Cautious welcome for chancellor’s measures to streamline apprenticeship system

Experts have welcomed a commitment in the chancellor’s spring statement to make money available for smaller employers to take on apprentices – at the same time as a consultation into the extension of the IR35 tax rules into the private sector was confirmed.

In his speech yesterday (13 March), Philip Hammond said the education secretary would release up to £80m to support small businesses to employ an apprentice, after admitting that the current system was challenging for such firms.

“Small enterprises with fewer than 50 people employ some 48 percent of all private sector workers,” said Geraint Johnes, professor of economics at Lancaster University Management School and research director at The Work Foundation.

“So they offer a significant engine for employment creation, and facilitating the adoption of apprenticeships in this area is likely to prove fruitful.”

The apprenticeship levy, which was introduced last April, has been met with criticism from some employers. In February, it was described as “woefully inadequate” at a government select committee hearing.

The levy, which has been besieged by a lack of understanding and evidence of falling apprentice numbers, is paid by larger employers with pay bills exceeding £3m. These firms set up an account with the National Apprenticeship Service through which they can access funds.

Johnes believes that one of the reasons smaller firms have struggled to utilize the funding opportunities for apprenticeships is that they will not automatically have an account with the service, which has limited their use of apprentices.

“The extra support [announced by Hammond] implies a transfer of resource from larger to smaller firms, but larger employers will continue to benefit directly from the apprenticeship training when the smaller firms are in their supply chains,” said Johnes.

The Federation of Small Businesses welcomed the promise of more funding. National chairman Mike Cherry said: “It’s good to see £80m of much-needed dedicated funding for small firms that are keen to take on an apprentice. Small businesses are key to delivering the government’s target of three million new apprenticeships by 2020.”

Despite this welcome, some were disappointed that the government did not go further to reform the levy.

Elaine Gibson, education director at the Chartered Institute of Payroll Professionals, said: “While access to more funding will be useful to businesses, we would like to see wider training opportunities being included through the levy. This would really benefit small businesses that could strengthen the skills and knowledge of their employees through funded opportunities that they may not be able to afford any other way.”

The call mirrors findings from the CIPD’s research into the impact of the apprenticeship levy, which called for the government to transform the levy into a training provision.

Hammond also took other skills and training-related steps, including making £50m available to help employers prepare for the rollout of ‘T-Level’ work placements, and highlighting that the construction skills fund will open for bids to fund up to 20 ‘construction skills villages’ next month.

Launching a consultation on improving the way the tax system supports self-funded training by employees and the self-employed, Hammond’s announcement that the government could extend the existing tax relief available for self-funded work-related training by employees and the self-employed was cautiously received.

Stephen Herring, head of the taxation at the Institute of Directors, said: “We welcome the government’s acknowledgment in the chancellor’s spring statement that a broader, simpler, compliance-friendly tax relief to encourage individuals to undertake training that will directly benefit the UK economy is necessary.

“Hopefully, the outcome of the consultation will provide a sufficiently generous but focused new tax relief for those individuals who do not already benefit from courses provided by their employers.”

Hammond’s written ministerial statement confirmed that a consultation into off-payroll working in the private sector would be launched in the coming months to consider how to tackle non-compliance in this area, following the experiences of the public sector. The announcement appears to confirm industry belief that the IR35 may be extended to the private sector.

“While the written ministerial statement did confirm that a consultation on off-payroll working in the private sector will be launched ‘in the coming months’, there are still no firm timelines attached to this,” said Samantha Hurley, operations director at the Association of Professional Staffing Companies, which opposed the move to extend IR35 changes to the private sector.

With no new policy announcements made in the statement, Steven Cameron, pensions director at Aegon, said it was disappointing not to have heard more on other key policy areas.

“While automatic enrolment means nine million extra employees are saving for their retirement through workplace pensions, the self-employed are excluded,” said Cameron.

“With the chancellor saying the Conservatives are the champions for small businesses, we need new policies to stop the self-employed becoming second-class citizens in retirement.”

Despite the lack of new policy statements, the coming tax year will bring in several previously announced changes that affect employers, including rises in auto-enrolment minimum contributions, an increase to the pension lifetime allowance, changes to tax bands and changes to income tax rates for those in Scotland.

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National Apprenticeship Week may be over – but the work continues

For a young person, there’s nothing more powerful and persuasive than hearing from their peers about how apprenticeships work, writes Sue Husband.

