UK Students and companies keen to meet the government’s 2020 apprenticeship targets

The ruling Conservative party in the UK set themselves a big target on apprenticeships in the run-up to the 2015 general election in an attempt to plug the skills gap in the country. They pledged to have three million apprenticeships by 2020 and introduced a new system whereby businesses would pay for these training positions.

Four years later, apprentices feel they made the right choice in choosing a training scheme over the university, having weighed up their options as to whether it was a good alternative to a degree, particularly in light of the cost of tuition fees. Both apprentices and businesses approve of the system, but both feel there is more work to be done to meet the target.

In 2017, the government introduced the apprenticeship levy, with the aim of supporting these schemes. The levy means that employers with a payroll of over GBP3 million per annum now have to allocate 0.5 percent of their payroll costs to training.

This financial obligation was imposed to support the apprenticeship strategy, but in 2017-18, the number of apprenticeships starting fell 24 percent year-on-year, going down from 494,900 to 375,800, with many businesses calling for an urgent simplification of the apprenticeship levy to enable the scheme to be a success to enable them to take on apprentices without the headache of a complex, bureaucratic regime.