Dear BBC, Apprenticeships are much harder than you think

I can’t seem to get the recent BBC article on apprenticeships out of my head: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-63762317

It's been three days since I read it, and I can't seem to shake it. So, here’s what I want to say: Dear BBC, Apprenticeships are much harder than you think.?

Jane Hickie , CEO at AELP has rightly come out in FE Week this week and said that the EDSK report in the article “tried to paint a picture of the apprenticeship system which is simply not true or one the sector will recognise”. Our Skills Minister Robert Halfon MP has also spoken about the major reforms in this area, the successes so far, and the continued push for quality within apprenticeships. Thank you to Jane and Robert and well done, but surely we need to call this BBC article what it truly is: lazy, uninformed and frankly mis-leading to the general public.

I couldn't agree more about every apprentice and employer needing a high-quality apprenticeship experience (who wouldn’t?), but taking non-completion rates as a proxy for quality is deeply flawed.

Flip that around. If I said that many thousands of learners completed every course all the time, would you think they were necessarily getting a high-quality experience? No chance. We’d all cry foul about a suspicious 100% pass rate and almost certainly want to investigate more. We would definitely want to establish some other metric for quality.

On that very theme, comparing A-Level success rates to apprenticeship success rates is bonkers, bananas, cabbages, whatever you want to label it.

A-Level students go into a class day-in day-out, sit down, and study something. Every day is – let’s face it – about getting ready for that big-old exam at the end. There is a clear syllabus (probably in place for years, or even decades in a similar form of some sort) and there are lots and lots of sample exam papers to work your way through, with the dream of opening a golden envelope in mid-August with the results.

By stark contrast, apprentices are in offices, factories, on ships, in hospitality, at client sites. They have to deliver their work commitments to their employers (and by extension their customers) AND study, AND do it all to schedule, with a challenging End Point Assessment at the end of the road that may well be their licence to practice and thus the barrier to progress in their chosen career.

By the way, these End Point Assessments are pretty new and have been changing, no plethora of sample exam papers to scroll through for weeks beforehand. And when you get to your End Point Assessment, it might not just be your technical exam that you need to clear under exam conditions. You are very likely to have to also meet a real person who checks your work, your portfolio, asks you to prove your skills and will look you in the eye about it all. Your examination hurdle may well be cleared, but they will decide if you’re truly ready.

Put simply, A-Levels are a single line (learner to school or college) and Apprenticeships are a triangle (apprentice to college or training provider to employer). They are much more complex and harder than the general public may well think, and they take AT LEAST 12 months to complete, with many apprenticeships taking considerably longer. There is no way that all will make it through, so why does this article give that impression?

But there’s an equally large reason why comparing A-Levels to Apprenticeships = bonkers, bananas, cabbages.

A-Levels is very much for a homogenous group of 16-18 year olds, who already have GCSEs in the bag and are not in work (my apologies to the A-Level students out there who don’t fit this profile, but hopefully you’ll agree with the broader picture).

Apprentices on the other hand are so much more diverse. Sure, many are younger, seeking their way into work for the first time, but apprenticeships are across all ages, levels, industries and roles. There are now hundreds of paths to chose from, another factor making them complex but equally making them even more amazing. Apprenticeships have within them the ability to transform our skills sector, our economy, our growth, our productivity, but don’t be lured into the trap of thinking that it’s a given. Bad characters (be they any of those within the triangle) will inevitably rear their ugly heads, but that does not mean that the aim isn’t clear, that the system isn’t a good one, nor that the vast majority of us all have high-standards of quality and real ambition.

Which brings me to my final point, our further education and skills sector.

It’s a brilliant sector. You need to have resolve and be ready to graft, but you’ll be surrounded by people prepared to do just that. A college principal I spoke to just a few days ago put it plainly when he asked “When will government ever trust us? All we want is to deliver; we want to achieve great things”.

And that’s what probably irks me the most. This article gives the impression – innocently or otherwise – that our sector is the problem. Well, it’s not. It’s linked to a chronic lack of funding, lack of resource, lack of trust, reporting pressures, lack of profile, and the difficult balancing act that colleges & training providers have to tread every…single…day.

As you may have picked up, I don’t like the content, arguments, comparisons and proposals that this think tank has put forward. I question their 'skin in the game' in all this. However, I don’t see them as the real problem. They – by definition – are there to prod, provoke and push people to think differently. They are welcome to publish what they see fit, and to then stand by or adapt the assertions they make.

No. The real culprit here is the BBC. A desire for a Headline above a desire to understand - or even seemingly take a real interest in - the subject matter, or speak with key stakeholders in our skills sector. I would much rather see the BBC get the thoughts of Jane Hickie , David Hughes , Robert Halfon MP and many other knowledgeable people on apprenticeships and publish that to millions of readers and viewers.

Apprenticeships are amazing. All of us in the sector know it. We know it, and it powers why we go to work every day. The day-to-day balancing act that is needed between learners, colleges & training providers and employers should not stop all of us from taking to the tightrope.

Dear BBC , we don’t need you jeering from the crowds below as we journey across the tightrope. We need you to understand how scary it looks from up here and we need your cheers instead.