As I look back on last week, I’m thrilled that so many people who are passionate about apprenticeships came together to celebrate how apprenticeships work for the eleventh National Apprenticeship Week 2018 (NAW).

University should no longer be the default next step. With more high-quality apprenticeships on offer than ever before, apprenticeships are being increasingly recognized by young people, their parents, employers, and schools as an alternative way to progress in a great career. The opportunities offered by apprenticeships are growing all the time, but there’s still more we can do to raise awareness of the benefits apprenticeships can bring to all.

For a young person, there’s nothing more powerful and persuasive than hearing from their peers about how apprenticeships work. That’s why this NAW, we wanted to give thousands of young people the opportunity to hear first-hand from current and former apprentices. To reach more people than ever before, we targeted apprentices, former apprentices and schools and stakeholders across the country and asked them to come together to take part in our 10,000 talks movement – 10kTalks – and help inspire the next generation of apprentices.

I am delighted to announce that we exceeded our target three times over. More than 300 schools joined us in the movement and helped us reach over 33,500 people with stories of how apprenticeships offer a career path that can take young people to the top.

The quest continues

Although NAW 2018 is now over, the quest to promote apprenticeships continues. Teachers, employers and apprentices should be incredibly proud of England’s thriving apprenticeship culture and we need to continue working together to ensure that apprenticeships and apprentices have the bright future they deserve. Beyond National Apprenticeship Week, schools can still sign-up to arrange talks for their students from inspiring apprentices, and access bespoke resource packages.

We want to see a future where more parents are confident in and supportive of their child’s decision to do an apprenticeship, because they know apprenticeships work. We also want more teachers to encourage all young people to consider an apprenticeship as a route to an exciting career. During NAW, almost 130 schools hosted teacher-to-teacher talks, reaching over 2,300 educators. Teachers ran sessions with their colleagues to spread the apprenticeship message and equip more people with the tools to inform students of the diversity of apprenticeships on offer. Whether it be a level 2 apprenticeship in butchery or a degree apprenticeship in aeronautical engineering, we want more people to be aware of the variety of opportunities out there.

Equally, more and more employers are recognising that apprenticeships are a fantastic way to develop their workforce and grow their own talent. During NAW, students were inspired by top employers and their apprentices at companies including Capgemini, IBM, JP Morgan Unilever, and Microsoft through the National Apprenticeship Service Live video series.

We know there is still more work to do. Yet, the unprecedented success of the 10kTalks movement shows there is a significant appetite for us to engage with even more schools, and together we can help inspire many more students to consider an apprenticeship. With all of us continuing to champion apprenticeships, we are confident of a bright future.

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Businesses can use apprenticeship levy funds to invest in executives’ MBAs, government confirms

‘Rebadging’ of training under scrutiny as Deloitte says almost half its graduates are now undertaking apprenticeships.

The way businesses use the apprenticeship levy has come under further scrutiny after the government approved a £18,000 funding allocation for higher-level skills, MBAs and degree apprenticeships.

Skills minister Anne Milton gave final approval for the funding band – which can be used by employers that have had higher-level apprenticeship courses approved by the Department for Education – on 1 March, following an initial approval from the Institute for Apprenticeships in August 2017.

The move will prove controversial among commentators who have claimed ‘rebadging’ training for existing employees runs counter to the intentions of the levy. And People Management has also learned that one of the UK’s largest graduate employers has rebadged almost half its 2017 graduate intake as ‘apprentices’, allowing it to receive top-ups from the government for their training.

The apprenticeship levy applies to all UK businesses with an annual payroll bill of more than £3m. Since April 2017, they must pay a levy of 0.5 percent into a digital account, recouped in training vouchers that are intended to fill skills gaps and provide new routes into the workplace. A target of three million apprenticeship starts by 2020 has been set by the government, and today marks the start of National Apprenticeship Week, which will bring a renewed focus on the topic.

However, an early assessment report published by the CIPD in January revealed that more than a third of eligible organizations use or plan to use the levy to fund management or leadership training for existing employees. And 46 percent said they would seek to rebadge graduate-level schemes rather than investing in apprenticeship starts.

Professional services giant Deloitte has now confirmed that it has transferred “just over 40 percent” of its 2017 graduate intake into an accountancy/taxation professional Level 7 apprenticeship scheme.

Emma Codd, managing partner for talent at Deloitte, said the apprenticeship levy was “designed to support and provide training for people starting their careers. Graduates on the programme will continue to be fully supported in gaining their professional qualifications. In addition, they will gain a Level 7 apprenticeship – master’s degree level – qualification.”

