Official Report 615KB pdf
Welcome back. This morning, we will have the first evidence session of our short inquiry into apprenticeships. I welcome to the meeting James Withers, director of JR Withers Advisory Ltd; Dr Janet Brown, vice president for education at the Royal Society of Edinburgh; and Helyn Gould, deputy associate principal for education systems and enhancement at the University of Strathclyde. I thank you all for your written submissions.
Before I open up the discussion to other members, I will start with a question. The Scottish Government’s post-school education reform agenda aims towards a system that is fair and that gives opportunities to all school pupils, yet I hear of many cases in which kids cannot get access to foundation apprenticeships and of cases in which there are no modern or graduate apprenticeships or opportunities in their desired field. Why is that? Are there not enough apprenticeships, or are they perhaps offered in the wrong areas?
Good morning. Thank you for arranging the evidence session and inviting us.
It is almost three and a half years since I finished my review of the skills system on behalf of ministers. A key part of that, for me, was observing the cultural issue that we had in the education and skills system, whereby vocational education, as it is called—apprenticeships have been the most obvious vehicle for that—is still treated as secondary and second best to traditional academic forms of learning. In the year that I spent inside the system, I observed that it was very fragmented.
My longer answer to your question about why not everyone can access apprenticeships is that, for a long time, the entire apprenticeship system has been carved off and separated from the rest of the education system. The funding and development of frameworks were carved off into separate agencies, away from the mainstream of education. Vocational education has been deemed a separate potential add-on, often for young people who are considered not to be progressing through academic routes as well as schools and the system would like.
There are not enough apprenticeship places. The Scottish Government has committed to 150,000 places over this parliamentary session, which is a good increase, and a 10 per cent increase in contribution rates, which is certainly overdue. However, until we have culturally embedded parity of esteem into our system—in other words, if you are doing a foundation apprenticeship in software development, that is level 6 learning in exactly the same way as higher maths is level 6 learning and those things are treated the same by parents, teachers, ministers and the whole system—apprenticeships will remain the area of the system that is more poorly served in terms of funding and availability.
The demand is there, and business is certainly looking for greater support for apprenticeships—we know that the workplace needs that pipeline. There has been good structural progress on system reform, but delivery progress has been relatively slow. It would be unfair to say that cultural progress has been non-existent, but we are a long way off where we need to be.
I cannot disagree with what James Withers has said—I agree with everything he said. The challenge for culture is key to this issue. Countries such as the Netherlands have taken action to have the Government lead the way in how we talk about this sort of education and the way in which we measure education.
It has historically been the case that you get what you measure and you get what you value. August is a time when everybody values how many highers everybody has got and how many people go to universities, but we do not recognise what has happened during the course of the year in terms of apprenticeships and the foundations that lead to apprenticeships. We have a system that values one pathway over another, and we need to do something about that.
One of the other challenges, for me, is the fact that we measure the school system according to how many highers pupils get. That is a challenge in persuading parents to encourage their children to go into foundation apprenticeships.
The provision of modern apprenticeships poses a different challenge. If you read some of the reports that have come out from several industries, such as the heating and plumbing industry, you will see that they are concerned about whether employers will continue to want to hire people as modern apprentices, because of the costs associated with that and the challenge of taking somebody on for four years but not necessarily being funded for that or for providing secure employment for longer than one year. That is particularly the case with Government contracts, which are, in general, 12-month contracts. We must challenge that.
It is a complex arena, but we have to fix it, because, if we do not, Scotland’s economy and Scotland’s people will not be successful in the future.
09:15
Good morning. I am here to speak about graduate apprenticeships, which are in a slightly different situation. To an extent, they have become victims of their own success. The process for achieving a place is extremely competitive, and apprentices are recruited by the employers, not through the universities. Research has shown that the entry requirements are on a par with those for entry to prestigious universities. One of the challenges is that the widening access agenda in Scotland has led to universities giving adjusted entry to students from widening access backgrounds without there being any requirement for employers to do the same, so the application process for apprenticeships is extremely competitive.
The different skills involved have been matched to Scottish Government priorities, particularly in science, technology, engineering and mathematics, so most of the available graduate apprenticeship frameworks are in the STEM area. Their availability in Scotland is limited compared with their availability elsewhere in the United Kingdom, and the application process is very competitive, which disadvantages students from a widening access background.
Thank you. I will now open up the discussion to other members.
Good morning. I have been an employer for 25 years and have taken on apprentices, although I have never been approached and asked to do so. I have also spoken to many other businesses in the south of Scotland that have never been approached or encouraged to do so, which is a big failing. Taking on an apprentice is not cost effective for small and medium-sized enterprises that have to rely on their trained staff taking time out to teach somebody. They really cannot afford to do that, because costs have gone up in every area of business. We need to look at what we can do to incentivise and encourage businesses to take on apprentices, through a tax break or something like that. Something has to be done in that area, because it is getting harder to run businesses.
On the point about kids not attending school and looking to go to college, colleges and tutors have told me that kids are reaching them who can barely read or write, which is quite concerning. I am talking about plumbers and electricians—you need skills to learn to do those jobs. Why do we not have apprenticeships start in schools, perhaps even in third year, to engage kids’ minds and help them to find their passions before they go on to further education?
First and foremost, you have made some really good points. Incentivising employers is a real challenge. We all know the fiscal situation that the Government and others are in, but we really need to take away some of the pressure on employers when they take on apprentices. As you said, you get little out of them in the first year.
It is more like the first four years.
One suggestion that has come through in the work that we have done is that apprenticeships should start in school, but it is important that what young people learn in school actually builds towards an apprenticeship. The Scottish credit and qualifications framework should allow that. Young people should be able to build on things learned in school—and things perhaps learned in one year of college, such as health and safety—and carry that learning forward before they enter employment. That is one of the challenges that we face.
You also brought up the issue of people leaving school unable to adequately support themselves with maths and English. Scotland’s latest programme for international student assessment results are quite interesting from that perspective. It is important that, when kids leave school, they are able to enter the workforce and also have successful lives. Every individual in Scotland needs a good comprehension of maths, English and—
The basics.
The basic studies—I totally agree with what you are saying. For me, that means thinking about how, within one system, there are different places where people can learn things that are valuable for employment but also for their personal benefit and development.
