Opening up apprenticeships

Jason Holt's government-commissioned review of apprenticeships has left us with plenty of food for thought. Apprenticeships are misunderstood, inaccessible and confused by a plethora of organisations willing to give – sometimes conflicting – advice, Holt concluded. The report has highlighted that we need to make businesses more aware of the support that we can offer to make taking on apprentices much easier. Most apprenticeships in this country are offered by smaller businesses – 80% of apprentices in the UK are currently employed by businesses with fewer than 200 employees. However, we know there are many more that are missing out on these opportunities. Almost 99% of businesses in the UK are SMEs, but only around 10% of them currently employ apprentices. The National Apprenticeship Service (NAS) has a huge opportunity to match together a whole new cohort of businesses and apprentices by bringing them together using our apprenticeship vacancies online system. This enables businesses to advertise their apprenticeship job opportunities for free and find potential candidates who match their criteria. One of the key issues the Holt review highlighted is that too few businesses know about NAS services. This was a conscious decision taken at our launch three years ago, to promote the apprenticeship brand rather than our organisation. We recognise that now is the time to promote our services, too. As a result we will be enhancing our marketing activity aimed at smaller businesses, including publishing a simple guide to show exactly what help is available to access apprenticeships. We have already started to implement changes, such as making it easier for more SMEs that recruit young apprentices aged 16 to 24 to access the £1,500 Apprenticeship Grant available to them. There will now be a single (rather than staged) £1,500 payment and the grant will now be available for up to 10 apprentices per employer. We also recently established a dedicated small business team to provide responsive help to smaller businesses. Continuous improvement is something we always strive for and the Holt review offers us some very practical ideas we can take forward.