As far back as 2015, in the wake of Tony Blair and New Labour’s push to make university attendance the norm for school leavers, David Cameron’s promised 300,000 more apprenticeships as an alternative . The Tories have been rattling on about this ever since, without much idea of what it really means. Let alone how they are going to achieve it – Rishi Sunak’s latest policy announcement left Schools Minister Damien Hinds fumbling through a Sky News interview this morning.
A consequence of a lack of real employment opportunities, the Tories have not been able to ‘price out’ a bulging HE student population, by hiking up the fees. With thousands not earning enough to pay back their loans, ministers have become increasingly agitated about the growing debt mountain, so they’ve lowered pay-back thresholds and increased the number of years that new graduates are liable to for their debts.
Wanting universities to return to ‘what they used to be’ (only available to the few) and backed up by various reports about graduates’ future earnings not demonstrating ‘value for money’, the Tories have been tightening the screws on institutions reliant on ‘recruiting’ rather than ‘selecting’ students. They’ve threatened funding cuts if courses are not ‘vocational’ enough and attempted to introduce alternative ‘technician level’ qualifications taught in FE colleges. Now, as the election slips away, Sunak has promised legislation to close universities offering ‘unviable’ degrees – and to use the savings to create 100,000 new apprenticeships ‘every year’– even more than Cameron himself ( this was later clarified to mean during the next Parliament)
Do the Tories even know how apprenticeships work?
Because their own children don’t do them, the Tories (and unfortunately, many Labour politicians) have little understanding of apprenticeships. Created by employers, not government ministers. As the UK economy has flatlined, so have apprenticeships. It’s true that the quality and the entitlement to ‘off the job’ training has been improved – low-level schemes lasting a few months and being used to recruit temporary cheap labour have been drastically pruned; but the number of annual apprenticeship starts ( about 200,000 in the last half year) slightly more than half what it was at the time of Cameron, with young people under 19 representing less than 1 in 3 (to access funding, employers have continued to enrol existing staff).
While governments don’t create apprenticeships, neither do they provide that much of the money. Large employers are required to pay a ‘levy’ which they can then claim back to fund their own apprentices. Levy funds are also used to subsidise smaller employers, with the government providing a small top up. But figures show huge amounts of levy funding (some estimates show up to half), unspent. In other words, in the UK’s flatlining and investment starved economy, employers don’t want to recruit young people and are not being compelled to do so (public sector organisations are set quotas, but these are very low. Only the police and the military make extensive use of them.)
For apprenticeships to be considered a realistic alternative to university for young people, then rather than being an ‘add on’ to a chaotic free market economy (as they are in the UK) they need to be part of a comprehensive industrial strategy (as has been the case in Germany) providing clear routes of progression and serving as a major, if not the main qualification for entering skilled and professional employment, both of which continue to disappear in the UK.
Labour and apprenticeships
While rightly mocking Sunak’s desperate politics, Keir Starmer’s Labour has also distanced itself from Tony Blair’s attempts to encourage university attendance. It’s proposing a new ‘growth and skills’ levy where employers will be allowed to use 50 per cent of their contributions to fund non-apprenticeship training. This means resources are simply being redirected not increased. But without adding additional funds of its own (Labour’s self-imposed ‘fiscal rules’ restrict this) or increasing employer contributions this may reduce the small number of school /college leavers starting apprenticeships still further. (With large increases in the number of Higher Level starts, there’s already evidence that some employers are trying to use their existing apprenticeship allowances to fund management trainees on post-graduate courses.)
But without a major reform of the economy there’s little chance of young people’s prospects improving. If during the post-war years’ apprenticeships were tied up with various types of manufacturing and related employment, they could now make a crucial contribution to a Green New Deal. But Labour won’t commit to this either.
Education, Economy and Society 