I agree entirely with Janet Brown on that, but I will add a couple of things.
The SME point is important, not least because our business community in this country is dominated by SMEs. There is no doubt that SMEs find it very difficult, because of time and resource issues, to engage in public sector funding networks and the public sector more generally. Also, it can be easier for public agencies to deal with bigger businesses. If Skills Development Scotland is trying to hit an annual apprenticeships target, it will be easier to deal with Rolls-Royce, where hundreds of people can be put through. If you want to make the most efficient use of resources, working with a small number of large companies is much easier than working with a large number of small companies. Therefore, there needs to be ministerial direction on engaging with SMEs.
Also, contribution rates have lagged far behind. My sense is that, for SMEs, contribution rates are important and should, at the very least, keep pace with inflation. Actually, it is about committing the time, because, as you say, a company is taking someone off a job to work with an apprentice.
On the point about education and starting apprenticeships earlier, I could not agree more. It is absolutely essential to bring more work-based learning into our school curriculum. The curriculum is going through its annual cycle of review, and my hope is that that will come out with something that is much more positive and with an understanding of the importance of embedding work-based or work-related learning into the curriculum. When I was doing my review, Louise Hayward was doing her review on the future of qualifications, and it is a huge disappointment to me that some of her key recommendations have been shelved and have not been progressed at all.
That has happened partly because there has been a lack of bravery and courage to grasp real reform in our education system, which is partly because there are short-term fires to be put out around violence in classrooms, attendance and PISA scores. My assessment is that part of the reason for those issues and why so many young people are disengaged from the curriculum is that they do not see any relevance in it. Collecting highers and A grades is not relevant for more than half of our pupil population, so we have to build a curriculum that is much more relevant to them, and apprenticeships and work-based learning are key to that.
Foundation apprenticeships fail the parity of esteem test partly because they have a terrible name. They are not an apprenticeship and they are not a foundation level of learning. We should give them the same name as other academic routes, because they involve the same level of learning. Until we tackle that, people will always deem them to be a second-best option.
I totally agree with that.
Would you like to come in on that, Helyn?
I have two short points to make. The point about the challenge for SMEs is true for graduate apprenticeships as well. Research has identified that the work-based mentor is a key resource, but it is challenging for SMEs to provide that in order to have a graduate apprentice. Another issue is that there is no associated funding for potential innovation or collaboration, and modern apprenticeships do not necessarily feed directly into graduate apprenticeships, which makes advanced entry more challenging.
I have a small point. I left school more than 41 years ago, which is hard to believe. When I left school, there was a debate about parity of esteem between skills and academia, and we keep on having that debate.
I was interested in something that Mr Withers said. I am paraphrasing, so please correct me if I have got the meaning wrong, but you said that skills and apprenticeships are poorly served in terms of funding and that, until we get culture change, that will not change. Maybe the reason why the funding situation is poorer, as you see it, is because there has been no culture change. In talking about culture, I am talking about schools, parents, society, universities and employers—everybody. Until we get culture change in all those parties, there will be no parity of esteem, and that has been the block.
I am sure that employers who are looking for apprenticeships believe that what they are offering is as valuable as anything that people might get from a university course, but nobody else has bought into that. Even the children—sorry, the young people—have not bought into that because, as you have said, It feels like second best. That is the message that is all around them.
What do you think we can do? I spoke about what the situation was like 41 years ago, but we have probably been talking about the issue for even longer. How can we change the culture? Is it just a case of funding?
No, it is not just funding: it requires real leadership. One of my observations was that Scotland’s skills system had lacked Government leadership for years, and that echoed a report from Audit Scotland that came out before I began my work.
We must stop talking about university as though it is a golden pathway and the ultimate achievement for any young person, because it is not relevant to at least half our young people. In some cases, it is also a way of warehousing young people in another four years of education when the job opportunities out there do not discriminate as much as they used to between someone who has a degree and someone who does not.
The optimism I can offer is that the culture outside the education system is already changing. If you speak to businesses now, you will hear that the list of grades that a job candidate got for their highers is much less important than it used to be and that it is much more important for a candidate to demonstrate that they can be creative and solve problems and that they are empathetic, kind and good team workers. Those are the skills that employers are looking for now, so our education system needs to catch up with the cultural reform that is already happening in the outside world.
The recommendations in my review were informed by people from across the system, none of whom had a total understanding of how the whole system worked because it was so fragmented and complex. One of my main recommendations was that, if we want to have a joined-up system, we have to join it up. If we carve apprenticeships out into a separate agency with separate—and uncertain—annual funding, it is no wonder that those are treated as second best to the more consistent rhythm of academic qualifications.
We need to stitch the system together, and that structuring is beginning to happen. The Tertiary Education and Training (Funding and Governance) (Scotland) Act 2026 is a good step forward, and having a single agency looking after both university and college funding as well as apprenticeship and training funding is another good step. However, we must change the qualifications culture. We need to stop newspapers from printing exam league tables to determine the best and poorest-performing schools because that is absolute insanity.
Until we get there, it will be very challenging. I am hopeful that the culture will change because the world is already demanding a much broader set of requirements from the workforce pipeline than just an exam certificate, but the education system has not quite caught up with that and its hierarchy of qualifications does not value what the business world is looking for.
Finally, the Scottish credit and qualifications framework is an asset, but it is a gift that we are bemusingly and bewilderingly underutilising.
I think Dr Brown wants to come in, but I have one more question before that. You said that Audit Scotland mentioned a lack of leadership. Is anywhere else in the UK doing better, and can we learn from that?
A similar review was done in Wales. Some parts of the UK have done well, with Manchester being one example. When I was doing my review, Manchester was delivering more of what they call “degree” apprenticeships—which is what we call “graduate” apprenticeships—than every part of Scotland combined. That shows that some areas have been doing better.
The recent rhetorical leadership from the UK Government about the importance of technical, vocational and apprenticeship-based qualifications is a big step forward. Until recently, there was a stark contrast with the rhetoric we would see up here. We have had First Ministers for whom the percentage of children going on to university has been the absolute driving key performance indicator. Scotland’s universities are brilliant and are absolutely the right path for a lot of people, but they are not the right path for everyone.
