The coalition government announced its Skills Strategy on 18th November. It will pump £250 million into the Apprenticeship programme. But what will apprentices be paid, what will they do, and what training will they get?
The £250 million is not new money, but has been shifted over from "Train to Gain", which focussed on developing NVQ programmes. The "strategy" contains few surprises, and differs little from what we would have had expected had Labour still been in power.
Still, the increased availability of Apprenticeships is a good thing. With the cuts to higher education funding, many young people will be looking at alternatives. There is a long standing gap in skills-based qualifications for young people not wishing to pursue the academic route.
But we are potentially being sold a pup here.
The TUC has agreed a minimum wage for Apprentices of the princely sum of £2.50 an hour. When questioned on this, the National Apprenticeship Service’s response was that there is nothing to stop employers paying more!
It has always been agreed that Apprentices should be supernumerary in their workplace, in order that they gain proper training, and to avoid the substitution of permanent jobs with cheap labour.
Now a representative of the Apprenticeship Service suggests that employers could not be expected to take on supernumerary apprentices in the current economic climate, and that it is perfectly acceptable for apprentices to be taken on for things such as maternity cover.
We need to watch out on the college based element of apprenticeships, too. When government funding flooded to NVQs in the mid 2000s a large number of private training providers flooded to market with “pile them high, sell them cheap” offers. We need to be vigilant that the same does not occur with apprenticeships, devaluing them to little more than a version of the 1980s Youth Training Scheme fiasco.
Most unions will have relatively decent policy on terms and conditions for Apprenticeships, but we need to ensure these are properly negotiated and enforced in our workplaces.
With the fight against raised higher education tuition fees high on the agenda at present, we need to ensure we do not forget young workers and condemn a generation to poverty pay and poor training.
