them. This reversal of language actually does help to engage learners and employers, but it does not necessarily do anything else other than shift the balance and the focus to where it becomes more understandable. On the downside, there is a potential proliferation where employers are defining the new standards in very fine occupational ways.

Alex Cunningham

And it is dominated by larger organisations, rather than SMEs.

Brian Wisdom

I think that all the Trailblazers engage with SMEs, and 80% of the Trailblazers are supported by the organisations that belong to the federation—industry training boards, sector skills councils, national skills academies and so on.

Chair

Brian, you said that employers want competencies. Just as we have different apprenticeships, we have different employers. Yes, I want competencies, but I also want a good qualification that the young person who works in my office can use to go on to work for other employers later. I see that as my role in bringing this young person to a point where they have a good qualification, good competencies and good experience and they can therefore go on and get a job somewhere else.

Brian Wisdom

That is really important.

Chair

Is the current system able to deliver that?

Brian Wisdom

Yes and no. I think that the current system can, where the standards are strongly defined and there is a clear qualification outcome. For example, I was talking to our engineering member the other day. They were saying that in some of their maintenance engineering standards within the Trailblazer, there are a number of qualifications and at the end of the day, an apprentice will walk away saying, “I’m not just an apprentice here. I actually have technical certificates in this, that and the other.” Yet, there are others being defined—I think that one is in food and drink maintenance engineering—where there are no qualifications. Where is the transferable thing that that apprentice can take away and say, “I have these qualifications,” to an employer who may not understand it? The danger at the moment is that proliferation. Where the old system had 200 frameworks and 25 standard-setting organisations, today there are 66 groups working on Trailblazers. There are over 200 of these occupational standards already coming through. Our estimate and our members’ estimate is that this could go to 150 groups and 1,500 standards. Within that is a risk of complexity and the fact that variation could exist. It needs some form of standard supervision.

Alex Cunningham

So it is very much a mixed bag out there in terms of what the young person comes out with and the quality of what they can achieve in their apprenticeship. I look at the whole panel and ask: what needs to change in order to ensure that every young person going into an apprenticeship comes out the other end with some of those competencies and the bit of paper that says, “Yes, I can do this, that and the other”?

Tony Moloney

Can I reply as an employer and give you an experience from that perspective? Everything that I am hearing is correct, but there is something that has to be picked up. There is the potential to have a disparate approach, and the structure and governance within sectors is important. We found that it was very powerful to come together under the industrial partnership for energy, and that it was enabling to bring together 20-odd employers. We didn’t just pick the big asset owners, such as ourselves; we got the supply chain involved in determining a standard. There is a balance to be struck between having an appropriate occupational standard that is granular enough to decide what the job does and what the function is, and having something that is much broader. There is a breadth and depth issue that you have to keep on top. It is important to structure the qualification, because the apprenticeship itself—rather than the NVQ or the certificate—becomes the qualification. The endgame is to have something that the sector or employers recognise and about which they will say, “We’ll have that.” You must construct it in a modular sense. A core that lends itself to many within the sector is a critical structure, and then there are some enabling technical skills. On your point about what you are looking for, Madam Chairman, when you assess it you want to see knowledge and the practical ability to apply it in synoptic sense. You want to see someone demonstrating their ability rather than some form of accredited prior learning, which existed in the history of some of these assessments.

Alex Cunningham

To bring you back to the point, what needs to change, or what recommendation would you make?

Tony Moloney

The recommendation is that you have to have some kind of independent assessment service, so we have created one within the industrial partnership. That is a peer review that can see that each employer has defined operating standards, and that we are running to them. It is not just about determining and defining what those standards are. Because ultimately, if you see a degradation, you get a fall-off and you get fails.

Alex Cunningham

That is going to scare away thousands of SMEs across the country, isn’t it?

Tony Moloney

That is why I think the industrial partnerships are mutually inclusive to this debate. If you left Trailblazers or apprenticeships to do something separately, you would end up having to have some form of governance or structure that would at least keep that sense of an overview of standards. Aligning it and keeping a close relationship are mutually inclusive. The industrial partnerships have a huge role to play in bringing in that group of supply chains—the small and medium-sized ones, right through to the larger ones.

Mr Ward

I am a few years out of this, but my background was in training, and I thought I understood all this. I will have to do more work outside here, because I am totally confused. You said that the apprenticeship is a qualification. My father stopped being an apprentice when he became a master plumber, so an apprenticeship was not a qualification; it was a route towards being something.