Political leadership is really important, but we have had an extraordinary turnover of skills ministers even since I did my review. The minister who commissioned me to do the review was gone by the time I had finished it nine months later; the minister who introduced the tertiary education bill was gone by the time it reached stage 2; and the minister who saw it through stage 3 was gone before the changes were implemented in April.
Therefore, one of my hopes—in what is probably a naive way, politically—is that we could have a skills minister who lasts longer than the average football manager over a season. I think that Alyn Smith absolutely gets the cultural bit, so let us keep him in place for a while to drive some change with the kind of political leadership that is needed and which I hope he can bring.
09:30
It is not just a UK issue; it is a worldwide issue. We recently completed some work looking at how four different places—Switzerland, Sweden, Ontario and the Netherlands—are approaching vocational technical training. Fundamentally, they all have the same challenge, which is the perception that movement into university is the way that everybody should be going. That is the case for lots of people and for lots of jobs, but not all jobs.
In the future, it is likely that we will need far more people not to go to university than is currently the case. It is a real challenge that we need to analyse. It was interesting to see that all four of those places had recognised that there is a cultural challenge. The only place that seems to have made an absolute commitment is the Netherlands, which said that there was leadership from Government that started to change the language used to describe things.
I think that it was the submission from James Withers that said that we should stop using the word “highers” and call them level 6 qualifications. That would represent a huge step forward. We talk about degrees, which are an SCQF level 10 qualification. There are Scottish vocational qualifications at that level too, and it is really important that people across the country recognise that the depth of learning, which has just happened in a different space, is of equal value and equally as challenging as a degree. We need to change the culture, but culture is incredibly difficult to change.
A couple of years ago, the RSE published a paper called “Education and skills 2050: Future proofing Scotland”, in which we tried to encourage people to think about a radical review of the curriculum. That does not mean a subject-by-subject review of what is in a history or geography qualification; it is a process of thinking about what children should be learning for when they come out of school in 2050—and that is not what we are teaching them today. What we are teaching them today is good for, probably, 1995, but not necessarily for the future.
There is a whole load of culture that needs to change. We need to take some risks, because it is always very hard for teachers, who are absolutely focused on getting the best for their students, to do something radical, but we might be in the position at the moment where we need to think about that and scope that work. That is also cultural change, and it is a fundamental barrier to any significant movement on the issue.
The experience of the graduate apprenticeship is relevant here. It was introduced in 2017, and one of the first challenges that we had was explaining to employers that it was not degree-lite or a different version of it. In particular, the attachment of the words “graduate” and “apprenticeship” seemed to be quite challenging for some employers.
One thing that has come out of that experience is that the retention level for graduates from a graduate apprenticeship, as opposed to a university graduate recruitment, is much, much higher, and companies are seeing a return on their investment. There is an issue with graduates leaving university, joining a company, doing two years on the graduate scheme and then moving company. The retention rate for graduate apprenticeship students is significantly higher.
We have seen sectors move to introduce graduate apprenticeships to their talent pipeline and to have both graduate apprenticeship and university graduate recruitment.
I am listening to what you are saying, and I am trying to work out how it settles with me, maybe because I am culturally attuned to the fact that we are meant to go to university. I am trying to establish whether you are saying that university is not the route or that we should not have that ambition for people—although “ambition” might be the wrong word—and I am worried about what we would lose.
You are right that the economy and the jobs market are very quickly driving the way that things are happening. Even if we and the Government are not leading that process legislatively, we see that universities that are not what I suppose we would call the ancient universities are offering places at below course requirements just to fill the spaces.
I guess my question is about whether such changes are happening in the jobs market anyway. As far as I can see, that is mainly due to artificial intelligence moving the whole jobs market—let us be honest about that. Will losses happen anyway as a consequence of that? We will need to respond in some form—otherwise, there will be significant unemployment.
It should not be seen as a case of, “We can’t go to university because of this or that.” It should be seen as, “This apprenticeship is actually a good direction of travel for me and my future family.” It is not just about the economy; we want to encourage multiple different ways in which people can develop throughout their lives for their own benefit as well as for the benefit of the economy. If we focus only on what the workplace requires, we will not properly serve our people.
It is about saying to people, “You can have a great career and a good family, and you can support your family by going down these pathways as well as by going to university.” We need to aim as much for that aspiration as for having a degree that people might not be able to find a job with afterwards. It is not about just waiting for that to happen because of people not being able to get jobs after their degrees; it is about creating a positive environment that says to people, “This pathway is really beneficial for you as a human being and a member of Scottish society as well as for the Scottish economy.”
That thinking is also a way to address the other issue that Scotland needs to address, which is social inclusion. It is important that such pathways are not seen as things that only people from lower socioeconomic backgrounds go into, because they are for everybody.
I back what Dr Brown has said. University is also not just for when people leave school. If we are committed to lifelong learning, we need to support flexible and innovative pathways through universities—that is key for upskilling, reskilling, microcredentials and all those different elements. Just because a person does not go to university after they leave school, it does not mean that they will never attend university or engage with higher education.
It should be part of the messaging that university is about people’s careers and pathways. We know that graduates will change pathways multiple times throughout their careers in a way that they did not do 40 years ago. We need to look at the whole ecosystem and consider how the different elements of tertiary education support learners in post-secondary education.
I will add a brief point. It is important to stress—as I think that we have done, but I will do so again so that there is no doubt in anyone’s mind—that people absolutely can have an ambition to go to university. We should be ambitious for our young people to go to university, but it should not be the ambition for them all to go to university.
Because the culture has become so embedded that university is a golden pathway, we are at the point of at least half our pupil population—and a much higher percentage in some areas of Scotland—leaving school believing that they are failures before their lives have even begun. I honestly cannot think of anything that would be more damaging to a country, particularly one that has a shrinking working-age population. Our universities are brilliant and the right option for many people, but they are not the right option for everyone. Where there are alternative routes for learning, those should be given parity of esteem.
Duncan Dunlop is right that the ways in which society is going and AI is developing will result in the system evolving. My concern is that there will be a time lag between when the system changes and when the world demands a much broader set of skills and a broader diversity of people in businesses, communities and volunteering roles—all the ways in which individuals can contribute to society.