Expanding on the reasons for the December change to its graduate professional training scheme, the firm said its programmes were “continuously enhanced”.

Jeremy Stern, whose son joined Deloitte as a graduate trainee in September 2017, said he had concerns about the move. “In December, he and his cohort were told that they were now going to be put on a Level 7 apprenticeship course,” he told People Management.

“Nothing changes for them – just one extra piece of coursework is required, but Deloitte is able to obtain significant funds from the government for people they already employed, who they were already going to train and for whom there is no difference in the outcome.

“Hundreds of recruits are now classified as apprentices. Deloitte was heavily involved in planning the apprentice scheme with the government.”

Codd added that Deloitte believed the apprenticeship route “provides additional structure to our existing graduate programmes”, with “more emphasis” on skills and behaviors development, and better “support and pastoral care, through regular coaching provided by a combination of Deloitte personnel and our chosen training providers”.

Codd said Deloitte had set up “a very successful Level 4 BrightStart Higher Apprenticeship, developed over the past decade” and it now “offers 370 places to school leavers. We are very proud of this programme and offering the Level 7 accountancy apprenticeship route is the next step.”

Lizzie Crowley, a skills adviser at the CIPD, told People Management that employers using the levy to rebadge existing training was a concern. “When the levy gets taken off employers, it becomes public money, and the scrutiny of how that money is being spent is incredibly important. If organizations are using it to subsidize existing activities, that’s a big question mark over the effectiveness of the programme,” she said.

“The levy was set up to get a boost in overall investment in training but, if it encourages businesses to rebadge existing routes, this adds no additional training to the UK economy and won’t drive up apprenticeship numbers.”

The Chartered Management Institute (CMI) last week announced that 900 executives from a range of organizations would commence a Senior Leader Master’s Degree Apprenticeship, centered on developing strategic leadership skills for employees moving into senior management roles.

Barclays Bank in the UK has also announced that it will be offering master’s apprenticeships to invest in the development of employees, including the alumni of its graduate programme, higher apprenticeship alumni, and longer-term employees.

The bank said: Age or social circumstances shouldn’t be a barrier or deciding factor in finding a viable route to employment, and reskilling can be achieved at any age. It’s time for employers to take action to ensure that there is always a way to work, no matter how old you are, and recognize the unique benefits that an older workforce brings.”

Petra Wilson, CMI director of strategy, described the government approval of MBA-level apprenticeship funding as a “breakthrough opportunity” to invest in management, as strong leaders were vital for tackling low productivity and the uncertainties caused by Brexit.

“Top teams need professional leadership skills to drive business performance and growth. It will also help to challenge snobbery around vocational routes, and can help demonstrate how these new apprenticeships really can provide pathways through to the top,” she said in a statement.

Tristan Garrick, the CMI’s head of PR and campaigns, told People Management that the move would allow organizations to invest in apprenticeships “at all levels”, with plenty of funding to go around. “Investing in apprenticeships is essential to closing the UK’s professional skills gap at every level – particularly in management. The apprenticeship levy has been designed to create a workforce with the world-class skills that employers need to thrive post-Brexit,” he said.

According to CMI research, nine in 10 managers are in favor of using the levy to fund apprenticeships for people of all ages.

“Not only does this provide a pathway for school leavers into professional careers, but it also enables them to learn on the job from qualified, experienced leaders,” said Garrick.

“More than half of management apprentices are under the age of 30 and, with £3bn in available funding every year from 2019, there will be plenty of opportunities for employers to invest in apprenticeships for the next generation of managers and leaders.”

However, experts have questioned the decision to invest levy funds in this way. Allocating apprenticeship funds to senior and executive-level training was challenged at last week’s House of Lords select committee hearing. Lord Forsyth of Drumlean asked if the levy was “really designed to send senior people on MBA courses? Perhaps I’m being naive, but I didn’t think that was its purpose.”

Crowley said that while investment in skills was needed at all levels in the UK, including training for senior members of staff, apprenticeships were not necessarily the correct route to achieve this. “Higher-level apprenticeships can take three to five years to complete, and involve a considerable amount of time off the job – about one day a week for your senior members to actually not do their day job,” she said.

“Even though there is more flexibility in apprenticeships in the standards and frameworks, they are still not necessarily the most effective tools for delivering that training to senior leaders – often short courses, bespoke and blended learning are the best routes for delivering those skills. Apprenticeships are meant to deliver on the technical skills the economy needs – those technical skills gaps are not about management and leadership issues.”