Tony Moloney

That’s “was”. What I am talking about is what it will be—the way it is changing. I also did a fully indentured apprenticeship—I came the long route—so I know the apprenticeship system in that sense, and I agree. The difference is that it is changing. It is early days, so we can determine how we construct them. The previous apprenticeships were somewhat paralysed by the non-value-adding activities and qualifications that you had to do and the ways in which you had to assess them. The change here—and it is a risk—is that you can have specific qualifications that employers value, such as City and Guilds. When they get their “end of” certification, that becomes the new standard and people can say, “Ah, you’ve got that. That’s portable; you can take that with you. We recognise it.” There are some issues. It works very well, and it has a much greater structure and standards—engineering is a classic example. I think there is an issue for some of the sectors that do not have that—

Mr Ward

How does it differ from an NVQ?

Tony Moloney

NVQs traditionally are continually assessed against certain performance criteria. There are certain rules, and you can simulate assessment. The difference with the synoptic approach is that you have to witness everything being done in a real sense.

Mr Ward

But in terms of its being a bundle of competencies at an acceptable standard that take you to an overall competence, is it any different?

Kate Stock

No.

Chair

Good answer.

Tony Moloney

It depends who you are putting the question to, I suppose.

Caroline Nokes

Do you think that young people in general and apprentices in particular should have more say in the standards for apprenticeship programmes?

Brian Wisdom

If you look at what standards definitely need to be in place, from an industrial success perspective, you have to say that someone has to look at what the industry needs to be able to compete globally and be competitive in its own marketplace. I will use a very simple example. My background is the hospitality industry. When I ran a restaurant company, our test for whether a chef had been trained properly was very simple: “Come in and show me how you fillet a fish.” We used to get three different responses: one was, “Actually, I’ve never seen a fish,” and those people tended to have been to very bad colleges, or whatever; there were some who came in and could do it, and had been very well trained by very good colleges or whatever; and there were some who came in, normally from big companies that had already deskilled their kitchens because they couldn’t get enough skill, and those people would say, “Well, I can cook a fish, but I’ve never filleted one myself, because it comes in ready-filleted.” Now, to compete at the very top end you have to have that skill and someone has to arbitrate that that skill is there, and I don’t think the learners can do that. There has to be an industry-strategic input that says you need that level of skill, and it is true of every industry. That is why we have industrial standards and why industrial standards are important. Where the learners do have a part is in the quality of the environments in which they are learning, and I think we don’t have enough data on what happens in good apprenticeships and what happens in bad apprenticeships, because we don’t link up registration of apprenticeships with certification, which is what my organisation does at the end. We are at the back end of the process, but no one is tracking what really works through the system and no one is really tracking the destinations that go beyond. Acquiring a lot more data, which involves training providers, learners and employers themselves, is critical to having a really robust apprenticeship system for the future, and frankly today it is not good enough.

Tony Moloney

I concur with that. A very obvious statement in response to your question is that you face a dilemma. It is not that there is an issue with not wanting to involve young people in the standards; it’s a question of them not knowing what they don’t know.

Caroline Nokes

The unknown unknowns.

Tony Moloney

Quite. And therefore if apprenticeships are differentiated from traineeships, and you are creating a lot of rigour and increasing the stretch, then they kind of really don’t know there is a degree of lead. What would be good practice would be around some of the non-cognitive areas and employability bits when they are in, and what improves those sorts of things. When they are in a scheme, they are actually being part of how they can improve, and a continuous improvement sense would work.

Chair

What are apprenticeships for? Are they really about giving young people skills and matching those skills in industry, or are they about mopping up the NEETs in this country?

Tony Moloney

May I start with a quick response to that? I think the general view is that it is healthy to view apprentices as an investment in long-term talent for a particular organisation. Apprenticeships are learning vehicles and pathways into a job, because they are taking people from school and doing the work that we do, in terms of careers education stuff and getting them work-ready, and then moving and creating the transitions into employment. Apprenticeships, like traineeships or going to university ultimately, are learning routes into the world of work. Apprenticeships should be, and are, aimed at jobs and we should differentiate between them and traineeships at level 2 and below, which Richard has taken us down. They should be sufficiently aimed at an occupation where there is a technical standard and a level of proficiency—whether it is safety, technical excellence or whatever—where you are building a knowledge of expertise around a person. As an organisation, you can look to build a degree of loyalty with and keep them. So I don’t see apprentices as fodder; I see them as long-term strategic investments.