In the past decade—probably since the beginning of devolution—the skills system has been allowed to evolve. Although evolution happens almost uniformly with good intent, when a system is complex different parts of it drift into different areas and the level of fragmentation will deepen.
We are probably in agreement. The question is what the motivating factors or drivers will be towards the apprenticeship schemes. I am interested in the degree to which various forces will push that. Even in Scotland, with our free university education, most people leave university with £18,000 to £20,000-worth of debt, which is pretty difficult if they do not then get a job off the back of their degree.
There is huge value in people having space to develop and mature. It is still predominantly people in their late teens and early 20s who go to university, and it does have a role to play. However, I totally get what you are saying about our need, which has been starved, and I totally agree with what you are saying about the status of what we do with apprenticeships.
I will move to the more practical elements. Oversight is moving to the Scottish Funding Council, and that is a structural change. We have also talked quite a lot about cultural change; what do we need to do to make sure that that happens? Instead of having the Scottish Apprenticeship Advisory Board looking at the area, the SFC is creating the apprenticeship committee, but how is that not just a mark 2 version of what there was? What will be different with the SFC? What does the SFC need to change?
The first point is that, in my opinion, the SFC needs to see all three aspects of tertiary education as equally valuable. A really key thing is that we need to make sure that the apprenticeship area is still employer led. There has to be an engagement in the Funding Council—and the aspects of the apprenticeship management structure underneath that—that retains close engagement with employers. It would be a real shame if we lost that.
In my review, I recommended that training and apprenticeship funding should come together with university and college funding into a single agency. That is important.
Skills Development Scotland did a remarkable and very good job in establishing our apprenticeship framework and the whole ecosystem that sits around it. However, the very thing that was needed to establish it is the very thing that is now holding it back—in other words, a dedicated agency that is focused only on apprenticeships and is separated from the rest of mainstream education.
The apprenticeship framework needed focus to establish it but, in order for it to grow up, leave home and become more embedded in our mainstream education system, it needed then to be stitched into the heart of the education system, which meant that the funding should be in the same place. It is also my view that the new qualifications body should have an overview of the entire qualifications ecosystem—school and post-school—and that is not quite happening.
There is absolutely a risk with the transfer to the SFC, because we are moving apprenticeships into an agency that has, if I am honest, muscle memory for universities, so there is a need to stay engaged with employers.
My vision was different to what is being executed now; my view was that we need much more devolution—down to the local level—of powers and responsibilities over skills and funding. In my ideal world, there would be a network of employer boards that worked locally in regions with their councils, colleges and universities and had responsibility over skills funding to establish the appropriate educational provisions in that particular area. That is why I felt that SAAB should be devolved down into employer boards around the country. That has not happened, so we have the creation of mark 2 SAAB through SFC, which I am not convinced will be as optimal as the more regional approach.
Some of the best things that are happening around skills and education provision—
I am sorry to interrupt you, but do you think that a key part of public sector reform should be looking at devolving that power down to localities?
Yes, that absolutely should be looked at. At the moment, city-region partnerships can direct billions of pounds of investment, but we have not trusted them with a few million pounds for the skills provision that might sit alongside that. That is an odd set-up, so we absolutely need to look at that.
The skills requirements in different parts of Scotland are different. Through regional skills planning, we have a good regional skills plan, which has demonstrably involved colleges, universities, businesses, councils and all stakeholders in that area. The prize for regional integration and the bringing together of different interests around a coherent plan should be the control of funding that sits alongside it.
Could I add just one thing? The movement of everything into the SFC was a structural one. We still have not changed the funding mechanisms, so we do not have parity of funding for the different types of tertiary pathways.
09:45
So the budget lines have not moved.
No, just the people.
One of the committee’s first evidence-taking sessions was with Universities Scotland and its college equivalent, Colleges Scotland. They came together, but it seemed that they were competing for this finite resource—the funding that the SFC now holds. I still do not see how, realistically, the money that is in the SFC for universities is going to move towards the college sector, if no more resource is forthcoming.
The challenge lies in understanding what sort of tertiary sector we need. When I say “tertiary sector”, I mean all of it—everything that happens after people leave school. At the moment, Universities Scotland is working on the future of universities, and what they will need to look like, and colleges are thinking about what they will need to look like in the future, too. However, we need to think about all of that as one system—and that includes apprenticeships and other types of learning. After all, there are other ways in which people can get into work—
I am sorry to interrupt, but is such work on the radar at the moment? Is anyone doing it? Both sides seem to be on two very separate pathways.
There is hope that it will come together. One of the things that the Royal Society of Edinburgh’s education committee is focusing on for next year is very much this one-system idea. What does one system need to do? How do we bring people together? We have the ability to bring people into a space that is non-political to talk about how we change that divergence of approaches. The competition that you talked about is a real challenge.
The structural bit is important and matters, but it does not deliver the cultural bit on its own, and neither does it deliver the more agile, flexible and fast-moving apprenticeship system—and, indeed, education and post-school education system—that we need. It takes a long time to develop an apprenticeship framework. I think that this has moved on a little bit, but when I was looking at graduate apprenticeships, individual universities were having to bid for funding for those placements. Why on earth can we not give universities the freedom to decide how much of their provision they want to drive through traditional full-time study and how much they want to drive through graduate apprenticeships?
Some of that flexibility might come, but we need to trust our institutions a bit more to know what the most appropriate provision for them will be. What the University of Strathclyde wants to do and what its ambition for graduate apprenticeships will be is going to be different from what one of the ancient universities wants to do, so we need to give universities the freedom to operate accordingly.
We have that now, but when the funding moved from SDS to the SFC, it became folded into our existing provision. Previously through SDS—and then when it first moved to the SFC—the money was additional funding for and investment in apprenticeships, then it was taken away and folded into our existing numbers. As a result, it was reduced. If we want to deliver graduate apprenticeships, we have to reduce the number of traditional on-campus degrees.
The move to the SFC was beneficial to our employers, because there was a mismatch between the timeline for employers planning to recruit someone to an apprenticeship and SDS’s funding timeline. We were receiving funding indications a few months into the year, but actually they were needed towards the end of the year before. Companies are planning now for their recruitment next spring and summer. Having that lag and the strategic ability to plan into the future have been benefits of the move to the SFC. However, the funding for delivering graduate apprenticeships has been removed from universities.
