Today’s official apprenticeship data really is a wake-up call for the government. 

As the Association of Employment and Learning Providers (AELP) surveys predicted, the coronavirus pandemic has wreaked havoc on the flagship skills programme with new starts in April slumping by nearly three-quarters compared with 12 months ago. 

We should be particularly alarmed that the proportion of apprentices aged under 25 is now only a third of the total starts, and that intermediate apprenticeships (level 2) account for only 22.7 per cent of starts. This was 36.8 per cent in 2018-19. The bottom rungs of the ladder of opportunity need more than a lick of Ronseal to stop them decaying further.

News: Apprenticeship starts plummet during lockdown

More: Number of NEET young people rises to more than 770,000

Boris Johnson: 'I will look into an apprenticeship guarantee'

Coming straight after Tes reporting that the number of NEET young people has risen to more than 770,000, this doesn’t make for a good end to the month. 

The Department for Education’s attitude towards all this is genuinely puzzling. Contrast it with what the prime minister, the Labour Party, the Sutton Trust and the boss of the Institute for Fiscal Studies have said over the last few days. 

In response to the Commons Education Select Committee chair Robert Halfon (chapeau to Rob), Boris Johnson said that he "totally agreed" that apprenticeships would play a "huge part in getting people back on to the jobs market and getting them into work and we will look at anything to help people".

If the prime minister "gets it", why are DfE ministers struggling to make the connection between maximising the number of apprenticeship opportunities for young people and ensuring that the country’s training infrastructure is at maximum capacity to help create those opportunities? 

The training provider relief scheme 

I am referring of course to the department’s continued refusal to extend the Cabinet Office provider relief scheme to cover the two-thirds of England’s 628,000 apprentices not in scope for protection. Labour’s shadow education team has written again to Gavin Williamson, saying they cannot see any justification for not extending the scheme and nor can AELP. 

As we go further into the summer, the cash reserves of both high-quality and niche providers will run down and an already fragile infrastructure will begin to erode badly. 

At every opportunity, skills minister Gillian Keegan reminds audiences that she had 30 years in business before becoming an MP, yet there appears to be a need for us to clearly spell out that today’s crash in new starts equals a huge slump in provider income that puts the sector’s financial resilience at risk. The DfE says that it keeps the situation under review, but it is now time for ministers to act.

When it comes to the government and the agencies, it hasn’t all been bad news. We should tip our hats to Ofsted, Institute for Apprenticeships and Technical Education and Ofqual for the flexibilities that they have allowed during the pandemic, while ESFA officials are working very hard to get more of our requests through the government machine. To build on this and in the interests of young people, we need to see more progress on traineeships and study programmes.

Supporting an economic recovery

As the government rolls out its plan to end the lockdown, we need a strategy not just to support young people but also adults who have sadly lost their jobs during the pandemic. Earlier this month, AELP submitted a well-received paper to government and the devolved authorities that outlined a set of proposals on how the employment and skills sector could collectively support the economy to recover.

Our view is that a simplistic approach is unlikely to work because the experiences of different sectors of the economy have varied so much over the past three months. The solution must start with identifying job opportunities and upskilling requirements as the core driver, not a generic skills or work programme with different government departments doing their own thing. This requires sophistication and close engagement with employers and sectors, utilising live rather than lagged data.

AELP’s paper has identified the following priority groups who require support:

• Those NEET/long-term unemployed before the crisis, who will be pushed even further away from job opportunities.
• Low-skilled, recently unemployed individuals as a consequence of the Covid-19 crisis.
• Higher-skilled workers displaced by the crisis primarily due to a shrinking in the economy.
• Young talent (aged 16-24), many of whom are entering the workforce for the first time.
• Those who are economically inactive going back into the workforce due to economic need.

The proposals recognise that many displaced workers will have skills that they consider are specific to the industry they work in, but are actually transferable skills that will be of use and benefit in other roles in other industries.

While there is certainly scope to adjust existing programmes, we doubt that there is time for completely new employment and skills programmes to be devised when we are plunging into what could be the worst recession in living memory. 

A sophisticated new approach is needed to maximise the economic impact from existing programmes and get as many unemployed people back into work as quickly as possible. The young people who will hear about today’s apprenticeship figures need to be given hope that there is a decent future ahead of them.

Mark Dawe is chief executive of the Association of Employment and Learning Providers