Chair

Is that the view from you all?

Ian Taylor

I would add that apprenticeships are an opportunity to get young people into “earn and learn”—that is how we describe it. It gets them into the marketplace of working, with a specific job to go to at the end of it. But it also gets them into an option of careers, because it gives them as a 16, 17 or 18-year-old skills that are transferable in the marketplace. There are other ways into that marketplace, of course, but we certificate about 17,000 young people. Two thirds of those are young girls and young ladies, who are coming into the workplace. Now, their career thereafter may be long term as a beauty therapist, or it may change during the course of their career. We introduce them into the workplace and they learn the transferable skills of customer service, which can apply across many sectors, and fundamental embedded functional maths and English, which are very useful in their workplace environment and which give them some real value to their employer.

Chair

So there is an element of targeting NEETs in that.

Kate Stock

The reality is that you have to have a job before you can be an apprentice. The apprenticeship scheme is a valid alternative to going to full-time college or staying on in sixth form. You can see that by the percentage of learners in that age group who do an apprenticeship. The difficulty is that you have to have the job first. In the removal of the access to apprenticeships scheme, the programme-led apprenticeship and all the other schemes for unemployed apprentices, you have taken away the ability for learners who are not ready for employment but who wish to study the full qualification outside of college to do that.

Chair

So what do we do for those young people who are not ready?

Kate Stock

One of the biggest weaknesses was in the set-up of the study programme, where training providers who did not already have an EFA contract are not allowed to deliver the study programme. We can deliver traineeships and apprenticeships, but we cannot deliver the same qualification—

Chair

So what is the recommendation, Kate?

Kate Stock

The recommendation is that the study programme should be extended to training providers.

Brian Wisdom

I think that traineeships have to be much more closely linked to apprenticeships, and they are not. The problem is that we all get confused between what is social policy and what is industrial policy. What is really important for the economy is that we have a really strong, robust industrial strategy and we prepare people to meet the needs of the economy, which we are not doing at the moment. We need 83,000 engineers, and last year we certificated, I think, 28,000 people in STEM subjects. It is just not enough. At the same time, we are probably short of 100,000 chefs and cooks to date, and we are not training nearly enough of those either. In fact, the whole hospitality industry had, I think, 60,000 apprentices last year. We are clearly not getting that. I think that is partly because of the fudge around—

Chair

So a much closer link—I think you are all nodding—between traineeships and apprenticeships. Those of you who were here earlier heard the evidence about GCSE maths and now GCSE English, and it appears that we are locking a huge group of young people out because of that. Do we need some other kind of entry qualification in numeracy and literacy, which is not based on Shakespeare?

Kate Stock

As the provider, in child care probably 40% of our learners have D grades or below in GCSE when they start on the programme. In order to be a fully qualified nursery nurse, you have to work to level 3, and 75% of our apprentices are studying at level 3.

Chair

Are they studying numeracy and literacy?

Kate Stock

Yes, because it is required under the apprenticeship framework. In a complete ridiculousness in the apprenticeship framework, we also have to do ICT functional skills. I do not know whether anybody in the room knows what a VLOOKUP is, or has any competence in VLOOKUP, but it certainly bears no resemblance to the practice in the toddler room, being quite a high-level Excel function. Excel is not exactly much use in the toddler room either. The new child care level 3 apprenticeship requires GCSE on exit instead of functional skills, which will further exclude learners from the workplace. Under the early years foundation stage, you have the ridiculous situation that a 16-year-old student is allowed to be counted in ratio, but if you have an EYE level 3 qualification but do not have your English and maths GCSE, you are not.

Brian Wisdom

In addition, the new system will rule out the opportunity for retakes. That means that the whole cohort will have to go through at one point in the year, which does not suit the employers who would be taking them on as apprentices.

Kate Stock

Or the learners.

Brian Wisdom

Or, indeed, the learners themselves. I think there is a real challenge. We all recognise the need to improve literacy, numeracy and the skills of our young people, because in the end, in whatever workplace you are in, you need those skills. It is how you do it. The challenge with apprenticeships, certainly if you are talking about the traineeship much more as part of the pre-apprenticeship route, is finding ways of making contextualised learning as valuable as academic learning. At the end of the day, if you are motivated by catering, actually calculating the ingredients for a dish is as efficient a way of learning maths as the traditional way.

Chair

So you would recommend as a panel that we need something alongside or as an alternative to GCSE maths and English.

