Hello PPMA members and friends

As part of our ‘Let’s Talk’ themes, our President Caroline Nugent gives us an update on how apprenticeships and the levy have developed over the past year.

“Well what a year it has been. From the ‘excitement’ of the new levy to the reality of the new levy! You are all very well versed on my views on apprentices and how passionate I am about bringing on tomorrow’s talent so they do not have huge debts. We have had an olive branch of some change through the chancellors recent speech, so hopefully those in power have realised that we all want this to work but it will not be successful in its current state.

We need to increase apprentice numbers again as to see a 50% reduction in numbers of apprentices is just the worst thing, which could have happened! I suppose I have to get my frustrations out of the way before I reflect on the positives. Why has it given providers the opportunity to raise fees for providing the same things! How can a course last year have gone up so much? And hasn’t this happened for our own HR professional courses too? We are heading the same way as universities where we have a race to the top to see who is going to charge the most and who is going to challenge why fees have gone up so much!

And why on earth weren’t the qualifications ready for some of those courses we desperately wanted to put people into as part of succession planning? What I find so depressing is during talking to so many people that I am hearing ‘oh we just put x onto a management course to make sure we use up the money!’ Where is the strategic planning approach we really need? And who is keeping track on the equalities on who is getting the training and who isn’t. I can just see now the FOIs etc asking which protected characteristic had opportunities and who didn’t…….. we don’t want another BBC.

So onto the positives as I always do. We have our highly successful national programme on Apprentice of the Year, which is due to run again this month and will test and challenge our young people and put them outside of their comfort zones. If I had had the opportunity to go on a programme like this, which is FREE and will set me up for life, I would have been so motivated and grateful to my employer. Let’s increase numbers even further next year to give more people the chance.

We have wonderful people like Matthew from Central Bedfordshire who won our Apprentice of the Year 2017 and has been working with Leatham on considering disabilities in apprenticeships and how we can make this work so that we can actively support and increase numbers of people with disabilities in the workforce. There is a real opportunity here.

Finally all in all I see a positive potential to apprenticeships, but this is conditional upon being able to use some of the money for salaries and challenging providers about why costs are increasing. From one ex apprentice to the next lets make it work and lets work together to give young people the chance to work cross sector or across different public bodies during the apprenticeship so they get a fantastic experience and no university debt!”

Hello PPMA colleagues and friends

In this week’s blog post, our amazing Apprentice of the Year, Matthew Wallis gives us an update on the work he has been doing on accessible apprenticeships for disabled people. Matthew speaks from very personal experience as he is hearing-impaired. For those of us that know Matthew well, we know that this ‘impairment’ does not make Matthew ‘less-than’ in any way. Caroline Nugent told us that Matthew’s commitment to raising opportunities for disabled apprentices is clear to see and his experience means that his thoughts have real insight and impact.

So over, to Matthew …….

“I would like to give an update on the progress being made by the PPMA to make sure that public sector organisations have the tools they require so that their apprenticeships are as accessible as possible for disabled people. For those of you who haven’t read my previous articles in the PPMA’s focus supplement, I feel very passionate about promoting the benefits of employing more disabled apprentices.

As a former hearing-impaired apprentice, I can say from personal experience that apprenticeships offer disabled people the chance to achieve great things – as long as the support is available to help them reach their potential. For employers, the benefits include the opportunity to shape their workforce to reflect the community served, the introduction of new skills and an increase in the number of high quality apprenticeship candidates.

Of the 7 million disabled people in the UK, 3.4 million are currently out of work. As a result of this, public sector organisations are missing out on the chance to employ talented members of staff. With increasing pressures in the public sector to ensure they recruit and retain the best talent, could providing accessible apprenticeships for people with disabilities, offer the much-needed key for a prosperous future workforce?

I think it can. The government has set an ambitious target of 3 million new apprenticeships by 2020. As part of this target, there has been an increased focus on the need to encourage and enable many more highly quality disabled candidates to start apprenticeships. There have already been a number of initiatives which aims to tackles this.  This includes:

–       The Apprenticeship Levy, where learning providers can receive additional funding for recruiting disabled apprentices;

–       And the Paul Maynard taskforce recommendations, which was a taskforce commissioned to explore access to apprenticeships for people with learning disabilities.

Despite these efforts, there is still a lot more work that needs to be done, to achieve the governments ambitious goals.

In the past few months, I have been undertaking research and building a case to determine what we can do to help bridge the apprenticeship gap for disabled people. As a result of this research, I provided the PPMA Policy Board an update earlier this month. I made 4 simple, but effective, recommendations which aims to tackle the gap.

• To produce a number of case studies of disabled apprentices in the public sector
• To gather statistics regarding disabled apprentices in the public sector
• To create a standard for an ‘Accessible Apprenticeship’
• To understand what barriers there may be in recruiting disabled apprentices

These recommendations will help PPMA and our employer organisations identify whether their apprenticeship programmes are as accessible as they could be. In the coming months, I will be working with our networks to try and make sure these recommendations become a reality.

If you know of any disabled apprentice in the public sector who would like to contribute to this project, either as a case study or to give feedback, please encourage them to contact me at matthew.wallis@centralbedfordshire.gov.uk.  Alternatively, if you have any thoughts, comments or suggestions please feel free to contact me or drop me an email.”

Matthew Wallis , PPMA Apprentice of the Year 2017