The report, funded by the Commercial Education Trust, revealed that the negative perceptions around apprenticeships among students, teachers and parents hampers take-up and highlights how more needs to be done to ensure equal guidance for both academic and vocational pathways and challenge views about the suitably of different apprenticeships across genders.
The report demonstrates the need for teachers to be given further advice and information on apprenticeships and for students to have the opportunity to meet employers (including former or current apprentices) in school, to mitigate the lack of reliable information available.
Read the full report here
This film shows the key findings:
Findings include:
Gender stereotyping exists in apprenticeship careers provision. Too little has been done to challenge these stereotypes and promote ‘non-traditional’ roles to students.
- Employers believe that parents are one of the biggest barriers preventing school leavers beginning an apprenticeship.
- Students’ perceptions are that apprenticeships are ‘low pay’ and offer less flexibility than a university route.
- Schools which successfully sent a great number of teenagers into apprenticeships start giving career advice and guidance at a younger age and before key decision-making ages.
- Young people who have a positive perception of apprenticeship have received greater number of employer engagement activities in school.
- Young people found the career education they receive mostly biased to academic education. They believe there is a shortage of advice and guidance about vocational routes to the labour market.
- Careers provision around apprenticeships is patchy. Teachers lack confidence and experience in promoting apprenticeships, leaving young people with advice that often focusses on going to university.
Education and Employers in partnership with the National Apprenticeship Service are already tackling some of the issues outlined in the report. We have 6,514 volunteers signed up to go into schools to talk about their experience of apprenticeships and so far, we have trained 2,863 teachers to talk to their students about apprenticeships.
Dr Elnaz Kashefpakdel, Head of Research, Education and Employers, has written a feature about the report for FE News.
The report has also been featured by: QA Education for Headteachers
Janna Simpson, an Apprentice Project Manager at Highway’s England says:
“What I love about my job is that there’s always something new to learn and every day I get more and more responsibility. I think it’s really important for apprentices to talk to state school children. I never had that and the jobs and routes to a career that I learned about in school were very small compared to what’s actually out there”.
Inspiring the Future’s free online matchmaking platform quickly and easily connects schools and volunteers who can go in to schools and colleges to talk about the jobs they love and the route they took to achieve it. 40,000 people have already volunteered and it is hoped to double that number in the next two years.
Education and Employers has worked with the National Apprenticeship Service since 2013 to help pupils better understand apprenticeships and since 2015, have been the delivery partner for the Apprenticeship Support and Knowledge for Schools project on behalf of the National Apprenticeship Service across the Southern and London regions to support the Government’s target of achieving 3 million apprenticeship starts by 2020.
For more information on the report, Teenage Apprenticeships: Converting awareness to recruitment, contact: Dr Elnaz Kashefpakdel, Head of Research, Education and Employers elnaz.kashefpakdel@educationandemployers.org 020 7566 4894.