“Ladder of opportunity”, “Get in, go far”. The push for social mobility is behind much of the rhetoric emanating from the Department for Education in relation to apprenticeships. As apprenticeships and skills minister Robert Halfon put it back in November: “They will upskill the nation and give millions, including some of the most disadvantaged, a ladder of opportunity to high-quality jobs.”
Spoiler alert: you’ll hear a lot more about ladders during National Apprenticeship Week. As a means of explaining social mobility, it’s a useful metaphor.
However, it’s also a simplistic one. Is the implicit assumption - apprenticeships help people from all kinds of backgrounds into work - one we can trust? To some extent, yes: hundreds of thousands of people of all ages have completed apprenticeships in recent years, and plenty are in fulfilling careers. But who are the people who have been gaining the most?
Groundbreaking research by Professor Peter Urwin suggests that, typically, apprentices come from less disadvantaged backgrounds than learners taking other FE courses - and, in the case of 16-18 apprentices at level 3, they tend to be “significantly more advantaged” than the population as a whole.
This isn’t an issue on which blame can be attached to one political party
The problem is broader than poverty, too. While the proportion of FE learners who have learning difficulties or disabilities has risen steadily over the past six years to 17 per cent, this hasn’t been mirrored in apprenticeships: the proportion of participants with learning difficulties or disabilities decreased to 8.6 per cent by 2014-15.
This isn’t an issue on which blame can be attached to one political party; in the decade that the study covered, Labour, the Liberal Democrats and the Conservatives all had a hand in government.
And while it’s important to question the extent to which apprenticeships have been a tool for social mobility thus far, that’s not to say they can’t be. The launch of the Apprenticeship Diversity Champions Network this week was positive. But there’s plenty more work to be done. And Professor Urwin’s research is a reminder that, to support the hardest-to-reach learners, we need other qualifications and routes to help them climb on to the ladder in the first place.
@stephenexley