Kate Stock

The functional skills that we have are good. They are challenging. They were only fully integrated into apprenticeships a couple of years ago. I think you will find that, across the board, all apprenticeship providers are still struggling to implement functional skills properly. Where they do not work is where there is no relevance to the vocation, which is created by the apprenticeship framework.

Tony Moloney

Can I just make one point? I am not wholly behind this. I get much of what has been said, but I was not party to the earlier conversation in full. The point that I would make is that a concurrency of activity needs to happen. There are two streams. We have to do something with the education system in primary and secondary schools—with STEM and the other subjects that form part of the broader education—that leads students to a position at point of exit where they can transition into a suitable pathway. That has three outcomes. The first is directly into employment, which is fabulous. There are six point something million one-man-band businesses in the UK and there is a lot of local business, which is great. They are economically active and that should be celebrated, but it is seen as failure in school. The second route is work-based learning—traineeships and apprenticeships. There are two ways into that, but it is predominantly apprenticeships. You may also go into continued education, further or higher, and decide that that is a route. Those are three paths to trying to become employed. On the concurrent activities and the systemic thing that we need to try to fix—this picks up your point, Kate—traineeships have a place, and I will state where they fit. In the energy sector, we have created them in such a way that they work as pre-employment bridges, so they can get to NEETs and to the lowest social decile. It is hard to do, but you can create an employability skill set package that can act as a pre-employment bridge that can then get people on to the entry point of an apprenticeship. I think that that is how they fit.

Kate Stock

But that requires young people to know what they want to do. Part of the difficulty is that a lot of young people still come out of school, quite rightly, not knowing what they want to do when they grow up. I am 41 and still don’t know what I want to do when I grow up. They are not wrong to be confused. The really good thing about the traineeship programme as it currently stands is that it allows you to have in-depth conversations with young people and deliver really good, independent information, advice and guidance to help them. They get to do work experience to experiment. They might say, “Oh. Working in a nursery involves screaming children. I don’t think I want to do that.” Many people have this preconception about what a particular job is like, and the traineeship programme is really good in terms of that. In terms of careers advice from schools, I was at an event a couple of weeks ago and people were coming up to me and saying, “I want to do an apprenticeship.” and I would say, “In what?” and they would say, “What do you mean?” so I would say, “It’s a job with training, so what job would you like?” The response would be, “Oh. I don’t know.” and then I say, “Marvellous. Can’t help you then.” There is a misunderstanding about what an apprenticeship is, what it does and how cool it is.

Caroline Nokes

I want to go back to something you said in response to an earlier question, Kate. I have a 16-year-old and I entirely get that they come out of school not knowing what they want to do. You mentioned that their maths and English skills had to be relevant to the role that they chose. Is it not the reality now that young people—all of us actually—are more likely to change career mid-life and that we do not stick at the same thing for very long, so the maths skills that are relevant to a career in catering will not be the same as those for a career in child care, hairdressing or whatever?

Kate Stock

Whether or not to stick with the current system is an interesting dilemma. Functional skills are practical maths and English that can be applied to any context. They are challenging; you can see that by the fact that there is not a 100% rate. They have an advantage over GCSE. With GCSE it is set out that only a certain percentage of the cohort can pass. So, if GCSE is our only English and maths qualification, which was the route Government was heading in, there will be the problem that 40% of the population will never achieve that standard. Functional skills, based around competence, mean that if you achieve that competence, it does not matter how many other people are there with you, you can still pass the qualification.

Chair

If you’re good enough.

Kate Stock

Functional skills are good enough.

Chair

No, I am saying if you are good enough you can pass. It has nothing to do with who was around you.

Kate Stock

If you are good enough, you can pass. That is the thing that is brilliant about work-based learning. It is based on your genius at work. Can you look after children at 4 o’clock on a Friday afternoon when they have been screaming at you? Can you still do it? That is not about synoptic assessment. That is already there; we go in and observe learners at work and go, “Yeah, you’re cool.”

Alex Cunningham

We have a great chef in Stockton who is working with kids who are NEET. He is organising pop-up kitchens, so they are learning to cook and handle money while working with people at events. He is placing them in roles with local kitchens. Not one of the people he has been working with will get anywhere near the standard that is required for maths under the present regime. I worry about the barriers that are in place for those young people. Some of them will have to get to 19 to have this opportunity with him, whereas my brother who is a chef turned teacher is working with young people who, again, are not going to achieve the maths qualification but he can place them in work. What barriers can we remove? What can we do to give children who are never going to be mathematicians that chance to get into work without placing that barrier in the way?

