How Can A Bold Vision For Apprenticeships Kick-Start The Recovery And Rebalance Our Approach To Education Once And For All?

How Can A Bold Vision For Apprenticeships Kick-Start The Recovery And Rebalance Our Approach To Education Once And For All?

Apprenticeships change lives. They combine a real job with training so that people can earn while they learn. They span a huge range of sectors – not just the important traditional heartlands of engineering and manufacturing, but finance, software design and the green economy, too.

They have extraordinary returns for all involved: apprentices go on to have excellent employment prospects, businesses benefit from new expertise, and every £1 invested in level 3 apprenticeships brings a £28 return to the wider economy. They’re about as close to a win-win as it gets. And yet we have not yet realised their enormous transformative potential.

Our ‘Trade Secrets’ report, published in 2020, found that:

• The number of apprenticeships dropped by a quarter between 2014/15 and 2018/19.
• Individuals aged under 19 from the most disadvantaged areas are five times less likely to do a degree-level apprenticeship than those from the most advantaged areas.
• As of January 2020, non-levy payers lacked the resources to meet the training costs of around 85,000 apprenticeships.
• CSJ/YouGov polling shows that 17 per cent of levy-paying employers in England used the apprenticeship levy to rebadge existing training in the year prior to being surveyed.

It is in this context that the CSJ will discuss how a bold vision for apprenticeships can kick-start the recovery and rebalance our approach to education.

Speakers