Foundation Apprenticeships are Scotland’s newest school qualification - but only just. They’ve been around since 2016, pipping Nationals (introduced from 2013-14) to the title.
But there can be no doubt as to which is the more popular. Last year, while there were around 300,000 National 5 entries, there were 3,000 entries for Foundation Apprenticeships at Scottish Credit and Qualifications Framework (SCQF) level 6.
In some ways this is an unfair comparison - for a start, the Foundation Apprenticeships introduced in 2016 are, like Highers, at SCQF level 6, a step up from National 5 (SCQF level 5). Yet, these work-based qualifications are not attracting anything like the same interest as more “traditional” ones.
However, those who have embraced them - such as Aberdeenshire Council, which has the highest uptake of Foundation Apprenticeships of any local authority - say they are driving up attainment and making school relevant for all.
Foundation Apprenticeships came into being following Sir Ian Wood’s 2014 report, Education working for all: developing Scotland’s young workforce, which sought to improve access to vocational training and get more young people into work. The report called for the 50 per cent of students who do not attain Highers to be better catered for in school.
Foundation Apprenticeships were to help plug that gap and bring work-based learning into senior secondary. Now, they are available at SCQF level 6 in 12 subject areas, from engineering to social services. The qualification is also being piloted at SCQF levels 4 and 5.
Foundation Apprenticeships are a “game changer”, says Andrew Ritchie, a former secondary head who is Aberdeenshire’s Developing the Young Workforce lead, because if in the past a school ran vocational courses, it could have a negative impact on attainment levels. That’s not the case with Foundation Apprenticeships.
“Vocational courses were not tariffed as well as traditional courses, but Foundation Apprenticeships changed that and you can actually increase attainment by delivering them,” he says. “In the past, if a pupil had opted not to take history but to take boat building instead, that meant your attainment was going to take a hit.”
All Foundation Apprenticeships at SCQF level 6 are worth at least two C grades at Higher, with the engineering frameworks equivalent to at least two B grades at Higher.
At Aberdeenshire secondary Portlethen Academy, some young people who would not have been expected to attain any Highers have attained a qualification at an equivalent level by doing a Foundation Apprenticeship, says recently retired head Neil Morrison.
For Abbie Johnson - who left Portlethen Academy in 2020 and is now studying law - taking a Foundation Apprenticeship in S6 was a no-brainer. She hates the pressure of high-stakes exams, and she liked the idea of being continually assessed and getting work experience while gaining a qualification equivalent to two Highers.
“It was definitely one of my highlights of my six years in school because you were learning by doing something - rather than learning facts, you were getting an insight into working life,” she says, adding that “the continuous assessment took so much pressure off and I was able to enjoy the learning”.
Abbie was on the social services, children and young people pathway and did work experience with a childminder two afternoons a week, with the course’s theory element delivered in school by external trainers.
Rebecca Westwater also left Portlethen Academy in 2020. She wanted to be a nurse and was keen to get hands-on experience, so she did a Foundation Apprenticeship in social services and healthcare, carrying out work experience at Carronhill School, a special school in nearby Stonehaven.
“It’s so difficult to get real-life work experience when you’re still learning, and the Foundation Apprenticeship broke down that barrier for me - it solidified for me that nursing was what I wanted to do.”
In Aberdeenshire, Foundation Apprenticeships tend to be delivered in school - as opposed to a further education college - largely because of the time and difficulties involved in travelling across a large, rural local authority, says Ritchie. But a school-based approach is also about giving the qualification “parity of esteem” with other senior-phase courses and ensuring it is part of the “core curriculum offer”.
Foundation Apprenticeships are now offered in all Aberdeenshire secondaries, and the council projects that around a quarter of 2022 school leavers will have the qualification at SCQF level 4, 5 or 6.
A Skills Development Scotland progress report in June showed that Foundation Apprenticeships had a presence in over 90 per cent of state schools in Scotland. However, uptake varies widely.
In 2020, uptake for levels 4-6 in Aberdeenshire - which has around 6,500 students in the senior phase, according to the 2020 pupil census - was 531 students. But in Edinburgh - which in 2020 had almost 9,000 senior-phase students - uptake was just 114. In North Lanarkshire, with 9,500 senior secondary students, uptake of Foundation Apprenticeships was 269.
Ritchie says the key to Aberdeenshire’s successful rollout was that it has been “strategically driven” - that is, the authority wants this qualification in its schools and has been determined to make that happen.
Headteachers in areas where the qualification has not taken off to the same extent say the reasons are straightforward: lack of promotion and investment.
“If you put in new courses, staffing levels either need to go up or other courses have to go,” one head told Tes Scotland.
Another head says that FAs - as they are sometimes known - need “a reboot” and that it was a mistake to call them Foundation Apprenticeships, which implies they are “bottom or basic” and calls to mind Standard Grade terminology - the Foundation award at Standard Grade (the qualifications replaced by Nationals) was the lowest that a student could achieve.
Responding to criticisms, the Scottish government says it invested more than £12 million in Foundation Apprenticeships through Skills Development Scotland and the Scottish Funding Council in 2021-22, and that the numbers undertaking FAs have increased year on year since their introduction in 2016, with 4,240 starts in 2020-21; there were just 346 in 2016, when only the level 6 qualification was available.
Jamie Hepburn, minister for higher education and further education, youth employment and training, added that an Education Scotland review of Foundation Apprenticeships is due out in early 2022.
Graeme Hendry, who leads the Skills Development Scotland team charged with establishing Foundation Apprenticeships in schools, says that SDS is happy with the qualification’s growth.
“Even during the most difficult period ever for work-based learning - when [because of Covid] we have not been able to promote Foundation Apprenticeships in the way we used to - demand has remained …That tells us that what we were doing to get [FAs] embedded in the system, and thought of as a mainstream part of it, is there.”
Something that helped Aberdeenshire schools embrace Foundation Apprenticeships was the possibility of running them over one year, as opposed to the two years originally envisaged as the sole option. The “shorter duration delivery model” was introduced in 2017 and by 2020 was almost as popular as the more established two-year model. “Our schools were reporting youngsters would go along in year one but drop out in year two,” says Ritchie. “Rightly or wrongly, the system and youngsters are used to a one-year duration and that fitted with their other courses.”
In October, the government confirmed its intention to reform qualifications, and questions about existing vocational options have already been raised.
Earlier this month, Professor Gordon Stobart, who wrote a recent government-commissioned report on the future of qualifications, told the Scottish Parliament’s Education, Children and Young People Committee that vocational education is “a powerful option”. He also said that Scotland was in a “good position”, citing Foundation Apprenticeships as a “high-status vocational qualification”.
So, the qualification is there, offering something compelling and credible - but it’s less clear if schools have what they need to embrace it.
Emma Seith is a reporter for Tes Scotland
This article originally appeared in the 26 November 2021 issue under the headline “The foundation for a vocational revolution?”