As National Apprenticeship Week got underway, the City of London Corporation celebrated breaking its apprenticeship target by achieving 102 starts in the last 12 months. And provider HIT Training last week scooped the national TES Further Education award for its ‘monumental’ hospitality and catering apprenticeships programme.

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Ministers to face House of Lords committee grilling over apprenticeship levy criticism and the future of student loans

Ministers are to face questions from the Lords Economics Committee this week on criticism over the apprenticeship levy, as well as the future of student loans.

The House of Lords Economics Affairs Committee will be grilling Anne Milton MP, minister of state for apprenticeships and skills, along with Sam Gyimah MP, minister of state for universities, science, research, and innovation, on Tuesday 13 March.

The Committee said among the questions it will put to the ministers include how fair is the current system loans system, and how biased towards university applications is the careers advice and information provided to pupils?

The apprenticeship levy will also be in the spotlight since its introduction has been followed by a decline in apprenticeships.

It was introduced last April and makes employers with an annual pay bill of over £3m contribute 0.5 percent of their payroll towards a levy, for the money then to be claimed back to fund training for new or current employees.

Members of the House of Lords have already criticised the levy, saying its first year in place had been “woefully inadequate” at a previous meeting of the Select Committee.

Employers have been critical of the levy, with the chair of the EEF manufacturer’s body saying last month its impact had been “disastrous”.

Dame Judith Hackitt said it was seen as just another tax on business, and that many firms have postponed apprenticeships due to the levy.

Figures in January revealed there was 114,000 apprenticeship starts for the first quarter of the 2017-18 academic year, compared with 155,600 for the same period the year before – a drop of more than a quarter.

Research from the London Chamber of Commerce and Industry (LCCI) meanwhile, found that more than a third of businesses are not aware of the government’s apprenticeship funding scheme.

The government had set the target of creating 3m apprentices by 2020, and the Department for Education has said previously that the levy will “boost economic productivity, increase the country’s skill base and give millions a step on the ladder of opportunity”.

The DfE has also said it may “take time” for organizations to adjust to the new funding system, so conclusions should not be drawn too swiftly from the initial figures on apprenticeship starts.

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Apprenticeship Levy…success or failure?

You would be forgiven for thinking that apprenticeships are doomed and that vocational learning is not the way forward if you believed all of the recent media headlines and hype.

A lot has been written and discussed in the papers and trade magazines about Department of Education states that show a 41% decline in the number of people starting apprenticeships between May and July 2017.

You would be forgiven for thinking that apprenticeships are doomed and that vocational learning is not the way forward if you believed all of the recent media headlines and hype.

A lot has been written and discussed in the papers and trade magazines about Department of Education states that show a 41% decline in the number of people starting apprenticeships between May and July 2017.

In most quarters the reduction has been attributed to the introduction of the Apprenticeship Levy, which insists that firms with a wage bill of £3m or higher pay a monthly fee into a pot for organizations to tap into if they are looking to employ apprentices.

Whilst all sectors knew it was coming, there still seems a massive discord with what the Government was trying to do and what it has actually achieved. Lack of communication? Training provider engagement or lack of it? Are firms wanting more flexibility with training?

These are all valid concerns and ones I tend to hear a lot when I’m talking to companies about their skills and competency needs and how they can best meet them.

However, is it fair to say that the levy is failing?

Recent research with engineering and manufacturing firms showed that 55% of respondents felt it was working. It’s not a resounding approval and there is obviously a lot of discontentment out there, but it is still positive.

Furthermore, just over a fifth of companies questioned said the change had encouraged them to take on more apprentices which have to be a good thing. Some of the anecdotal information featured in the report centered around poor communication, a lack of understanding and confusion with all of the new types of standards being introduced.

The latter was another bone of contention. Two-thirds of manufacturers clearly stated that they didn’t get the new Trailblazer Standards, with 87% of those indicating that content was a major stumbling block. This is very disappointing and probably reflects a wider issue in the way apprenticeships are delivered and training providers need to shoulder their share of the blame.

Too many are still caught up with the original apprenticeship framework and not supporting their clients to explore the benefits of Trailblazers, which should, in theory, deliver a more rounded and skilled person for your business.

So if it’s not purely a case of the levy not working, what has triggered the number of apprenticeships starts to take such a drastic fall? It’s difficult to pinpoint one specific reason and probably a combination of a number of ingredients.

The sector may have got a little blasé in thinking that all of the marketing hype around vocational learning would deliver the numbers, neglecting the hard work and engagement with young people that is so crucial in convincing them that engineering and manufacturing is the right career for them.

