Today's apprentices must be on training for twelve months (one day a week), and also be paid at least the minimum wage and have sick pay, holiday pay and any work benefits offered, including access to employer training programmes. All apprentices must now complete an independent end-point assessment at the conclusion of their training to confirm that they have achieved occupational competence. Good organisations will often provide some preparation support to help young apprentices step into learning. These preparation programmes are often seen as a ‘nice to have’ but they are very important to prepare young people, often just out of school, to become work ready.
Many young people can only do an apprenticeship if they live at home, as their wages are too low to cover rent, travel and the rising cost of living. For more vulnerable young people with less family support, this is particularly troubling. For example, there are 800,000 young people classified as Not in Education Employment or Training (NEET), which has a detrimental impact on their physical and mental wellbeing and often leads to a very unhappy life of crime and poverty. Yet we know that by supporting them into apprenticeships, we can give them a head start. It makes no sense to overlook our responsibility for our future generation.
Childcare is a sector that has welcomed apprentices, not least because in a sector struggling with recruiting sufficient good-quality staff, apprenticeships are the most effective pipeline. Taking apprentices, integrating them into the culture of the organisation, and providing the training and work experience can be the perfect solution for both the employer and the apprentice. The risk is that the apprentice is only as good as the organisation which trains and employs them. A programme that does not build in regular, relevant and robust training and mentoring is failing the apprentice. This is not a cheap option. Good apprentices need a great learning experience, if they are to succeed. The majority of apprentices are trained through independent learning providers: in 2019 that was 457,000 out of a total of 735,000. In the Ofsted Annual Report for that year there was a reference to their concern about quality, especially learning and assessment of progress, access to off-the-job training and the competence of the teaching staff. Half of the provision inspected was judged as requiring improvement or inadequate. As a great advocate of apprentices this worries me, as it can damage the already fragile reputation of apprenticeships as a very credible route to employment.
In an underfunded sector, there is always the risk that some organisations will use apprentices as cheap labour. Desperation may drive such behaviour. Getting the funding right is critical to ensuring apprentices are trained by well-qualified and capable staff who are able to deliver the best education to all children.
Apprenticeships are a major part of education and training. Employers must take a lead in developing, implementing and monitoring apprenticeship programmes that will add value to the sector. My small contribution to this was creating a qualification for chefs working in the early years who have much to offer, especially in educating staff and parents about healthy meals for small children. The Level 2 Diploma in Food Production and Cooking in Early Years is the result of my efforts, and is now available through an apprentice route for budding chefs interested in becoming experts in cooking for small children (www.qualhub.co.uk/qualification-search/qualification-detail/level-2-diploma-in-food-production-and-cooking-in-early-years-78).
Call to Action
Celebrate and support great apprentices. Join the voices of employers, politicians, schools, colleges and apprentices together to tell the country about why apprentices are a great investment. Let's campaign to raise the status of apprentices nationally.
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Further Reading
Bradbury, A. and Wynne, V. (2020) The Apprentice's Guide to End Point Assessment. London: Sage.
Meggit, C. (2006) Child Development: An Illustrated Guide, 2nd edn. London: Heinemann.
Tassoni, P. (2012) Practical EYFS Handbook. London: Pearson.
B is for Babies
Working life is such today that many people have to seek work in towns or cities away from their existing family networks. Our economy has increasingly becoming a two-person economy. The impact of both those shifts was often felt when a child was born. New parents found themselves far away from family networks and willing grandparents, but still needing childcare to enable them to continue to work. In other words, they needed a strong accessible and high-quality childcare infrastructure.
For the most part the maternity systems are designed to allow a parent to stay at home for up to approximately twelve months with some level of pay. According to the annual Office for National Statistics figures, 75% of mothers return to work (Office for National Statistics, 2019a). That means we are welcoming babies into nurseries aged anywhere between six and twelve months, although more recently we have been increasingly requested to settle babies into nursery aged four months. This is more common among women who work for international companies in senior positions where there is a limited maternity allowance and also a greater risk of losing their position. This is another strand of work that perhaps needs a feminist perspective.
When a parent arrives at a childcare setting with a small baby, their first impressions are based on how we support them. Parents, mostly mothers, are anxious about trusting their babies into the care of a stranger. They are weighed down by the practical issues such as breast feeding, infant feeding and introducing solids, and sleep or the lack of it. How we respond builds the foundation of a successful relationship within which a baby will thrive. Many parents are wracked with guilt having read the conflicting research as to whether nurseries are good for their children. The jury is still out on this as the research is chequered. They worry as to whether to find a childminder, a nanny, or simply abandon all intentions of a career and stay at home. For those such as single parents, main providers, or those who must work to balance the family income, the choice is much more based on the availability, locality and cost of a place. Baby places are not subsidised and can therefore cost anything between £250 and £350 a week.
In childcare, understanding of a baby's development must be solid, right from the very point of conception. If you were to follow government policies you would think all children were born in a school uniform, so little do babies get mentioned. Yet children's development over the first two years is astounding. Combine that with our continual learning from neuroscience and we actually need staff working with babies to be the very best.
Approximately 277,000 children attend nurseries and about 21% of them are babies. These babies can spend up to ten hours, five days a week, 51 weeks a year in a nursery or childcare setting, so we need to get it right for babies. Therefore, staff working with babies need to be very knowledgeable and experienced with buckets of emotional intelligence. The needs of a four-month-old child are very different across the range of developmental needs, interests and skills as compared to a 20-month-old. Staff in baby rooms really need a specialist qualification and from research we know that generally parents support this. We must raise the status of baby staff and make them experts in their field. Sadly, in far too many settings, the less qualified and experienced are based there. You also find that agency and relief staff are put in the baby room. This is not a good idea if we are to support parents, as the general understanding of a baby's development among new parents is still very much misunderstood and sought and shared through lived experienced, old wives’ tales perpetuated through social media and