This is a bit of a different thought, but if having colleges and universities as separate entities does not really work, would it be better to have one institution covering everything that you have been talking about—from, say, SCQF level 6 or 7 to level 10—so that we do not have people saying, “Oh, you’re going to this place rather than that one”? Could our institutions look the same and, therefore, be able to advertise and market all this in a different way?
There is value in having separate entities, but there are examples across the country of very close working relationships between colleges and universities. We need look only at North East Scotland College—I think that that is the wrong way to describe it—in Aberdeen and surrounding areas and how it is working with Robert Gordon University and the University of Aberdeen. In that respect, I would highlight the seamless pathway to a computer course at those universities.
There are examples that we need to learn from, but I should also point out that the role of colleges is not just to provide apprenticeships. Colleges also have wider and hugely beneficial community engagement that responds to individual businesses and business requirements.
I am also on the board of Glasgow Kelvin College, and we need to understand the difference in identity. Glasgow Kelvin College does not deliver as much higher education at an HNC and HND level as other colleges, because it is the college in Scotland with the highest number of students from the most deprived areas, according to the Scottish index of multiple deprivation. A total of 41 per cent of the college’s learners come from the most deprived areas, so the college is about further education and getting people into education rather than going straight into a higher-level qualification.
In part, that is about place, which is very important to a number of our colleges. It is about the place and the community, and lifelong learning and engagement. I see the benefit of having separate systems that work closely together, and pathways to articulation are a key way of achieving that.
I have one final question.
James Withers wants in first, if that is okay.
I will dissent slightly from my colleagues here. The idea is really interesting and, if you landed from outer space and looked at what we need from an education system and what we have just now, I think that you would question the rationale for having separate university and college systems.
I had not been in a college for 30 years before I started the review, and I was blown away. Colleges are incredible—they are rooted in their communities, and they are better connected into schools and businesses—but they are hugely fearful for their future and their financial sustainability. Some of the best work is happening when a university and a college are working with each other in a particular area—I looked at Forth Valley College, for example, which is working with the University of Stirling.
I did not look at the idea in my review but, if we want to be radical, that is exactly the kind of thing that should be on the table.
I will move to one last area, which Helyn Gould mentioned. Helyn, you said that there are no widening access requirements for graduate apprenticeships. How can we change that? One of the ways in which we have improved the university system in Scotland is by making it a more available route for many people.
It is a real challenge, and I think that you cannot land universities with that, because while we message on the value, as we all know, of diversity in recruitment—and there has been significant activity to encourage employers on that—places are incredibly competitive. Part of it has to be about encouraging employers to consider diversity in their recruitment activities. It is a key area that universities have been trying to influence, but our ability to do that is limited.
What would we need to do to give us more levers of power over that?
I am not sure that that is easily achieved, in part because the employer starts with the place but—in contrast to the situation elsewhere in the UK—as soon as a learner begins a graduate apprenticeship, the place then becomes theirs rather than the employer’s. It is a complicated situation, from that point of view.
In something such as the renewables industry, where there is a lot of procurement and big contracts—it is not SMEs operating in that space—could we say, “If you want to get this contract, part of the community benefit is that you will take on widening access apprenticeships”?
I think that you could ring fence certain areas, but you would risk employers stepping away. The issue definitely needs addressing, but it has to be tackled collaboratively. My hope is that the new graduate apprenticeship committee will take that as a key priority area to address.
My question is for James Withers. You mentioned in your original review that the skills system felt fragmented and there was drift, and it struck me that you said that there was “an absence of prioritisation”. Have we made progress in that area? Is there sufficient planning in our apprenticeship system for the skills that we need in Scotland at the moment and in the future?
I think that there has been progress, and it would be churlish not to say so. If I was sorting it into buckets of good progress, slow progress and no progress, I would say that there has been good progress on structures, slow progress on delivery and little or no progress around the cultural aspect.
It is three and a half years since the review was done. We passed the Tertiary Education and Training (Funding and Governance) (Scotland) Act 2026, which is good; Audit Scotland recently reported on progress against the reform agenda and identified the absence of good strategic planning around it, so that is an issue; and ministerial churn is a factor. Progress is there, but delivery has been slow. We are unlikely to see significant progress on how apprenticeships are shaped and delivered until after April next year, which will be almost four years since my review was done—and it was just one in a series of reviews that happened around the issue at the time.
The need for strategic leadership and a strategic plan from the Government is absolutely critical. Having lived through a bit of that experience, I observe that albeit reform is always difficult, public sector reform is the most difficult of all. That is partly because it might be 10 years—two electoral cycles at the very least—until you see the benefit and, in the meantime, you get all the disruption and challenges, so you really have to stick to the course to get through those choppy waters before you reach a better place. It is also partly because of the nature of the process that gave rise to a fragmented system, which is that you have to break up the system into manageable chunks for different departments and different agencies to work on. When my review was done, which called for a more cohesive system, it was sliced and diced into lots of different sections and sent off to different departments and agencies.
Therefore, you need strategic leadership—which must be political leadership—to take a whole-system approach to the process. You need to be ruthlessly focused not on all the issues with which institutions and agencies will have problems and about which they will complain, but on the end user, which is difficult to do in the context of public sector reform. However, I remain hopeful that there has been progress.
My next question is for everyone. The target is 150,000 apprenticeships by the end of the parliamentary session, which James Withers said at the start was about a 10 per cent increase. Will we hit that target? What are the challenges in hitting it?
One question is whether we should be measuring the number of people who come into apprenticeships or the number who complete them. Getting people out the other end is one of the challenges that we have with apprenticeships. For me, first, the measures need to be addressed—indeed, part of Audit Scotland’s feedback on progress was that we do not have sufficient measures in place to understand whether we are making any progress, because no milestones or measurements are associated with this.
Secondly, you asked whether we think that we will make the target. Large employers are generally okay with it, but some of the feedback from SMEs is that they are worried about the financial situation and whether they can afford to take on apprenticeships—the fall in numbers in the past couple of years is probably a reflection of that. We need to think about the issue in the round and find ways to encourage people.
