Britain | Training and skills
Why apprenticeships are so rare in Britain
And why new ideas for boosting them could easily backfire
THOUGH IT SPENT a lot of time lambasting Britain’s universities, the Conservative government that left office last year did a rotten job of promoting alternatives. The failure of its efforts to boost apprenticeships is the most striking example. In 2017 the government began requiring big firms to set aside money for on-the-job training, in the hope that this would create lots of opportunities for young people. Instead, the number of people starting apprenticeships has shrunk by a third.
Fixing this mess now falls to Labour. In opposition it promised sweeping changes; in power it seems to be retreating from them. It appears to be floundering just as much as the government it replaced.
Britain’s politicians have good reasons to covet more apprenticeships. They want to make it easier for career-changers to start again. They suspect that some university courses are a waste of time and cash. And they worry about people who get no more lessons after leaving school. Nearly one-third of 18-year-olds in England are neither in education nor getting formal training at work—compared with 21% in France and 19% in Germany. These people are “headed for a lifetime of low pay and low productivity”, warns Richard Layard, an economist now in the House of Lords.
Some big firms are keen apprenticeship-givers. Apprentices are about 10% of UK staff at BAE Systems, a defence manufacturer; this year it expects nearly 30,000 applications for its 1,300 or so openings. Mike Hawkings, a recent graduate of one of BAE’s programmes, shows your correspondent around a testing centre in Rochester—where bits of fighter jets are shot around centrifuges, shaken in big rattlers, and sweated in huge ovens. A few years ago he was working as a labourer in a quarry.
Most firms, however, are much less enthusiastic. The hold-up is not just that Britain lacks a deep tradition of apprenticeships, of the kind found in Germany or Switzerland. It is that British firms are oddly reluctant to offer training of any kind. They spend about half as much educating workers as companies in the EU do, even when courses of all types are combined.
The “apprenticeship levy”, which went into force when Theresa May was prime minister, aimed to change this. It requires companies with payrolls larger than £3m to ring-fence sums equal to 0.5% of their annual wage bill; they may use this money only to train apprentices. It was assumed from the start that big firms would not use up these pots entirely; by design, funds left unspent after two years flow to the government, which takes some of this to subsidise apprenticeships at smaller, non-levy-paying companies. Along with all this have come efforts to raise the quality and reputation of apprenticeships, for example by making them longer and more rigorous.
Learning on the job
Most people agree that apprenticeships are held in higher regard than a few years ago—when parents saw them as excellent opportunities for other people’s offspring. The problem is that even as demand has risen, the total supply of apprenticeships has gone down. The kind that are available to teenagers (aged 16-19) have plunged especially hard. One reason is that the reforms have “decimated” the number of apprenticeships offered by small and medium-size firms, notes Lizzie Crowley of the Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development. These companies seem to have been discouraged by the bureaucracy that arrived with the new regime.
As for large levy-paying firms, they have been spending their pots in ways that were not entirely foreseen. Many are using apprenticeships to improve the skills of people they already employ, rather than to teach beginners. About half the people who start an apprenticeship in England are older than 25; some 40% have already worked for their employer for at least 12 months. Multiverse, a British startup that promised to help school-leavers find good apprenticeships, increasingly earns its dough helping firms educate existing staff. The worry is that many employees are doing training they would have been offered anyway—awkwardly rebadged as “apprenticeships” in order to chew through ring-fenced funds.
Now, Labour seems to be inventing its policies on the hoof. It has promised to limit very dodgy uses of the levy, such as to fund management training for bosses. Plans announced in February to end basic tests of numeracy and literacy, and to create shorter apprenticeships, may help push up numbers—but they also reek of dumbing down. The government risks undermining hard-won trust in apprenticeships, says Alice Gardner of Edge, an education foundation.
The biggest questions concern a still-vague plan to turn the apprenticeship levy into a broader “growth and skills levy”. In opposition Labour said it would let firms spend a chunk of their pot on approved training other than apprenticeships. In theory this could give the government finer powers to fix failures in the market for training, and to use up levy funds that currently go unspent. Last year about £800m of the levy money that went to the government was not subsequently spent supporting training of any sort.
The problem is that this change could easily cause the number of high-quality apprenticeships for young people to fall further. And even were this not a risk, enabling firms to spend more of their levy pots will in effect cost the government money. In February Jacqui Smith, the skills minister, told the Financial Times that her department’s plans hinge on spending decisions to be made by the Treasury. Months of uncertainty are benefiting no one. Pray that the government puts only its best people on the job. ■
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