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It’s an F grade for Keegan over nation’s apprenticeship failings

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ANDREW FISHER, pictured right, explains how apprenticeships can be a valuable means of recruitment for some employers while offering some pay to trainees, but that the Education Minister’s dabbling with ‘apprentice teachers’ looks like another ‘fail’ by this Government

This week is National Apprenticeships Week: a chance to celebrate the opportunity that workers have to earn while they learn.

I say “earn”, but although many employers do pay a real wage, the national minimum wage rate for apprentices is a measly £5.28 per hour. Teenagers doing babysitting rightly charge more than that! I was earning more than that while a university student working in a call centre in the late 1990s.

From April 1 this year, the apprentice rate rises to £6.40 per hour, but that is still just £224 for someone working a 35-hour week, and is still just 60% of the full national minimum wage.

It may be that many young people struggling to get by, or in households finding it hard to make ends meet, are turning against low-paid apprenticeships. Citizens Advice has this week warned that 5million people in this country are in “negative budget” – that is they don’t have enough coming in to cover their expenses.

F off: Tory Education Secretary Gillian Keegan has a dubious agenda for teacher training

Against a backdrop of rising unemployment (and youth unemployment is rising most sharply), new apprenticeship starts in England are down by 35% since 2011-2012.

Gillian Keegan, the Secretary of State for Education, has claimed this week, “We have revolutionised our apprenticeship system since 2010”. Even in a script for Yes, Minister, Sir Humphrey might have politely described that, in the context of a fall in numbers of more than one-third as “a bold claim, minister”. Less diplomatic types might call it delusional.

In Croydon, the number of apprenticeships is down 30% over the same period. In Croydon Central and Croydon North constituencies (the numbers are given by current parliamentary seats), there has been a sharper drop, more in line with the average in England.

Croydon’s stats are far worse, however, than the London average, which is down 23%. At least we can console ourselves that such declines are not as bad as in the North East, where apprenticeship starts have plummeted by more than 50% since 2011.

Croydon College offers a range of apprenticeships.

And for National Apprenticeship Week, Croydon College is hosting an Apprenticeship Information Session tonight (from 5pm-7pm), offering an opportunity to find out about the opportunities available. Register online here: https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/apprenticeship-information-session-tickets-768901243317?aff=oddtdtcreator

Across the country, there is a massive shortage of skilled workers across a range of professions, from nurses to care workers, from engineers to carpenters. Apprenticeships could provide one avenue for plugging those gaps, with subsidised places offered to unemployed young people so that Britain develops the skills its businesses need.

Instead, we leave people languishing on poverty-level benefits rather than learning on the job.

The Conservatives, having overseen a 35% drop in apprenticeships over the last 12 years, have a cunning wheeze. From September, they are launching a new teaching apprenticeship.

Hands up if you could do a better job than Gillian Keegan…: teacher recruitment has been dire under the Tories

For each of the last three years, the Government has failed to hit its teacher recruitment target, with only 59% of teachers needed recruited last year.

So forgive me if I’m sceptical about the motivations behind this move to “open up the profession to more people”, as Keegan described it.

The Institute for Fiscal Studies has calculated that in real terms the pay of an experienced teacher has fallen by up to £6,600 since 2010 – that’s more than £500 per month. No wonder teachers are leaving the profession, while fewer graduates are chooising teaching as a career.

The National Education Union, which represents more than 400,000 teachers said: “Apprenticeships give people a chance to build skills and careers, and are a vital part of our education system.

“But this is not the way to go about meeting the challenges of recruitment into teaching. Teachers should be graduates.

“It is essential that professional standards are maintained, and that new entrants to the profession are fully qualified before they embark on the early career stage of their practice. The apprenticeship scheme puts those standards at risk, placing underqualified and inexperienced teachers into classrooms.

“It is not fair on pupils, or apprentice teachers.”

Skip through Keegan’s self-congratulatory guff and you find that her latest wheeze is just “a pilot scheme working with a small number of schools and teacher training providers to fund up to 150 apprentices to work in secondary schools to teach maths”.

Fewer than 150 apprentice teachers across the whole of England is a drop in the ocean. Teacher vacancies are at their highest level on record (double the level of two years ago). Perhaps it’s Keegan (John Moores University and the London Business School) who needs to get some skills for life? She could well be out of a job at the next election…

The lasting impression from Keegan’s parliamentary career is likely to be her off-camera, on-mic boast that she has done “a fucking good job”, as crumbling schools were being forced to close at the start of the autumn term.

Perhaps Keegan should look to the Metropolitan Police for a better model for apprenticeships and successful recruitment. Since it launched in January 2021, the Met boasts that 2,000 officers have joined their Police Constable Degree Apprenticeship. It allows officers, with a starting salary of £36,775, to work towards a fully funded degree in Professional Policing Practice.

That’s a good deal better than the myriad of poorly paid apprenticeships, underfunded pilot schemes and falling apprenticeship numbers overall. It’s perhaps no surprise that , while teacher recruitment is down, police recruitment targets have been met.

So it’s an F grade for the Education Secretary this National Apprenticeships Week.

Last night, I joined Sky News’ Sophy Ridge on Politics Hub. As I was on, news broke of Labour dumping its £28billion Green Prosperity Plan. It’s a really bad move.

It’s bad for the country, the environment, for people’s energy bills and it’s bad for our energy security, too, at a time when we need to be less reliant on imports from increasingly unstable regions of the world.

Andrew Fisher’s recent columns:

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