Concerns are growing that the process of converting 140 existing construction apprenticeship occupations into the new employer-led formats demanded by the Richard Review is proving painfully slow and cumbersome.
In September 2017, government funding for existing apprenticeships will cease, with new recruits from that date only funded to follow the new style, employer-backed courses.
Last week, Construction Manager reported that the first industry Trailblazer, for construction assembly technicians, had been approved by skills minister Nick Boles.
This means that BIS has approved the wording of a concise two-page document describing the job role of a construction assembly technician, and that the Construction Trailblazer Group – a steeering group of industry contractors chaired by Laing O’Rourke’s Alison Lamplough – can now progress to discussing the content and qualification requirements with training providers.
But it’s now emerged that only one construction assembly technician pathway has been approved, when an additional two were originally foreseen by the employers’ steering group, making the apprenticeship much narrower than the employers wanted.
In addition, six standards for the Trailblazer apprenticeship in wood trades have all been rejected by a panel chaired by BIS ministers and must now be re-worked.
And although three further Trailblazer occupations are progressing in Round 3 of the programme – for digital engineers (BIM), hire desk controllers and piling technicians – it’s been revealed that industry employers submitted seven bids to develop new apprenticeships.
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However, a third apprenticeship framework in construction management – run in parallel to the Trailblazer programme by Balfour Beatty without being formally part of it – has gained approval by BIS and is progressing to discussions with universities and colleges.
The fear is that BIS has set up a system that requires considerable input from construction employers, but then allows their work to be rejected by a ministerial panel, on the advice of BIS civil servants with no construction expertise.
In addition, there is concern that the Trailblazer model does not include a role for third party organisations such as CITB to manage the development process and then oversee and update the resulting apprenticeship frameworks in the future.
There has apparently been discussion of a greater intermediary role for the UK Commission for Employment and Skills in identifying occupations where there’s strong employer demand for an updated apprenticeship framework.
But Nick Gooderson, head of education and research, told Construction Manager: “The employers put a lot of effort in, and that’s just to develop an apprenticeship framework for one occupation, but what about the rest? And who will contribute to the cost of updating it in the future? All that work was previously done by the Sector Skills Councils with government funding.”
“CITB is there for a reason – it has labour market intelligence through the Construction Skills Network, and it could take on the role of managing the whole end to end process.”
There are also uncertainties about what might happen to the Richard Review reforms and Trailblazer programme after the General Election, with Labour saying only that it supports the broad principle of the “employer-led” reforms.
This concept of trailblazers will be a total failure Also it will be out of step with other world apprenticeship schemes.
The advantage of the trailblazer apprenticeships when approved is that they are directly owned by the employers.
But CITB’s record on apprenticeships has not been great lately. Last year 7500 apprenticeships completed their apprenticeships and for an organisation with 1400 people that works out at 5 apprentices per member of staff. Not exactly world class. So there is nothing wrong in trying to do things another way. The result cannot be any worse.
The more models the better and as long as they all have parity of esteem then the only winners will be the apprentices and the industry.
‘The fear is that BIS has set up a system that requires considerable input from construction employers, but then allows their work to be rejected by a ministerial panel, on the advice of BIS civil servants with no construction expertise.’
From my days working as a field officer within CITB during the YTS Apprentice years, the old Manpower Services Commission (prior to it becoming a network of 72 Training & Enterprise Councils who were replaced by the Learning & Skills Councils who were replaced by the Skills Funding Agency) also had a huge network of advisors and monitors who also had no background, experience or qualifications to pass judgement on construction training. And yet they did. This is what government does it seems: spend its money on high visibility control mechanisms and interventions which don’t add value or move anything forward, but do keep a lot of civil servants busy!