Tony Moloney

I get the point about the connection, which is where I was going with the two concurrent activities. You need to try to put in some remedies that address kids who are in school now. Then you have got separate intervention that can deal with people who are not in education, formal training or employment. The point I was going to add at that stage was that as employers and sectors we should be spending a lot of time getting into schools, which we do through a careers lab, which we have created through secondary schools to try to help young people form and make those decisions early, so that they go into some of their options a little bit more light-hearted, knowing where it can go and take them. The idea is to bring alive some of that, but you need a diversity of employers, not just engineering companies. You need local businesses in local schools across all 4,500 secondary schools. We are trying to create that kind of presence so that they start to switch their own light bubs on—sorry about the energy pun—and make the connection between inspiring to what they aspire to and how they can go about exploring and take action and what they need to prepare for that transition. The beauty with that is that you will get to a lot more. You won’t solve everybody’s problems. We will still have people further up the education chain who think, “I am not sure what is in this for me.” The idea when you have careers conversations is not just the online portals that are available but real people in the classroom. That is where business has a huge part to play. I know that the DFE is looking at that to start creating careers conversations again. That helps them be more informed.

Brian Wisdom

One of our members—People First—ran an employment academy for unemployed people, combining them with leading employers who were opening new venues around the country. As a result, in the past year they got 5,000 NEETs into employment. That is a success rate of about 50% of those who were trained. That was by giving them absolutely industry-specific programmes to get them in. They were trained in customer service and all that sort of thing before they went to those employers. It is very successful. It is like anything; there is no silver bullet. We have to engage the whole system—employers, training providers, sector skills bodies—in making a difference. There is a probably a range of different initiatives. The local ones are brilliant; that is a much better way of getting to small business. For some national employers, you need to work at a national, sectoral level.

Kate Stock

I have three things. On raising the participation age, local authorities are much more focused on tracking down their NEETs. That is where the current traineeship programme is starting to work very well. It is a central place for learners who are NEETs to be referred to, and it addresses the English and maths issues. For a lot of learners, their appalling GCSE results are preventing them from moving on. The six-month traineeship programme is just about enough time to try to get them further forward than they were.

Alex Cunningham

But the new regime wants people to continue to study maths until they are 17, 18, 19 or whatever.

Kate Stock

Absolutely. That is not necessarily wrong. Again, it goes back to my point about removing the access to apprenticeships scheme. You have got learners who are ready to study a full qualification. In a lot of industries, a level 2 or level 3 qualification is the best way to get a job. Through work-based learning and doing placements so that they are with the employer—not being paid, but getting work experience—they can get the qualifications so that they get something out of it. Through that, they will get employed. The final thing is that we possibly need to start pushing back at employers. You cannot have an oven-ready chicken. The apprenticeship is not the only training scheme or the only qualification that 16 to 18-years-olds should ever undertake. We need lifelong learning and we need to continue to invest in skills. The apprenticeship has to answer the question, “Where am I going at the moment? Can it get me from A to B?” Through my life, I am going to go to Z and the apprenticeship will never, ever get me through the whole alphabet, nor should it.

Ian Taylor

I would add to that that there is a tube map of career options, but the apprenticeship and the traineeship before that are a route of earn to learn. They get you on the tube map and are your ticket into the whole system. We should not ignore the opportunity they create. On the embedded functional skills, we all want to see improvement in maths and English, but doing it through a purely academic approach is not working for a lot of people. I have seen young lads who can do 501 on a dartboard quicker than I can do it on a calculator. Put them into a maths lessons, however, and they just go starey-eyed.

Chair

I have taught many of them.

Mr Ward

I will just have one more go on standards and competencies. They are saying that I can do things to a higher or lower standard, but my understanding is that I cannot be a little bit competent, just like I cannot be a little bit pregnant. I cannot be at all pregnant, actually. Are they the same or are they different? Are the new standards the same as competencies?

Kate Stock

It depends on the framework. In a child care Trailblazer, it is pretty much identical to what we have, because there is one agreed qualification and that is what the Department for Education has decided it will recognise within the sector. The Trailblazer is not adding much value. The qualification is a competence-based qualification that combines practical skills with knowledge and understanding, so it is assessed in different ways. You can be borderline competent, but you have to be above the line. You can be amazing and knocking it out of the park. With an apprenticeship, you have to be 70% to 80% competent before you begin, because you are already in work building up those skills. You will then be building those up as you move through the apprenticeship. Competence-based education is good in that it assesses different skills, knowledge and understanding in a different way from exam-based assessment. It is able to be amended and differentiated to be much more inclusive than academic education, where you have to write the essay and cover X, Y and Z. There are no resits. With competence-based education, you put it in. Your assessor looks at it and says, “Well, you have not covered that, that and that. Now we will have a conversation on how best we can cover this, that and the other.”

