New research published today – Spelling It Out, Making It Count – by the Association of Employment and Learning Providers (AELP) reveals that up until the end of 2023, the delivery of a Functional Skills qualification for those in apprenticeships could incur as much as a £440 loss per individual.
Apprenticeships are the only vocational qualification that have literacy and numeracy qualifications as an exit requirement. Yet the content of Functional Skills – now almost indistinguishable from GCSEs following reforms in 2019 – mean that there is no widely effective means of learning and evidencing these skills in an applied context. Furthermore, their lack of viability and the perceived difficulty of them amongst learners with more practical approaches to learning, mean that Functional Skills qualifications are reducing overall apprenticeship achievement rates. Given the government’s stated desire to raise this from the current 52% to 67% by next year, this is clearly a key concern that requires urgent attention.
"Spelling It Out, Making It Count" written by AELP’s Research Associate Dr Chihiro Kobayashi and Director of Strategy Paul Warner, and Peter Dickinson of Warwick Institute for Employment Research (IER), and supported by Edge Foundation, Gatsby Charitable Foundation and with contributions from the Association of Colleges (AoC), looks in detail at the effect of reforms to Functional Skills content in 2019, particularly in light of apprenticeship requirements.
Looking in depth at delivery costs, it finds that even given the recent changes to funding, losses will continue to be incurred at a time when the training infrastructure is already in one of its most perilous positions ever. Overall, the prospects for social mobility that vocational skills training can offer are being undermined by qualifications that bear increasingly little relation to the workplace, and are in any case markedly underfunded.
