Been to university? No apprenticeship for you, argues SMF

There’s a lot to like in a new Social Market Foundation (SMF) report on the future of level 7 apprenticeships, which sees erstwhile head of now-defunct think tank EDSK Tom Richmond continuing his former outfit’s critical commentary on the apprenticeship system.

It’s neatly timed as well, landing on policymakers’ desks just as – you would hope – a final decision is being made on the future of level 7 courses. If you’ve not been keeping up, the government announced that “a significant number” of these would be removed from scope of levy funding.

While the devil will be in the (imminent) detail, the pushback has been firm from the sector, with a recent University Alliance-coordinated letter to the Treasury pointing out that levy receipts are already substantially higher than what’s spent on apprenticeships in England (plus what’s sent out in Barnett consequentials) – if Rachel Reeves fancied giving up that topslice, there is probably enough cash around to keep doing level 7 apprenticeships and fund the “foundation apprenticeships” at lower levels that Labour is keen on.

That said, until we have the detail on how much employers will be able to spend the levy on non-apprenticeship training in Labour’s new “growth and skills” re-working of the system, it’s hard to calculate with any certainty.

What the SMF report particularly homes in on is the number of apprenticeship starts from those with prior level 6 and level 7+ attainment (an undergraduate or postgraduate degree in almost all cases). This table, showing 2023–24 starts, is a useful contribution to the debate:

I’ve added in the percentages to highlight that this is particularly an “issue” for level 7 apprenticeships. Those against restrictions would point out that these qualifications are widely used in NHS trusts, for example – in this cases you’d likely often have someone with an undergraduate qualification in nursing, say, taking a postgraduate course in leadership. It might also reasonably be argued that level 6 attainment is really a prerequisite for any level 7 study.

The report’s recommendation is simply to ban anyone with a level 6 or above qualification from accessing levy-funded apprenticeships. The two sides of the debate are typically characterised by whether you think degree apprenticeships are being snaffled up by the middle class (a recent article on Wonkhe set out why this is an issue which varies depending on which subject area we’re talking about – it’s less likely to be the case in the health example above), or whether you think calls for apprenticeships to be better targeted at the disadvantaged are the other side of the same coin as calls for fewer disadvantaged students to waste their time at university, and that a bit of middle-class capture is good for the long-term prestige of the route.

Anyway, the elephant in the room in a lot of these arguments is about whether organisations should be able to spend levy funding on management-related programmes. The report proposes all of these should be turned into non-apprenticeship courses, though still funded through the growth and skills levy – but with co-payments from employers on a gradated scale.

At the heart of the reasoning behind picking this slightly arcane route to changing what training programmes are studied and by whom is the following assertion:

The Government would be wise to avoid a situation in which they (or Skills England) are seen to be hand-picking the specific Level 7 apprenticeship standards that will be funded in future because there is unlikely to be a process that could be considered fair and objective to all stakeholders in such a scenario.

Now we might point out that the proposed route of reclassifying various management and leadership apprenticeships as non-apprenticeship training would clearly be a form of “hand-picking.”

But the bigger question is why Skills England would be worried about been seen to pick winners – if anything, it seems very in keeping with its skills stewardship badging and theoretical join-up with an industrial strategy. Whether it will go down this route remains to be seen, but it’s likely the simplest way to make changes to levy eligibility. We should get answers soon enough.