Mr Ward

It seems to me that the definition is based on an outcome, as opposed to an assessment.

Tony Moloney

May I make a quick point to give you another angle on this? I am still left with the question about what is different from NVQs. This history of doing this has been that work-based learning roads are fabulous, and they always will be—this is effectively still a work-based learning road. The way competencies were assessed historically is that, if you look at the individual qualifications, you had certain elements and performance criteria, which you ticked off. You could do them in a separate way, and when people completed those qualifications as an apprentice or as a trainee—there are many entry routes into many employers—they came into the workplace ready to start work, and then they went through a form of authorisation. In the energy sector we have 400 kV, so we have to have people who are extremely safe. They go through a sequence of permitry and authorisations, which are in themselves competencies. With the new Trailblazer we have managed to align—this is why the synoptic parts are useful—the many routes to assessment, as this is not an exclusive route to assessment. The idea is that you effectively do a trade test that brings together the behaviours and knowledge that they have acquired from many areas and see them applied in real settings. That is where it is quite rich. For us, the beauty is that we can tick that off as part of their assessment towards being authorised to work on the network. That is a fundamental change, so you are doing it all straight away.

Brian Wisdom

It is a real improvement. The challenge will be how you maintain that going forward. These new standards have been set on a wave of volunteerism by employers who have come together to set those new standards and by sector bodies that have supported the vast majority of these Trailblazers. In two years’ time, when the Trailblazer groups have disbanded—the National Apprenticeship Service recently said that it is seeing evidence of employer fatigue in getting involved in this, which you can understand, particularly for smaller or medium-sized employers—if there is no industrial partnership structure that covers the breadth of training that needs to happen, how does it continue? Who does an employer go to when they have a question about the standards? Who does an employer go to when there has been a change in legislation that requires a resetting of the standards, which will happen, or when international events have changed things? This area is still completely undeveloped, and I think it is really important that there is a self-sustaining way of making sure that the quality and standards can be maintained.

Chair

Who should be accrediting all these qualifications or standards now that QCA has gone? Before we do that, we will go to Siobhain.

Siobhain McDonagh

Taking up that last point, how successful has the Trailblazer scheme been at involving employers in the design of assessments for the new apprenticeship standards?

Brian Wisdom

It is still early days. The old system was quite assessment-heavy because of all the qualifications that sat within it. The risk of a big assessment at the end is that it still remains assessment-heavy when, in reality, what you want to do is invest more money in the training process along the way. I think it is really important that employers are able to set that agenda and that it doesn’t become a hugely cost-heavy or bureaucratic process. Tony described a methodology that will work for some sectors, but other sectors will need a different approach. It is very important that the employers have that say and remain engaged, as they have been with the Trailblazer process, and that ultimately the assessment suits their needs and that there is some form of governance that ensures that the consistency of standards across the apprenticeship brand is acceptable.

Kate Stock

I am not sure there is any evidence that employers have been more involved in the Trailblazer process than they were through the sector skills councils previously. Where you are seeing more flexibility and innovation in apprenticeship frameworks from some sectors, it is because the current rules are allowing it. That is not to say that the Trailblazer process is better than what the sector skills councils were doing, but the sector skills councils were in a straitjacket. The current process is not necessarily any better.

Tony Moloney

That is a good point. I pick up both points and concur. We are in a perfect storm where there are eight industrial partnerships. We are finding that a good way to give some structure and governance. It is not the Trailblazer in itself. Therefore, we would have had an engagement through the sector skills council with smaller employers. To your point, Siobhain, if you think about the power network qualification for power network craftsperson, the big six energy companies, National Grid, and ScottishPower come together. Those are eight big ones. Purposely, we got some tier 1—supply chain—and tier 2 involved in that, so that they can feel part of that ownership. The important thing is when we configure the standard with the selection. If you create the right modular approach, they can use the apprenticeship and we can all recognise it. You could have done it the other way but I just think—to Brian Wisdom’s point—that part of the risk and, therefore, probably a recommendation is that any reform needs to think about what goes on past 2017-18. We all know that apprenticeships are a much longer-term endgame for the UK. We talked earlier about certainty. We need to create a model that we can start to live to and think about how it will be funded, and what the industry, the individual and the state will pay for. We need to be clear about that and about how it will pan out. That pipeline will start to emerge and become more used and recognised. Therefore, we will all stick with it. We tweak around but the funding will settle that.

