I agree lots of fake apprenticeships around where the apprentices provide cheap labour sponsored by external bodies who exist by skimming off government cash from the scheme.
Answering the phone in a doctors surgery is not an apprenticeship!
They exist in our industry with various bodies advising government on how to run electrical apprenticeships whilst keeping a careful eye on their own income.
I asked at the college I taught at why we did not offer the AM2 qualification as students were doing their level 3 C&G and then going off to a college 5 miles away. I was told my college was not allowed to run it due to the close proximity of the other college running it which was authorised by the owner of the scheme under a franchise arrangement. The AM2 has been dumbed down like the other qualifications and is classed as an Endpoint assessment.
I think the problem is public servants are no match for big business and are easily deceived by the people who come along to help them write the rules. I wonder who got sacked at the DCLG after Dame Judith Hackett reported back to Parliament after she condemned the whole suit Building Regulations ( that includes Part P) as being "not fit for purpose"?
I shall restrict my response to apprenticeships within the electrotechnical sector.
Twenty years ago I taught part-time on a fairly well controlled apprenticeship scheme which required the young person with appropriate O-level grades to secure a job with an electrical contractor. Once those key elements were met, the facilitating organisation, placed the candidate with a local college, monitored the candidate through the three year period both in work and in college and provided access to the AM2. No cost was levied to any participant and circa £9K of government funding was divided fairly between the contractor, the college and the facilitator. The scheme was far from perfect but it did provide excellent outcomes with high NVQ L3 achievement and very low drop-out rates. I have since tutored many of my erstwhile apprentices on current 7671 and inspection and testing courses. I am delighted that they have done well in our industry.
However, things seem to be different now. That scheme has since been replaced and colleges can cast a fine mesh net to recruit candidates who have below average academic ability. That in itself is not necessarily an impediment to progress but when the young person can’t get on to his first choice course of painting and decorating and is pressed into a technical career path then it is clear they will likely struggle. To add insult, the young person is brought to Level 2 through a purely college-based system which provides little in the way of practical experience and then discarded unless they can find an electrical contractor willing to take them on.
The nature of electrical contracting has change dramatically with many established firms becoming nothing more than management teams tendering for work on the finest of margins. There is no room for nursemaiding and thus the opportunity for a placement for the apprentice is becoming increasingly slim.
Fixing it? Well there is a clear case for government policy on procurement being honed to ensure that organisations tendering for public works have well-defined apprenticeship strategies in place. I accept that is easier said than done!
At the more academic end there is a related problem, and I'm thinking of electronics and equipment procurement, once upon a time (cold war mentality, big engineering contracts running over years) graduates arrived, all knowing in theory but often more than a bit impractical, and could be the 'gopher' to a big job, which had the slack to carry someone senior doing what would now be defined as 'mentoring' and the next wave the ones being mentored, and some time could be spent at the black or white board, depending on the era, explaining the whys and wherefores of the thing we are doing. The junior engineer then got to design the power supply, and help in the review and layout of the bigger parts, steered as required to things designed by more experienced hands (the 'design authority(ies)). This led after a few such projects to a well rounded engineer and a (surprising number of otherwise solid designs with power supply issues in the A model, but that is a small price to pay).
Nowadays the oldsters appear too expensive, so in some cases the graduates are given a suit and a card that says 'consultant' and launched/lunched at the customers with almost no preparation. The results are projects and plans that from the outset fail to meet the time line, budget and in some cases are not even what was really asked for. (Govt IT scheme anyone ?)
The saving grace is that the fresh graduate managers are also equally ill prepared, so are not likely to spot the problem immediately, and there is a lot of work for those that can in re-organising things that been have started at half cock to keep the oldsters from redundancy.
At some point we will realise that you get what you pay for but there are a lot of smoke and mirror operations.
There is also not really any such thing as 'right first time' design if you think there is, the thing you are doing is not really novel, but that is a different topic for a moan...
Mike's point: whatever happened to sandwich courses? I suppose that they must have died out with tuition fees.
Andy's point: never mind 16 - 17 year olds; what about 8 - 10 year olds? I have carried a knife since then, but we had to be careful in junior school not to be found using them, except of course when doing what was known as handicraft.
I do wonder whether young folk have the same curiosity that I have always had about how things work; and if they don't work, how to fix them. Part of the problem may the the modern trend to replace rather than repair. If good apprenticeships are hard to find, can the same be said of good apprentices?
The armed forces still train in-house so plenty of good engineering apprenticeships there.
For the last apprentice the government was supposed to give me a £1500 or so to take one on if they were less than 18. I could also pay them slave wages of like £100 per week or something silly.
I duly did take on an apprentice - a 16 year old - at £15000 per year starting wages and a 4 day week with one day at college, but the fine print said that once the money ran out (the £1500 part), it ran out - and apparently it had run out even before I got that apprentice.
For my latest apprentice (he's 28), I have to pay the college £600 per year. (And hes on £21000 basic plus benefits such as pensions sick days, holidays, bank holidays and a day off per week to go to school...... etc etc) I could - in theory have taken on two less than 18 years old for this cost.
I assume the college applies to government for the £9000 per year for him on top of that but I don't know.
Its not really an incentive to take on and train new people into the industry is it?
Luckily this aversion to sharp tools and apprenticeships hasn't't reached the mainland yet. My grandchildren all use various sharp tools at school (and kindergarten). At 8 years old one was required to have a Swiss Army penknife to take on a school trip. This chair was made by my 15 year old granddaughter at school. It is mostly doweled together and the seat part can be removed and slid into the back so it is flat for storage.
As I have mentioned before our neighbor's daughter (17-18 at the time) wanted to use my bench drill to make some parts for her final year project. She came with her own safety goggles, her hair tied back and insisted on sweeping up afterwards so had obviously been well taught at school. She is now apprenticed as a carpenter/kitchen fitter with a local firm.
A large number of people here (Switzerland) chose the apprenticeship route due to the flexibility it offers. You can start at almost any age and continue to build on the basic training throughout your career. The apprentices are considered to be useful and are not just classed as cheap labor. My employer recruits 10-15 apprentices per year spread across various technical and commercial positions.
