Apprenticeship challenge

Will the promotion of vocational training threaten the supply of university students? asks Alison Goddard.

Today’s newspapers are full of politicians arguing that they provide the best vocational routes for young people to find work. The BBC reports that Ed Miliband, leader of the Labour party, says he would boost the number of apprenticeships by 80,000 but that Grant Shapps, chairman of the Conservative party, reckons that his party would fund three million apprenticeships. The Financial Times says that the Labour scheme would cost £44 million; the Daily Telegraph says it would be available to all school-leavers who gained the equivalent of two A-levels; and the Independent says that Mr Miliband wants the number of people who take up apprenticeships to match the number who accept university places.

There is clearly some confusion here. More than 500,000 people entered higher education in the autumn of 2014. Some 38 per cent of youngsters achieve two A-levels, which rises to 58 per cent when equivalent qualifications are included. The number of school-leavers is falling. Any government struggles to find mechanisms to force employers to invest in training. And despite the rhetoric that high tuition fees in England will turn people away from higher education, the reality appears to be that students feel they cannot afford not to go to university: record numbers have enrolled. Perhaps Mary Curnock Cook, chief executive of the Universities and Colleges Admissions Service, had the best advice when she wrote, in an article available only to full subscribers to HE, that higher education strategists will want to keep a watchful eye on the impact of the current reforms on participation in A-levels, as well as engaging more energetically in the proposed reforms to vocational qualifications offered in secondary education.