There is still a perception that industry isn’t a great career to go into and, whilst we are changing that, we need to do more to paint a picture of what modern day manufacturing is like.

It’s robotics, it’s CAD/CAM systems, it’s precision CNC machines, it’s playing a role in making sure F1 cars get faster, airplanes are lighter, people can walk again – all played out in bright factories. That’s the message we need to get across and we need schools, college and universities to join us in getting this message out there.

And the latter needs to be much more than just lip service. There has to be a real co-ordinated approach and nothing would please the sector more than for teachers to get involved with industry so they fully understand the opportunities that exist.

This isn’t a riposte to education. I see it as more a tri-party collaboration where everyone plays their part. The government with the right conditions and funding, education and training providers with the right engagement and manufacturers affording young people the same opportunity they had to complete a full-time apprenticeship.

At the moment this isn’t really happening, with only a third of the firms featured in the research happy to let their apprentice spend the first 18 months off-site. This has to change. The skills issue will only get more severe if we don’t have a co-ordinated approach to getting apprenticeships back on track.

Let’s ALL take responsibility and bridge that gap.

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Is the apprenticeship levy pricing young people out of training?

The CIPD’s Elizabeth Crowley, the CBI’s Neil Carberry, and EFF’s Verity Davidge discuss what the new funding model means for school leavers.

he official story, as told by Anne Milton in her conversation with Spotlight this week, is that while the number of people taking up apprenticeships fell off a cliff in 2017 – dropping by 61 percent in less than a year – the drop was mainly concentrated among lower-quality programmes.

The numbers of more advanced, higher-quality apprenticeships rose. In November, FE Week reported a “huge spike” in higher-level programmes funded by the apprenticeship levy, as courses at level four and above rose by over 400 percent.

This, says the government, is good news – more people are doing better apprenticeships.

But within this data is another story.

Supported by a range of anecdotal evidence from businesses, there is a growing concern that apprenticeship reform, particularly the funding mechanism, has reduced the number of apprenticeships available to school leavers in favor of management apprenticeships for people who have already been employed for some time.

Elizabeth Crowley, the skills adviser at the Chartered Institute of Professional Development, describes this as “a pre-existing challenge within the system.

Before the levy was introduced, two-thirds of apprenticeships went to existing employees. Only a small number actually went to new starters.

However, the levy, or rather the incentives in the levy, appear to us to have shifted that balance further.”

Crowley explains that the new funding model means the priority for employers is now to recoup their levy money efficiently.

“Employers are looking for ways re-badge existing training activities to be able to reclaim their levy money.”

In its research into the unintended consequences of the levy, the CIPD found that “46 percent of businesses were looking at ways to rebadge their existing training activity as apprenticeships, including leadership and management training.”

“Early indications from [the DfE’s] data show that we’ve hit the lowest point since 2009/10 for the number of young people getting an apprenticeship place,” says Crowley.

“The IFS has been quite clear that the changes in the incentive structures actually disadvantage young people, because previously all of a young person’s training would have been paid for, but now they’re on a level playing field – the employers can spend to reclaim the levy cost for training no matter what age the employees are.”

Neil Carberry, managing director of people and infrastructure at the Confederation of British Industry, says that the CBI, too, has “anecdotal evidence from members that some of them have had to cut their apprentice numbers because of the way the levy is structured.

And we have had anecdotal evidence from members that some of them are accrediting training they already did via an apprenticeship framework.”

For Carberry, a significant part of the problem is that the rules mean companies often can’t spend the money they’re entitled to recoup from the levy.

Most importantly, the new rules state that “the only thing that the levy can pay for is the cost of taught time – so, the money that you pay to the college or the private provider for the classroom time off the job.”

Carberry quotes an example from a CBI member, “a business in a regulated sector with a £2.5m budget for their apprenticeship scheme.

Their arrangement with the college [for off-the-job training] costs £300,000 a year and everything else is a capital cost – the tools for the apprentices, the trainer time, the salaries.

But then the levy turns out to be £500,000 – so the cost of the apprenticeship scheme goes from £2.5m to £2.7m. And the question then becomes, can they afford that £200,000 increase in cost?”

Verity Davidge, head of education and skills policy at EEF, agrees that many employers will not use their levy allowance.

Of the EEF members who are levy payers, says Davidge, a third said they would have to cut training budgets, and three quarters don’t think they’ll spend their full levy allowance.