Procurement in the public sector is a real driver for the ability or inability to take on a modern apprenticeship. If an SME has only a one-year contract, will it make a four-year commitment to an individual? It is not just about putting more money in the system or having targets; it is about having people who come out at the other end with a successful apprenticeship that gives them a good career path.
I agree with that. We have a habit of measuring process instead of outcome. There is a value in the 150,000 apprenticeships target because it sets a direction of travel, but we count bums on seats all the time and I am not sure that it is a particularly good measure of the success of the system.
Modern apprenticeships have an 80 per cent completion rate on average. Interestingly, in the sectors that I know best, such as food and drink manufacturing, the completion rate is higher for over-25s than it is for younger people, yet age discrimination is built into the apprenticeship system—you get higher contribution rates for younger people than for older people.
Helyn Gould made a very good point about university access and learning throughout life. Although we need to focus on the completion rate, we also need to ask how long the people who get a qualification stay in employment and in that sector. A more nuanced set of measures would provide a much more valuable assessment of whether the system is working.
10:00
I have a few comments that relate to this point. The target for graduate apprentices is only very slightly higher than the number of those being recruited. I would expect the numbers of graduate apprentices to continue in that way and to achieve the overall levels.
It is important to look in detail at what we do as a measurement of success. I echo what my fellow witnesses said, in that this should be about attainment. One issue with attainment and the measurement of graduate apprenticeships is that a number of apprentices leave at the end of third year, having achieved their degree. That is because the Scottish system is different: those people do not need an honours degree for their particular career path. However, what they do is not seen as attaining on the degree programme.
You will notice that it is predominantly those over 25 who undertake a graduate apprenticeship. There is a balance to strike between the different elements. Apprentices often receive promotions, their jobs are more demanding, and they have achieved a degree. That is a really successful outcome.
That brings me to another area. Looking at the research into what we are achieving with our graduate apprenticeships, we find that they have been particularly effective in social mobility, upskilling and reskilling, but not so much among school leavers. Back in 2017, when the graduate apprenticeship was brought in, there was much talk about a different route, upskilling, reskilling and the needs and demographics of Scotland, with a requirement to reskill our population. Over the years following that, there was a move to place much more emphasis on school leavers. From a social mobility point of view, there is much more impact for our older learners. We should not lose sight of graduate apprenticeship roles being not just for school leavers but for that aspect of lifelong learning.
There is an opportunity here, which is covered in Professor Sally Smith’s submission. Professor Smith was originally going to attend this panel, and she wrote the submission. There is an opportunity for us to increase master’s level provision, which allows for reskilling. That would give us the ability to reskill our existing population in one or two years, without people having to undertake a four-year undergraduate degree. That would be financially beneficial for Scotland, and it would be beneficial in targeting those who have prior learning or experience that would allow them to come in at that level. That would be generalist master’s provision, not specialist master’s provision.
One of the strengths of the graduate apprenticeship model has been that it is a system that allows someone to repeat degree-level education, as long as it is not in the same subject area. That has meant that someone can find employment somewhere that may not be where they previously held qualifications and retrain within that area. That is the reskilling aspect.
As a sector, we would very much welcome the opportunity to focus on generalised master’s degrees.
If you were to come back and do another evidence session in the future, and if we managed to retain our skills minister and all the members of the Education and Gaelic Committee for a year or so, what would you see as measures of success? What would you like us to be considering as a committee?
I would like to see an increase in the number of successful completions, and I would like there to be a way in which we can help SMEs that want to take on apprentices. They should be given support. I do not necessarily mean just financial support in bringing on those people; it could involve a structural change in how the education system gives credit for other things that have been learned. I would like to see that.
At some point we have to make progress on culture. That means that the committee and politicians of all parties should be shouting to the hills about how great other pathways are over and above universities. That is a role for politicians.
Finally, I would like to see cross-party agreement on the direction of travel for education and skills in Scotland.
I definitely like that last bit about cross-party agreement. My background is working in the business community, where some things are deemed pre-competitive—that means that those things are so important that companies will not compete with each other on them but will instead collaborate and work together.
Education should be politically pre-competitive, in my view—although that is an incredibly naive statement to be making in a Parliament, where there are lots of different views on education. A board of reform with a member from each party would potentially be a good way forward, and it might start to challenge some of the issues around public sector reform.
Culture is coming out as a common theme, but it is really difficult to measure culture. The Government defaults to things that are easy to measure, which is stuff that is easy to count, such as jobs or the number of apprenticeship places. We need to grasp what percentage of our population believe that they have reached a positive destination as a result of their learning. That might be someone who is a lawyer or a doctor, or someone who is a plumber or a welder. It might be someone who is volunteering in their community or being a voluntary care worker. At the moment, the Government determines what a positive destination is, and I am not sure that that necessarily correlates with real life.
I would also like to see a measure of perceptions at school and what percentage of young people say that a foundation apprenticeship in software development is as valuable or important, or as successful an achievement, as higher maths or physics. If we start to get those to broadly the same level, that will be a good measure. Those things are difficult to measure because perceptions in surveys are not easily countable. I am sure that the chief economist in the Scottish Government will hate those kinds of things because they are a lot more difficult to measure, but they would be barometers of cultural progress.
I echo the call for a focus on outcomes and attainments rather than the entry points. We are very much focused on a funnel out of schools into colleges and universities, but I would like to see as broad an understanding of the cultural shift to pathways and the multiple routes through. We should look at it from a systems point of view and recognise that, when you leave school, you are not just getting a job but starting your career, which is a completely valid way forward. Parity of esteem for our young people is really important, as is looking at lifelong learning rather than just the next year or two.
Where to start? I quite like James Withers’s idea that the skills minister’s post is becoming like the Aberdeen Football Club manager’s job just now. I say that because Graeme Dey, the guy who initially put through the Tertiary Education and Training (Funding and Governance) (Scotland) Act 2026, is an Aberdeen fan, but he is probably on a golf course somewhere at the moment.
