Employers to be more involved in training design and funding
Employers will have more involvement in the design and funding of apprenticeships under reforms outlined by the skills and enterprise minister Matthew Hancock on Monday.
Speaking at the Association of Employment and Learning Providers (AELP) annual conference Hancock said the changes would help to drive up the quality of vocational training.
Government efforts to improve the quality of apprenticeships this parliament have made them popular among young people as well as employers, the minister said. However, he said he wanted the reforms to take this process further “placing employers at the centre of apprenticeships” and encouraging them “to work with providers to design the training apprentices receive”.
Hancock highlighted the ongoing apprenticeship trailblazer scheme, where 400 employers have already helped design new training standards, saying it will play a crucial role in bringing employers and training providers together.
“If employers in the industries you work with want to get involved, take control and design apprenticeships that work for you, just let us know,” he told the gathered training professionals.
“By maintaining this momentum, we will see the first starts on these new apprenticeship standards by the start of next year. By September 2017, every apprenticeship start will be on a new employer-designed standard,” he said.
The government will also give employers control over how apprenticeships are funded. Currently, the government “holds the purse strings”, Hancock said, “[but] by putting funding in the hands of employers, they will be free to work with learning providers to secure the most effective opportunities for their employees”.
He said that the proposed co-funding system would be tested with the trailblazers over the next year and that it “will take time to get the details right”.
Test funding rates will be based on businesses and government sharing the costs. For every £1 an employer puts into training an apprentice, the government will provide £2, and these employer co-payments will be mandatory.
To ensure the best value for the taxpayer, the amount of government funding will be capped at five levels broadly based on training requirements for different apprenticeship standards. And the government will give extra incentive payments for completed programmes, for small businesses with fewer than 50 employees, and for apprentices aged 16 to 18.
However, shadow minister for universities, science and skills Liam Byrne, who also spoke at the two-day conference, warned of a “looming gap on the vocational side” of learning and development, especially in STEM (science, technology, engineering and maths) skills.
He told AELP delegates that young people in his Birmingham constituency can see the booming Jaguar Landrover plant on the other side of the M6 motorway but that they knew they have a better chance of getting into a top university than getting an apprenticeship placement at the plant.
Yet even Jaguar Landrover, which is a fast growing business, “sees its number one constraint on growth as skills”, Byrne added.
He criticised the government policy on skills and development saying it was “breaking every rung of the career ladder” from “unsustainable” higher education funding, cuts in the full-time funding rate for 18-year olds at college to “the wholesale destruction of the careers service”.
“Labour has got to set out how it will rebuild the steps on this ladder,” he said highlighting his party’s plans to introduce a Technical Baccalaureate as well as the forthcoming Growth Review from Lord Adonis.
“We need to earn our way out of a low wage economy by building a knowledge economy not by breaking the career ladder but by increasing skills.”