And EEF, too, has seen a change in funding translate into fewer places for school leavers and more management courses.

“We do see some companies who have said they’re using them within their existing workforce. The big push at the moment is around leadership and management, so a lot of the management courses have taken off quite quickly,” Davidge explains.

This is a concern for EEF’s members, which comprise most of the manufacturing and engineering companies in the country, because it is in these sectors that the classic notion of a good apprenticeship – in which people learned on the job and progressed through a company for much or all of their career – was formed in the UK.

“About 75 percent of our members say they still generally recruit 16 to 18-year-olds,” Davidge says, because apprenticeships have “been very much a means of securing the skills they need for the future.

For our sector, a level two apprenticeship is never an endpoint.

It’s always a stepping stone.

Of all the apprentices at the manufacturing companies I speak to, it’s never a case that they’ve just done a level two or even just a level three, they’re on level four, five, six, they do degree-level qualifications.”

“Our concern is that if so much money is targeted towards those higher-funded management apprenticeships, actually we’re not targeting it at young people, people who need level two qualifications to move on to level three.

The government’s Industrial Strategy says we need technicians, well, let’s make sure there’s enough money to fund technician apprenticeships.”

“There shouldn’t be an age limit on apprenticeships”, says Davidge – Neil Carberry, too, says that “the important thing is not the age of who is doing an apprenticeship” – but Davidge, Carberry, and Crawley all argue that the system of funding for apprenticeships as it currently stands is inflexible and that this inflexibility is pushing businesses to compensate, quite rationally, in this way.

All three recommend what Neil Carberry calls “a flexible skills levy, so companies can fund the things that make a real difference, not specifically one type of training”. Verity Davidge says that “employers were promised ‘this is your money, and if you train apprentices, you can spend it and you’ll get back more than you put in’.

Those goalposts have firmly been shifted, to a point where employers don’t even think they’re visible.”

In October of last year, as management became the second most common apprenticeship subject, the DfE’s permanent secretary, Jonathan Slater, told the Public Accounts Committee that it was “very early days in the new levy, and we are watching it closely”.

If the trend becomes more pronounced over time, it may grow to have a profound effect on the people who need apprenticeships most of all.

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National Apprenticeship Week 2018: More than 8,400 roles up for grabs now – and the one job that pays the most

It’s National Apprenticeship week in the UK, and right now, figures show there are currently 8,400 positions up for grabs, in fields spanning from education to engineering and even trainee legal roles.

Job search-engine Adzuna, estimates there are currently 8,374 advertised apprenticeship vacancies available in the UK, offering an average salary of £14,759 – significantly more than the government’s £3.50 minimum wage for young, trained workers.

Where are they?

Those seeking immediate employment should look to London and the South East – where the vast majority of positions appear to be clustered.

Jobseekers seeking a training-scheme have 2,484 openings to choose from in the Greater London region, and 1,088 in the South East.

However, outside of the capital, there are also plenty of roles to be filled.

The cities home to the most advertised apprenticeship vacancies are Manchester (198), Birmingham (166), Leeds (127), Bristol (117) and Reading (110), all worth considering for potential applicants.

But what field offers the best pay?

Apprentices in the legal sector can expect the highest pay, with advertised wages in this area of £23,904.

Engineering placements follow close behind, with an average salary of £22,512 on offer for apprenticeship schemes.

Teaching placements (£20,814), consultancy positions (£18,864), and maintenance openings (£18,461) round-off the top five most lucrative apprenticeship opportunities.

However, these well-paid positions are not necessarily the most readily available.

The sectors currently offering most apprenticeship positions are IT (1,085), hospitality and catering (1,046), and teaching (740) while there are only 9 legal opportunities currently available in the entire country.

Doug Monro, co-founder of Adzuna, said: “Increasing apprenticeships is crucial to unlocking the skills crisis currently constraining our key industries.

“The government has set an ambitious target to help encourage young blood in skills shortage areas like engineering and teaching.

“Publicising and filling these opportunities will be key. Developing further flexible options like graduate apprenticeships will help encourage applicants who wish to study alongside learning on the job, and this should be expanded further.

“Another issue is that apprenticeships are currently clustered in the South East corner of the country, and opportunities in the other regions of the UK need to be fostered.

“With university tuition fees at an all-time high, more young people are looking at alternative ways to up-skill after school, without the hefty price tag.

“Apprenticeships offer a cost-effective way of training on the job as well as developing new talent in skills shortage areas. This makes them a win-win solution for both employers and job seekers.”

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