As Santa’s little helpers are nearly all on zero-hour contracts, it’s timely to remind the new government what our priorities should be. For when it comes to getting access to skills training, we are not just talking about the rights of those “working atypically”, as the Taylor Review of 2017 described them. 

There are certainly successes to build on, but the re-established Department for Education ministerial team really needs to press the reset button so that there is a better balance between all those who benefit from government-funded skills programmes, including apprenticeships. And not to labour the “Red Wall” point, but many of the “forgotten 50 per cent” from our education system reside north of Milton Keynes.

Read more: Election policies ‘won’t touch the forgotten third’

More views:  How can the government get the country Brexit ready?

Background: Inquiry aims to provide vision for skills system

Migration system

The Conservatives have set the parameters themselves with their confirmation that Brexit will be accompanied by an Australian-style inward migration points system with time-limited visas for low-skilled workers. We all know that sectors such as health, hospitality, construction and social care could be massively affected, and, as the Association for Employment and Learning Providers (AELP) has been saying since the day after the 2016 referendum, the policy imperative is to train more home-grown talent to fill the vacancies which arise after the new system is introduced. This is simply not going to happen if, for example, training providers are expected to train adult social care apprentices at a rate of £3,000 each. 

The Johnson/Cummings regime will apparently be all about “delivery, delivery, delivery” rather than about those who can perform well in the TV studios. And so while the aforementioned sectors may not qualify as exciting soundbites for the cameras, looking after them in terms of skills training is absolutely essential if the prime minister’s priorities are to be realised.    

Building on successes is about ensuring that the country’s skills strategy delivers improvements in productivity and meets the needs of employers, communities and individuals. In short, we need a new comprehensive skills strategy covering young people and adults. The proposed £3 billion national skills fund could form a significant part of the strategy and AELP’s view is that an allocation from the Fund should be directed towards the introduction of individual skills accounts. We have submitted to the DfE a blueprint for these accounts based on a robustly tested and approved provider base, a catalogue of approved learning programmes and an embracing of the latest technological advances which will allow employers and learners to top them up.

The number of young people starting an apprenticeship has dropped by a quarter since the levy was introduced in 2017 and starter-level apprenticeships have slumped by half. The government’s election manifesto pledged to train up hundreds of thousands more highly skilled apprentices while the prime minister previously promised that the apprenticeship programme would be “properly funded”. 

We would naturally welcome early action on these commitments in the forthcoming budget because 40 per cent of apprenticeship providers are having to turn away smaller businesses wanting to recruit apprentices or have given up marketing apprenticeships to them as a result of the growing shortfall in funding from the apprenticeship levy.

Even if providers have access to funding, it is clear from their conversations with employers that the rigidity of the off-the-job training rules remains undoubtedly the biggest obstacle to businesses offering more apprenticeships. Policymakers and opinion-formers misguidedly cling on to the 20 per cent requirement as some imagined measure of quality, which it certainly isn’t, using apples and pears comparisons with practice abroad. 

We now need to see the rules flexed with a standard by standard review, recognising fully that the true value of an apprenticeship lies in what a person learns from training on the job. As part of the Brexit strategy, the government also needs to kickstart traineeships because they are highly effective in getting young people with few or no qualifications into apprenticeships and jobs. Equitable funding for teaching functional skills for applied maths and English within an apprenticeship must also be a spending round priority.  

So in the spirit of a classic old Morecambe and Wise sketch, the government has all the right notes - but now is the time to play them in the right order.   

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