To go back to your report, James, you said that public money should support the learner and not benefit the provider. When the tertiary education bill was going through, I asked a simple question of the Scottish and Northern Ireland Plumbing Employers Federation, which also provides training. I asked how much it takes off the top of the SDS money that it receives. SNIPEF came back and, surprisingly, did not try to dress up its answer. It just said 40 per cent—boom, like that. My argument then was that we should look at the traditional college-first model as opposed to the model that we have fallen into, where the trade bodies do it.
I have a fair idea of what you are going to say, because I have read your report, but, at this stage—having done the report and looking back now—do you think we should consider a college-first approach as opposed to the more traditional method? My father became an armature winder—an engineer—and he went to college for so many days while working full time as an apprentice. Is the college-first model the way forward, to get us away from the fragmentation?
Independent training providers have a role and they fill a gap, but my view is that a college-first model is appropriate. It would support our colleges and the brilliant job that they are doing. I would like to see colleges determine where the gap in their provision is and whether they want to bring in third parties to help to deliver training.
It normally works the other way around.
Yes, it does. SDS will contract for third-party delivery. Some brilliant work is done by independent training providers, including Scottish Bakers and National Food & Drink Training, which deliver apprenticeships across the whole food and drink manufacturing space, which colleges do not necessarily have the provision to do. That approach is absolutely appropriate where colleges do not have the provision—or they deem themselves not best placed—to deliver that training. However, our process is such that that is not how it works, and we have individual training providers contracting directly with a public sector agency. Given the fragility in our college system, I am not sure that that is the best way to serve the apprentice, the learner or person who is being trained, or our college sector.
In short, I agree with your point, but that is not quite the same as saying that there is not a role for independent training providers.
Just to follow up on that, I point out that, in some cases, independent providers operate in specific or niche areas, although not necessarily the one that you mentioned. However, there is definitely a place for them, and it is really important that we recognise that.
That said, if we are to go down a college route, we should not forget that colleges must have the equipment that will allow them to be at the leading edge, as industry requires. Significant investment is being made in engineering courses that are run in colleges so that they have the necessary equipment to deliver modern apprenticeships efficiently and effectively. It is important that colleges are funded to the level needed to enable them to do that, and that will not involve a small amount of money.
For me, the big thing is following the public pound. I have been on various forms of this committee for quite a long time now. I had brown hair when I came in here; some might say that the committee is the cause of its not being brown any more. I know the frustration that arises when you try to follow the public pound and you see 40 per cent, which is a big number, being taken off the top. When you look at the college model, you will see that 90 per cent follows the pupil and about 10 per cent goes towards the administration of the college. That seems like a no-brainer to me. Surely it is the natural way for us to move forward, even with the investment in the whole system.
To be honest, I think that it will be a case-by-case thing, depending on the nature of the apprenticeship.
It should also come out of really good skills planning. That sounds kind of anoraky and dull, and as though it is more about paperwork and plans than delivery. However, for a start, if you had national skills planning—I know that it has been brought back into the Government, which is a good move and was certainly one of my recommendations—and then you unleashed the regions through regional skills planning, you could do mapping work on what was needed and who the providers were. A more strategic approach of looking at what we need and where the gaps are would be better than having some beauty parade and saying, “Right—there’s £90 million in the apprenticeship fund. Who wants to bid for it?”
When it comes to budget scrutiny, I think that it would be better—or equally as valuable—to look at the £3.2 billion that we spend on our entire post-school skills system and to work out whether that money is being put to best use. A tiny proportion of it goes on apprenticeship funding. Indeed, the latest figure, which I think is in the Scottish Parliament information centre paper that we have all received, is £120 million or £140 million out of that £3.2 billion. Another £1 billion is locked into the free or no-cost tuition fees policy that we have in Scotland, on which I did not make recommendations because I was concerned that it would become the sole focus of the report. However, we need to look at all that in the context of the tightest financial settlement that we have had in 30 years of devolution.
Finally, and going back to public sector reform, I think that it is all about delivery and ensuring that we actually change things. That might sound idealistic of me after all these years in the Parliament, but I think that, if you are going to go through this difficult process in the knowledge that it will take years before you get any kickback, you really have to look at delivery.
James Withers mentioned structural change. Politicians inevitably get caught up in the idea, but my experience is that structural change tends to lead to cultural change, because you get a turnover of the leaders in a particular area. When politicians try to encourage cultural change but it does not really happen, because of leadership or whatever, they inevitably end up saying, “Right—structural change has to happen.” Surely, James, there has to be some structural change if we are to get the other changes that you highlighted in your report, which we are discussing now.
Absolutely, and that is why my recommendation in that respect set out that comprehensive structural change needed to happen. For some people, that would be very uncomfortable. It would have been easier for me to say in my report, “Just throw more money at apprenticeships.” We do need more money for apprenticeships—we all agree that we would like that to happen—but if we simply throw more money at one part of the system we will just deepen that particular silo or that aspect of the fragmentation. There has to be structural reform. I remain optimistic that such structural reform is being put in place, but it will not be the end in itself. It is the first step towards achieving delivery change, which will rely on there being cultural change.
I am an advocate of what the Government is seeking to achieve through the Tertiary Education and Training (Funding and Governance) (Scotland) Act 2026 and of bringing together the funding into one place.
We now have questions from Laura Moodie.
10:15
My first question is to all of you; I will then have shorter follow-up questions for each of you.
For many years, we have known that apprenticeships remain quite heavily gender segregated, with different routes leading to very different earnings and progression outcomes. What specific changes are needed in schools, among employers and in the apprenticeship system to ensure that apprenticeships widen opportunity instead of simply reproducing existing inequalities?
Part of that is about what SDS is left with when the funding system has moved out. It is about encouraging people to understand what the career paths and opportunities are and how those can benefit different types of people in different ways.
One of the challenges in the skills agenda is that people do not understand what the job market is like. If we look at careers planning in schools, for example, we see that careers teachers have often been through the system and, therefore, are not familiar with the wider aspects of career opportunities. It is really important that we showcase people who have already gone down non-traditional pathways and highlight how successful they can be, how happy they are in their jobs and how they have progressed well. It is important that we get that message across to the people who have influence on our young people, who include teachers and parents. I would argue that it is also a job for politicians to showcase that message.
