Apprenticeships Go Up A Degree
The Government is to mark the next phase of its 2020 vision plan, first outlined in 2015, to continue to boost and enhance apprenticeships in England.
The next phase of the movement comes in early 2017, which is when an employer levy will begin, of those firms with a payroll of £3 million or more per year paying in 0.5% of that, to fund the targeted figure of 3 million apprentice places by 2020.
At the same time an independent body led by employers and business leaders will set up the Institute of Apprenticeships to monitor apprenticeship standards and raise apprenticeship quality, and help raise the status and desirability of apprenticeships.
In anticipating the surge of uptake from employers, Training providers have been advised to adapt and upgrade to the changes to Standards, funding and assessment and employer demand.
The Government’s publicity drive for the changes, also encompass the effort to change the public perception of apprenticeships, and that career success and satisfaction can be found without following the University path.
To put university degrees and apprenticeships on a similar platform level is one of the means of altering the public’s perception and with the plan to treble the number of apprenticeships by 2017, is also to give many the status of a university degree.
The push to allow access to universities for almost all in the 1980’s and ‘90’s has entrenched the established route of school to higher education to career, despite the apparent set back of mounting tuition fees resulting in post-graduates carrying a debt burden of £30,000 plus, shows little sign of running out of steam, which is why raising the awareness of the wealth of apprenticeship possibilities is so important.
The Government’s Get In, Go Far scheme is a push of a different sort, aimed not only at young people, but at impressing school teachers and advisers, through the establishment media channels of radio and TV, to the social media, along the path to including employers, to alter the mind-set approach, that a degree course should be considered, or in factual terms, be assumed, to be superior to an apprenticeship.
Vocational training in many countries is perceived to be equally as beneficial as spending three or four or more years on further education, and this is the ambition of the Government, having virtually handed higher education to private finance, to bring industry and apprenticeships closer and more profitably entwined.