The Association of Employment and Learning Providers is going to write to apprenticeships and skills minister Gillian Keegan over concerns that tens of thousands of apprentices are currently held back from finishing their assessments.
AELP's letter will also raise concerns over changes to apprenticeships funding. In her weekly newsletter today, AELP managing director Jane Hickie said today that the government “should shift its position on the delivery of adapted functional skills assessments as soon as possible and we should get back to calculated results for FSQs because this is now causing a huge backlog for apprentices waiting for their endpoint assessment”.
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She added: “We should be doing what’s right for the learner during this pandemic and being able to complete one’s apprenticeship programme is not just vital for the individual, but also in the wider economic interest.”
Ms Hickie said proposed changes to apprenticeship funding bands, which the Institute for Apprenticeships and Technical Education (IfATE) is consulting on, were causing “enormous angst among providers”.
“We were hearing, for example, that training electrical apprentices up to level 4 may become simply unviable. How ridiculous is that, when freedom of movement is about to end? We will have to adjust the saying, ‘you can’t find an electrician these days for love or (a very large amount of) money’.”
AELP had been in discussions with senior officials on both the FSQ and funding band model, she said, “but we will now be writing to Gillian Keegan asking her to bang heads together and sort out these matters as soon as possible”.