Vocational education and training - VET

The report follows a 4 month inquiry that seeks to understand the impact of proposed changes to post–16 education policy on future labour market outcomes of young people.

Francis Green, Golo Henseke and Ingrid Schoon. With skill shortages widely reported, you may be wondering what’s been happening to the learning of job skills among young people during Covid. It is already obvious that, following Brexit, we in Britain cannot rely as much on the skills of migrants – and this doesn’t just mean [...]

There are now more than five million self-employed workers in
the UK, making up 15.3% of the workforce. Even before Covid-19,
there were many questions about their work experiences and treatment in employment and tax law, but the current crisis has raised a new set of pressing issues, including income protection
during lockdown.

Coronavirus (COVID-19) restrictions have led to the cancellation of exams and prevented many assessments from being taken as planned.
We have designed an approach that is fair to learners and ensures, as far as possible, that they receive results to enable them to progress to the next stage of their lives without further disruption. Awarding organisations will be drawing on a range of evidence to ensure that results will be as reliable and consistent as possible, so that they are worthy of public confidence and valued by  education providers and employers as much as any other year. It is important that learners completing VTQs are not disadvantaged compared to their peers completing GCSEs and A levels. It is also important that learners receiving results this year are neither
advantaged nor disadvantaged compared to learners in previous or subsequent years

Some half a million will be leaving university, as many more may be leaving school or ending training and further education to emerge into nothingness. If they have lost their entire summer term, they will have had precious little careers advice, most of which was an early victim of austerity cuts anyway. The wealth of research from previous recessions shows that a long spell of early unemployment risks people being scarred for life.

Click here to edit the content

For the engineering sector to reduce its skills shortage, it needs to employ around 186,000 skilled recruits each year until 2024.

A key new piece of research launched this week by the Association of Employment and Learning Providers (AELP) and City & Guilds has outlined the need to improve the perceived value of apprenticeships if we’re to see a rise in achievement rates.

Launched at the 2023 Annual Apprenticeship Conference in Birmingham on Monday 13 March, “Raising the Standard: Sectoral approaches to raising apprenticeship achievement rates”, has been written by AELP’s Dr Chihiro Kobayashi, and Director of Strategy Paul Warner. It explores the underlying detail behind headline apprenticeship achievement rates and was commissioned following the then Skills Minister’s announcement in June 2022 that apprenticeship achievement rates should reach 67% by 2025 (up from 51.8% in 2020/21).

The interview analysis within the report identifies a variety of sectoral and cross-sectoral issues around apprenticeships. This includes six major cross-sectoral themes driving apprenticeship withdrawals: English and Maths requirements; malfunction of the Baker Clause; trainer retention and recruitment; engagement with employers; challenges with end-point assessment; and job or career changes.

With nearly half of apprentices withdrawing before completing their programme, this is a serious problem which compounds skills shortages in the UK. The full report contains fifteen recommendations outlining how this can be addressed, alongside further reflections on sector-specific issues that came to the authors’ attention. However, almost all of the factors and themes can ultimately be reduced to a single overarching conclusion and recommendation: much more work needs to be done by government, employers and the sector as a whole on raising the perceived benefit and value of apprenticeship study and the apprenticeship outcome.

Identified benefits– such as the increase in skills and productivity, the chance to learn whilst working, the improvements in career prospects – may seem obvious, but despite this the report finds that apprenticeships are still not being widely cited as a accreditation requirement in job adverts. This was even the case in roles advertised within the skills sector itself.

Career development and wellbeing has been researched in many career construction studies. However, little is known in a career development and employment services context about how best to approach potentially sensitive wellbeing conversations to support individuals who may be facing tough times. In the year(s) ahead it will be essential to find new ways to keep individuals motivated, resilient, agile, and aspirational in a rapidly changing world. A new free ‘Career Development and WellBeing Toolkit’ offers support to practitioners with these type of sensitive conversations.

The report uncovers the education motivations, attitudes and behaviours of 2,000 people and more than 500 employers based in the UK. Plus, we interviewed ten top education-sector experts for their take on the trends.

This document includes information on:
how apprenticeship training and assessment can continue in line with the new safer working
guidance
delivering apprenticeships flexibly to those working at home
furloughed employees continuing apprenticeship training and end-point assessment (EPA), or
starting an apprenticeship
applying the policy on breaks in learning
delays to EPA
alternative arrangements and flexibilities for EPA, external quality assurance, and certification
extensions to contracts for training providers with existing procured contracts
funding audits and evidence

This paper reviews the different definitions and measures of skills use and shows why it matters for local development policies.