I echo that. Universities have looked at that issue a lot. Part of it is down to perceptions and to choices that people make in secondaries 1 and 2 and once they start down their pathways from national 5 qualifications. Female students, in particular, sometimes take themselves out of certain routes because they perceive that some science subjects are very male orientated. That means that, when they get to the later stages in secondary school, their options are much more restricted.
It is about moving the narrative away from there being gendered occupational roles. Recently, the BBC had a news item on the representation of female scientists, which people might have seen. It showed how few female scientists are flagged up at nat 5 level—and in England, too—compared with male scientists. We must provide and showcase those examples, change the narrative and change the expectations of people—parents, school staff and our young people—to move them away from the idea that there are gendered occupations. We must open that up.
I certainly found that there were gender-based and disability-based inequalities and that care-experienced young people had limited opportunities and less successful outcomes in terms of reaching positive destinations.
There is something interesting about the showcasing idea. Helyn gave the example of female scientists. There is an old phrase that says, “You can’t be what you can’t see”. The reason for colleges being inundated with young women who want to go into the beauty sector is that that is what they see—they go to beauty salons at a young age or they might see their older sister going into the sector, for instance. There is work to do on trying to arrest some of those stereotypes.
As Janet said earlier, the visibility and line of sight are really blurry from course options, subject choices at school and qualifications that people take through to careers, and it is difficult to navigate through all that. One thing that I was asked to do in my review was to look at our national careers system, but I could not find it—instead, it seemed that we had a patchwork of things in different places. Earlier, Mr Dunlop referenced AI, and it bemuses me that we do not have the careers system equivalent of Skyscanner, with a digital training passport that, through AI, links the user to visible career options. You could see the SCQF qualifications ladder and how one leads to the other. It should be possible to do all that on your phone now.
However, at the moment, there is not a huge amount of private sector commercial incentive to go down that route, so the public sector should maybe fill that gap. The public sector is, in part, supposed to address that kind of market failure—and there is market failure in relation to that provision. Investing a small number of millions could make a big difference, which could help to provide a line of sight from subject choice to career and address showcasing the reality of opportunities for different genders.
To follow up on that point, if funding were redesigned in the way that you have proposed, would you like funding incentives to be linked to outcomes such as tackling equality objectives or occupational segregation, or is that too complex or too focused on the end instead of the start of the process?
Funding has a role because we know that it influences behaviour. Earlier there was a reference to how we could use public sector funding to encourage businesses to do more. If you are a grant recipient, it is legitimate that the public sector should ask you to do certain things in return for that grant, which might include apprenticeship offers. Funding has a role to play where clear barriers—whether gender based or otherwise—exist to certain parts of our communities accessing opportunities.
The challenge is that everyone always wants the system to be simple. However, I think we need to give up on that idea, because it is a fallacy. The system is really complex: people and their aspirations are complex, how they learn is complex and the job market is complex. Complexity is not a bad thing. The challenge with the current system is that it is difficult to navigate because we do not know who is doing what; it needs some embedded complexity, and funding has a role in addressing barriers to entry to different types of job for different types of people.
Dr Brown, in the RSE’s evidence, you talked about the need to better align apprenticeships and Scotland’s future economic needs. If women remain underrepresented in sectors such as engineering, digital or net zero, can Scotland realistically meet those workforce ambitions?
Absolutely not. I was a female scientist in my past, and I think that we are missing a trick by not encouraging all genders to go into all practices. Nursing is a classic example: a lot more men are going into nursing, which is hugely positive because of the nature of the people being looked after. So, no, we cannot do it without women.
I go back to what Helyn Gould said earlier: we need to get the career opportunities and the exposure to different jobs much earlier in schools. By the time someone is exposed to careers, they are in secondary 3 or 4, which is way too late. Arguably, they need to be excited about science and everything else when they are in primary school.
I will give you a classic example: me. The reason I got interested in science was because I had a teacher called Mr Horton—the only one of my primary school teachers whose name I can remember—who once made us put one hand in a bowl of hot water, the other in a bowl of cold water, then both hands in a bowl of medium-temperature water in the middle. You should try it when you get home—it is amazing. It is something really simple that teaches you about science. That excitement about science or engineering needs to start in primary school.
One of the challenges that we have, and which we must address, is that the vast majority of our primary school teachers are uncomfortable with science and maths. That goes back to James Withers’s point about the system being very complex—there are lots of complex problems in there, so we must think about it as one system. If you want more women in engineering and modern apprenticeships, you must think about what you are teaching young children in primary school—it is not only about doing that at the end.
Absolutely. Helyn, to pick up on the widening access work that the universities have been doing, could we learn some lessons from it that could be applied to gender imbalance in apprenticeships? Should we focus less on the start of the process, and how many people are going into apprenticeships, and more on where those people are five years afterwards with regard to pay, progression and job security? Sometimes it feels as though we focus very much on how many people are achieving or how many starts we get instead of what the outcome is for those people in five years.
The question of how we should measure success is really interesting, and there are opportunities on that. For example, one proposal that keeps coming up in several areas is the individual learner number, which would provide a way to tie together records and evidence to enable us to look at that data. For us to do that would be top of my Christmas list, because data is very powerful in allowing us to interrogate and understand what has been happening. Analysing what happens in graduate apprenticeships from a widening access point of view, looking at graduate outcomes, understanding the upskilling and reskilling aspects and exploring the various elements all come down to our ability to interrogate our systems. That is the first component of what we need to be able to do.
On universities’ widening access activities, I echo Dr Brown's point on primary education. A lot of those activities involve universities going out into primary education to do outreach work and address the various issues, recognising where we have work to do and trying to do the messaging associated with it.
There are success stories there. In particular, we have evidenced the attainment that has happened out of some of those routes. I have to be honest: our graduate apprentice graduates are absolutely phenomenal, because they finish their courses with not only a degree but four years’ work experience. I have always likened that to the difference, at the end of four years, between having been taught Spanish in Glasgow and having been taught it in Madrid. So, it is also about evidencing the success that we have had. I agree that many opportunities exist in widening access activities more generally.
That takes us to the close of this evidence session. I thank you all for your participation.
I now suspend the meeting for up to five minutes for a comfort break before we go on to our next evidence session.
10:27
Meeting suspended.
10:35
On resuming—