Earlier this month the Scottish Government announced 7,800 new Modern Apprenticeship places for Scotland. This sounds good for employers and trainees alike but there are huge gaps in the reality of the situation, which are obviously not apparent to the Scottish Government, Labour politicians who have put great emphasis on increased numbers of MA’s and the media observers.

Modern Apprenticeships are for young people (and now Adult apprenticeships) who are EMPLOYED!!  Where are we going to find an additional 7,800 new jobs?

In addition to the Modern Apprenticeship madness, the Leader of Glasgow City Council has pledged an offer of a MA place to all school leavers who fail to secure progression to education or employment – again, where is he going to find the companies which will employ the 1,000’s of young people on the MA’s?

If we look at the figures behind the Modern Apprenticeship programme we find some very perplexing statistics. Look at just 4 or 5 of the 110 framework categories from 2009 Skills Development Scotland’s own figures;

Industry                   Starts     In Trng   Achieved    £ per MA
Construction            2,366       7,644       54%         £7,500
Engineering             1,340        3,627       68%        £9,000
Car Mechanics           806        2,269       57%         £7,500

The above 3 framework areas account for 42% of the total MA places started, of those young people in MA training 51% are on these 3 vocational areas above.

Of the 4512 MA places started in the 3 framework areas, only 82 are female.
13,540 young people are currently on training in Construction, Engineering and Car Mechanics, which is 51% of the total of ALL MA’s in Scotland – and of the 13,540 places only 191 are female.

Why are we additionally funding a programme, which averages 57% achievement for these 3 vocational areas? Are there jobs available for 13,540 young people in these industries? What happens to the 43% who do not complete their MA? Is it cost effective to pay £7,500 - £9,000 per person for this training?

Another example from SDS statistics is a comparison between 2 other smaller vocational areas.

Industry                                Starts   In Trng   Achieved    £ per MA
Sports Performance Football      127      222        7%        £5,500
Dental Nursing                          105      229      82%        £6,000

There are no females on the Sports Performance Football programme and the achievement level for this MA is 7% - maybe we would not find this so unreasonable if the results filtered through to the performance of the National Team!!!
In Dental Nursing, there was 1 male on the programme but the achievement level was 82% - value for money.

The conclusion I have to reach is that we are funding policies which were fine in decades past when employers wanted financial support in training young apprentices but today I find that they want trainees who are employable first and who can be trained on the job secondly – not the other way around.

Would we not be better assigning funding on this scale to securing basic employability skills for all our young people in order that they can enter employment, sustain the job and then progress onto Modern Apprenticeships, further education and industry specific training courses?

This entry was posted on Monday, August 24th, 2009 at 12:19 pm and is filed under General. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.