Gloucestershire has an enviable reputation with our further education colleges being some of the most successful in the country for developing apprenticeships with local employers.
But I believe they are being hamstrung with bureaucracy involving the government’s apprenticeship training levy paid by companies with a payroll over £3 million. The number of people starting apprenticeships in England has fallen dramatically from 500,000 in 2015 to just 337,000 last year. The apprenticeship levy was launched in 2017 requiring big business to put 0.5 per cent of their payroll towards the cost of on the job training. But due to the vagueness of the levy, many firms are not actually using that money to develop young apprentices.
And instead, what is happening more and more, is that money is being used to fund skills training for management. I started as a trainee journalist at 17 and did a three year apprenticeship. That to me was what most people would regard as a "proper" apprenticeship. To me, "proper" apprenticeships for school leavers - through supportive employers - hold the key to unleashing our post-Brexit potential. And Sara-Jane Watkins, principal of South Gloucestershire & Stroud College, tells me:
"Every levy employer should be looking at all their vacancies and asking themselves if they can create them into apprenticeships".
She believes that the complexity of apprenticeships was often very offputting to employers - especially SMEs. "Every time we start an apprentice", she said, "There are over a hundred checks and things we have to complete for every single new student".
Matt Burgess, principal of Gloucestershire College, told me:
"I do question the freedom of using levy money on some of these higher levels of training."
Apprenticeships for our young people are far too important to our economy to be mired in complexity. For a start, the apprenticeship levy must be overhauled by government to encourage those “proper” apprenticeships and our local firms which will benefit from them.
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