Training providers under the spotlight

London – The UK government invested a massive £1.2 billion into its apprenticeship programme last year, when 457,200 people started new training as apprentices. But, it seems, this was a case of money being thrown at a problem without any real understanding of what the investment was meant to achieve.

According to the ‘Apprenticeships’ report by the House of Commons business, innovation and skills committee, there has been a lack of strategy and purpose around the programme, with no definition of what apprenticeships actually are.

Moreover, MPs found that there was insufficient data to advise where funds are best allocated. This shortcoming, it said, needed to be addressed as a matter of urgency, as did the complex delivery and sheer number of organisations involved in delivering apprenticeship schemes.

Most tellingly, perhaps, was a conclusion by the committee that “the success of the apprenticeship programme should not be judged by numbers alone” - suggesting that the Government has been doing exactly that.

“At present, the National Apprenticeship Service’s objectives are too heavily weighted on numbers,” said the report. “In the future, the quality of the programme should be seen as an equal priority, and should be assessed rigorously.”

The MPs’ findings tally with viewpoints expressed at the Process Engineering skills debate held at the PPMA 2012 exhibition.

Among other issues, these raised questions about the standards of training beingprovided to apprentices. Typical was a comment from a member of the audience, who reported that her staff were coming back from training courses saying that “they hadn’t learn anything other than the bleeding obvious”.

An even more acute complaint - from apprentices at the debate - was that they were being required to repeat basic training elements even though they had already qualified with higher BTEC diplomas in subjects such as engineering and advanced manufacturing.

This is, in part, because employers are unable to recognise the qualification or a lack of integration among the various industry qualification boards in the UK. Other speakers, however, suggested that this was an exercise in managing funding by training providers, who, as one put it, “need to be shown the error of their ways.”

Also concerned about current training standards is Richard Cook, production and personnel director at industrial seals manufacturer AESSEAL. He sees a lot of fast-tracking of training, with apprentices coming out into industry after 42 weeks training, who are unable to meet basic skills requirements.

“Learning the basics for me is really important,” he said. “For example, 90% of our machines are CNC, which don’t need someone to know how to manually [operate them]. But if something goes wrong on the CNC machine, they don’t know how to troubleshoot.”

Cook went on to say that companies get back from the training system what they are willing to put into it: “There are a lot of providers out there interested in drawing down funding, getting bums on seats and pushing people back out. If you continue to utilise those sorts of providers, you will continue to get those kinds of results.”

AESSEAL, he explained, had not been spoilt for choice with it came to selecting a training provider. But, the seals manufacturer had now formed a close partnership with its chosen provider and worked with the organisation to develop a two-year training scheme.

In that time, he added, the training provider had developed their capabilities, had increased their Ofsted rating to ‘good’ and were now going for an ‘excellent’ rating.

Another issue for qualified trainees, though, is to do with companies’ own in-house programme and requirements for training new employees. As Cook explained: “We like people to take a consistent induction to the business and a consistent training offering.

“Yes, there is some duplicity here which is unfortunate, but we ask the guys to stay with it. “Generally, people who are qualified to higher diploma level are more mature than those leaving schools, so that also gives us some cultural issues. It is a problem we have to deal with.”

Looking ahead, the AESSEAL director is now lobbying to bring back a system, such as the EITB Engineering Industry Training Board framework.

“The annoying thing for me is that we had a framework that we know worked so well,” concluded Cook. “The EITB framework provided broad-based training over two to three years, alongside the technical side of it doing a HNC if that academic capability was there. We have really gone away from that now.”