Ian Taylor

You have to add the whole supply chain, not just the employers. You have to have the training providers and educationists, and you need somebody to mediate and moderate that and bring them together. I believe that the Trailblazer process has disfranchised some of the employers because of the constant changes. We need to bring them on board but it is not just them. They will say, “We need an end assessment” and the training provider says, “I can’t do 17,000 people at one time. We need a different strategy.” It is important to ensure that all the voices are heard and that we get an industry or sectoral solution. Repeating what has already been said, there is not a one-stop-shop solution for this.

Mr Ward

Is it the role of NAS to do that?

Tony Moloney

I would not say so—not necessarily.

Brian Wisdom

It can be self-sustaining. If the certification system exacted a levy that supported the ongoing maintenance of standards, that money can be recycled in the system and does not require a Government body to do it, other than oversight of it. Today, we could manage that on a self-regulated basis.

Siobhain McDonagh

Taking up the point of, “You can’t all have your exams at the end because we couldn’t possibly get through them,” I have a question for Brian. The FISSS report that the assessment process is being captured by the award bodies. Does that represent an unwillingness on the part of employers to be involved in the assessment of the new apprenticeship standards?

Brian Wisdom

No, because I do not think that employers understand what the assessment means yet. It is at the very early stages. Logically, if you look at it from a commercial perspective, awarding bodies have gained a lot of their income from doing the assessments of the qualifications that have sat within an apprenticeship. That has now changed. How their business model can work in the future—I guess they are looking at the commercial opportunity of big assessments at the end of apprenticeships. That may well suit some sectors but it should be the employers making those decisions, not a Government decision that awarding organisations should do so, because that may well not suit some sectors. Indeed, Tony’s sector has already set up its own assessment process.

Kate Stock

It is quite ironic because for 20 years, in terms of practice, everything has been about back-end assessment being appallingly bad practice and not at all within the learners’ best interests—that learners get inspired and motivated by achieving throughout their qualification. So it is highly ironic that again we are having this almost academic assessment being foisted on, possibly in the view of raising the esteem. You are going to traumatise learners. This weaker cohort—the possible NEETs, the people who are vulnerable who bounce themselves in and out—are going to freak out. Three or four iterations ago, when technical certificates were first introduced, you had external assessment of the technical certificate. Within child care, we had a 90% first-time pass rate of the qualification or of that test. It added no value over and above all of the other assessment methods; you could tell that because the pass rate was so high. It will be interesting to see how this goes, but we cannot raise the esteem of vocational education by saying that everything that makes it special is bad, and that it must look like A-levels. In terms of the Trailblazers, the weakness within child care is that the Trailblazers—the employers—are not the ones making the running. The employers do not want GCSEs on exit within the framework, yet that is what we have. We had it imposed on us very badly in a very rushed way. There has been zero support for the child care providers or colleges to make sure that we are able to deliver this. The Trailblazer does not want GCSE on exit, yet the Government is adamant that GCSE on exit is what we must have. We have this divergence between what the employers say is necessary and what is being put on the sector. That, again, is against the whole ethos of the Trailblazer.

Mr Ward

We have looked at careers advice and we have found that it needs to be improved. We also looked at why young people may not consider apprenticeships. There is the issue of schools themselves wanting to keep the best kids in and so on, and not providing that. But there is also a possible lack of understanding among parents possibly, and certainly among young people about apprenticeships. These new standards, to be honest, seem very complex and confusing. Is there anything in here that would make it simpler for parents, employers, young people and schools to understand what these apprenticeship things are?

Kate Stock

Probably not.

Tony Moloney

My view is no; not necessarily. I do not think that just by calling it a red or yellow—it is still an apprenticeship. The issue is more societal in this country. That is why it is important for all employers—whether they are in child care, engineering or hairdressing—to get into and be part of a conversation in schools about pathways and transitions.

Mr Ward

We always talk about Germany. Would a parent, employer or young person there know about technical education?

