Governments across the world - from the US to France and China - are looking to Britain’s reformed apprenticeship system for ideas about how to kick-start their own skills revolution.
The skills sector still lags behind other parts of the education system in terms of its export value, with the latest figures showing that further education accounts for only 2 per cent of the UK’s total educational exports - a figure that fell by almost two-thirds in the five years to 2015. FE is dwarfed by higher education, which accounts for 67 per cent of the total.
But the founder of the Transatlantic Apprenticeship Exchange Forum (TAEF), Tom Bewick, said the UK’s flexible labour market and its proliferation of independent training providers - or “intermediary workforce players”, as they are known in the US - made the UK more attractive in many respects than, for example, Germany.
‘Ripe for exporting’
“The UK sector does not realise the expertise they have that is ripe for exporting, whether it’s end-point assessments or e-portfolios, which could be exported abroad, particularly as businesses in the US are used to buying in ‘business solutions’,” he said.
TAEF works with just shy of a dozen UK training providers, helping them to export elements of their apprenticeships provision.
“You have to step out of your own system to evaluate it and see both its strengths and its weaknesses,” said Bewick. Despite apprenticeships going through a “challenging time” with the introduction of the levy last April and the subsequent dramatic fall in apprenticeship starts, he said he believed Britain was still well placed to achieve a high percentage of young people taking the “learn and earn” route.
‘Sweet spot’
Bewick said degree apprenticeships were going to be the “sweet spot” for the American market because having a degree is “even more pervasive over here”.
It is not just America that is looking to the UK’s apprenticeship system. In 2013, the Chinese Ministry of Education chose Britain as a country to emulate, as part of an apprenticeship piloting programme. This included a college in Shanghai using UK apprenticeship frameworks and curriculums.
On a recent visit to Shanghai, as part of preparation for the 2021 WorldSkills competition, Dr Neil Bentley, chief executive of WorldSkills UK, said it was clear from conversations with officials that China was very interested in learning from the UK’s education and training system. “This is particularly around our apprenticeship standards, but also crucially how we encourage and enable creative approaches to thinking across all industries,” he said.
Countries looking at UK model
Euan Blair, chief executive of WhiteHat - a tech start-up that helps link young people with apprenticeship opportunities - stated a number of countries were looking at the UK model and exploring the launch of something similar.
Blair said: “We’ve been in regular contact with the French embassy and a delegation of government officials from Belgium is attending a roundtable at our offices next month.”
He added that countries as wide-ranging as South Africa and Malaysia were exploring how to use apprenticeships more effectively.
Apprenticeships and skills minister Anne Milton said: “Apprenticeships are not only giving employers the skills they need to grow, they are also giving people a real alternative to traditional academic study, so they can benefit from the excellent career prospects that they offer.”
This is an edited version of an article in the 16 March edition of Tes. Subscribers can read the full story here. To subscribe, click here. To download the digital edition, Android users can click here and iOS users can click here. Tes magazine is available at all good newsagents
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