Apprenticeship Week sees call for more funding

In a post-Brexit landscape, does the UK need to do more to encourage apprenticeships?

As National Apprenticeship Week begins across England, the government is being asked to improve funding for apprenticeships.

According to the Federation of Small Businesses (FSB), the current version of the apprenticeship levy is not doing its job of supporting smaller firms to access training for new recruits.

Counterintuitively, it appears to have had the effect of reducing vocational training for smaller employers.

After the levy was introduced in 2017 there was a fall in entry-level apprenticeships of 24 per cent. The number of apprenticeships has continued to fall.

In contrast, larger employers are using more of the levy fund than originally anticipated and for higher-level apprenticeships.

The levy has to be paid by businesses with an annual wage bill of £3m or more and is at a rate of 0.5 per cent on their payroll. The money is collected into a pool from which employers can then extract cash to pay for qualifying training schemes.

With the Budget due on 11 March 2020, the FSB and other employer groups are hoping the Chancellor will introduce new measures to boost apprenticeships.

This was echoed by the British Chambers of Commerce which says seven in ten companies had reported recruitment difficulties during the final three months of last year, adding that there is a “critical skills deficit across the UK workforce”.