Tony Moloney

Yes. I worked in Germany for six years, so I know the dual education system there. I know the relationship between the works councils. Interestingly, we kind of gifted that over to them many years ago. In society, there is still a deeper appreciation of the contribution made by certain occupations, such as engineering, and the ways into them, as well as the fact that there is a pure route. The lexicon around vocational/academic is not helpful either. We need to start presenting that you need good skills and knowledge for both vocational and academic. In schools and in society, we have to get to parents and young children and say, “Look, there’s more than one way to the top if that’s where you’re going. There are more ways to fulfil your life or improve your life chances.” We have to present apprenticeships and transitions from secondary education onwards in a way that feels more equitable. This comes back to teachers’ understanding and being confident to share knowledge about what apprenticeships look like and what you could do.

Ian Taylor

I do not think that the Trailblazer process has created the esteem of apprenticeships. Knowledge in our sectors is certainly on a local basis. I know that the girl next door has an apprenticeship in the next town; she does not have to travel 20 miles to the university or whatever. The Trailblazer outcomes, as far as we are concerned, is that we are going to see a dramatic drop in local SME apprenticeships because of the Trailblazers. It is having a negative effect on the lady who runs the local beauty parlour or hairdresser, or the chap who works in the local gym, who say, “I can get a job and still live at home. I am on a very low wage, but I don’t have to move away or take out loans and things like that.” If we lose a lot of such people, in fact apprenticeships will be even more devalued in the eyes of parents, because if their son is not going off to university or their daughter is not going into a vocational occupation, for example, and those apprenticeships disappear, what are their children going to do? Are you going to increase the number of NEETs, or just the number of unemployed?

Chair

We started on this journey of “Academic good, vocational bad” when we turned polytechnics into second-rate—in many cases—universities. Finally, Brian, your federation has been quite critical of the growth in the number of standards. Do you think—all of you—that the Government have sufficient oversight of the number and range of new standards? Have they really got to grips with this?

Brian Wisdom

The early indications are that there will be a proliferation of standards. I am not necessarily being critical of that; I am just saying that it is a fact. The numbers that have been developed so far indicate that there is going to be a significant proliferation of standards and of groups setting those standards. Within that lie some potential pitfalls, because of the need to ensure consistent quality across the piece and to ensure that, fundamentally, those standards can be maintained over a long period, given that we want apprenticeships to last in perpetuity and not for two years, or as the servant of political dogma, because we are talking about industry’s future and that has to be long term. There is some real cause for making sure that we have in place the governance and system that can support a proliferation of standards if there needs to be a proliferation of standards, to provide the opportunities and the quality that people need, or not. Either way, I do not think that there is a system in place for the future, and we can offer some of the answers to that.

Chair

What happens when the Trailblazers end? Should the Government pick this up? Should things go to Ofqual, so that it becomes not just a regulator, but extends its role?

Brian Wisdom

That is a risk. The issue with apprenticeship standards has been, according to Richard, the fact that they have been developed for the supply side and not for employers. This is the tilt that has started to happen. There is not a future laid out, and I do not think that it lies with Government; it lies with employers working together. There are potential solutions. Employers are paying for apprenticeships now, and they pay for apprenticeship certification. Within that certification route, they can also pay for the maintenance and development of standards into the future. Of course there will need to be some form of inspection and some quality assurance of how that public money is being spent through employers, but at the end of the day it can be managed.

Chair

An extension of Ofsted? [Interruption.] Ian is saying, “Definitely not.”

Brian Wisdom

I would be very wary of saying that it should be an extension. Clearly, where employers are major training providers, they are already inspected by Ofsted, and I would imagine that in many of those cases that will continue. A regime like that might be inclined to put employers off engaging with the system at a time when we need them to engage. Industry is perfectly capable of regulating itself through its own processes and ensuring that poor-quality employers are dealt with within the system.

Tony Moloney

My only answer to you on that is that we would not be worried or concerned about Ofsted having a limited remit. As you said, we are already inspected. Coming back to proliferation, the intra-cycle proliferation—that was a mouthful—and rationalisation will always happen to some extent. We do not want more qualifications within our sector than we really need. It comes back to finding a balance between the right broad range of occupational roles that will work. It is reasonable, with public money, to have some kind of assurance process that says that this is being well directed.

Chair

You said there were solutions. If any of you have solutions or recommendations, please let us have them. Thank you for your evidence. Ian, are you really an Olympic gold medallist?

Ian Taylor

Correct.

Chair

And did you bring your medal today?

Ian Taylor

It’s in my other jacket.

Chair

Respect anyway. Thank you. Oral evidence: Apprenticeships and traineeships for 16-19 year olds, HC 597 27