Category: Apprenticeships

Apprenticeships are not an “alternative” to uni, they’re alt-uni
On the first Sunday in July, Ipswich runs a free music festival at Christchurch Park.

It’s a great experience for Ipswich – it’s one of few times in a year where the town is full and busy.

Anyone from an Ipswich secondary school will likely have fond memories – meeting their friends on Hippie Hill – seeing multiple people you know all at once, getting into mosh pits, going on the Booster. The list goes on.

But despite my advocacy for Ipswich, I once found myself anxious to attend. Earlier in my apprenticeship, I had difficult experiences at work with a frequent performer at this festival.

This is something which, nearly six years after the ordeal ended, I am still coming to terms with.

Something which has helped me a great deal is the idea of exposure therapy. This is the act of revisiting certain ideas and places from a new reference point.

The intent is that it neutralises any bad associations with an idea or place by creating new associations. Over time, more neutral or even good experiences will outnumber the bad ones.

It’s like treating grief as a ball in a jar, where the jar grows around the ball over time. The pain is still there when the ball hits the jar, though the ball is much less likely to hit the expanding insides of the jar.

Along these lines, I approached the 2024 Ipswich Music Day with a fresh perspective. Seeing the band in the programme made me reflect on the rhetoric around being an apprentice and how it’s positioned alongside other options.

No alternative

I would argue that apprenticeships are not an alternative to university, at least not in all cases. Whilst it is a clear-cut alternative in some cases, such as advanced apprenticeships, it is more complex for Higher and Degree apprenticeships.

In these cases, it is debatable – on the one hand, these apprentices can attain qualifications at the equivalent level of a degree without attending a university.

In others, such as in my own personal experience, going to university was a core part of my experience – my qualification was a degree accredited by a university.

Gaining an academic education is what drew me to my degree apprenticeship, along with the opportunity to meet other students and experience (and create) a stimulating academic environment with them.

The difference in my case was that I wanted to apply what I had learned much more immediately and meaningfully – doing this would allow the knowledge to be retained more easily for me.

Maybe my experience is not universal – I can’t claim to know what other students’ experience has been like.

Nevertheless, I did my best to gain a fulfilling student experience, which was easier to achieve when I lived locally.

Whilst I did attend the university Film Society and meet up with friends, I did not have the “full” experience – I wasn’t living away from home, and I didn’t have as much free time to study and discover my interests. This is because much of the free time was consumed by a full-time job.

On paper, it does appear to be mostly work with some study release thrown in. This only accounts for the official contact hours, respectively from the employer and the university. To do well as a degree apprentice, you need to be willing to invest time in serious, self-paced academic study outside of the allotted contact hours. From my experience, this was as much as the time I spent at work.

If people who have chosen these options with the express intention of not going to university realise that they have to go to one, then they’re going to dislike the experience or drop out altogether.

Therefore, a contradiction presents itself:

Why is an option promoted as an “alternative to university” when half of it involves going to university?

The common resolution to this contradiction for policymakers and marketers is to just diminish or hide the role of the university as much as possible.

Then, the purpose of the apprenticeship is perceived as solely a means of gaining employment, rather than for its educational merit – university, within this paradigm, is viewed as a distraction or an obstacle to be traversed in order to accomplish solely career-focussed success

But the problem with the approach is disengagement, both socially and academically.

Making the most of it

For me, making the most of the educational aspects of the apprenticeship is as important as making the most of the position of employment.

The goal of an apprenticeship is to start from nothing and to gain experience in a given domain – my own experience shows that the creation of a virtuous cycle of learning is essential in gaining this experience:

The root of the contradiction is a separation between the experience of studying for a degree and the other aspects of university education. These other aspects are often overlooked, of which I have some first-hand experience.

When I have made genuine efforts to engage with every aspect of the experience, I am told that I should have gone to university full-time or that I am spending too much time focussed on academics at the expense of my professional work.

Seeing the band in the Ipswich Music Day programme made me reflect on an approach to resolve the contradiction of promoting degree apprenticeships to people who don’t want to go to university. This solution arguably comes from a change in definitions.

The band defines itself on their website as being “alt-rock”. Alternative rock is a broad genre of rock defined by the fact it is influenced from a diversity of independent music genres.

It is defined as an alternative to forms of rock that were becoming mainstream, such as arena rock – it is a different approach to the common genre of rock. Alt rock is not an alternative to rock as a whole – jazz and classical music are not considered “Alt Rock” for this reason.

We can see that alt-rock doesn’t describe a genre separate from rock. Its approach is different, with alt-rock defining a range of heterophonic subgenres.

Likewise, it can be argued that we should consider arguing for “alt-uni”. This terminology would reflect the fact that degree apprenticeships are alternative to the mainstream of full-time university education, but are not an alternative to university as a whole.

It’s still uni

Arguably, degree apprentices bring a range of learning approaches and knowledge to universities, such as through their professional training.

When I have previously suggested this idea, some argued that “alt-degree” would be a better term, as it focuses on the approach to the degree rather than the university.

But I believe the approach to a degree should be the same for all students, and this expectation contributes to the challenges of completing a degree apprenticeship.

The definition of what this alternative approach would constitute may vary amongst apprentices. Some debate is definitely due, though I would say that the following are important to the definition of alt-uni:
- Every second of university experience matters – an apprenticeship is finite, and we have less time than full-time students. This means careful evaluation of the experience to get the best outcome, academically and socially
- We can immediately and meaningfully apply both academic and professional work to improve the world
- There is the need to establish new precedents over accommodation, socialisation and engagement with university [youth] culture
- We can provide positive role models for studentship unencumbered by student debt, as a means of encouraging the reduction of student debt to ensure that the best options are available for all types of student
- We approach university similarly to students on scholarship. We have effectively been given a scholarship that covers our full loans. I would argue that apprenticeships should seek scholars across the university to inspire each other
- We cannot socialise as much as other students, but socialisation with them is valuable. This is especially true for apprentices of school-leaver age
Degree apprenticeships are not an alternative to university when a university education is involved.

Instead, just as alt-rock is not an alternative to rock, they should be conceived as an alternative approach to university (“alt-uni”).

This approach necessarily requires intentionality, balancing a university life with professional work. Done right, it will create a more inclusive, experience-rich education that values both theory and practice.
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March 7, 2025
Higher education institutions have invested time, effort and money in level 7 apprenticeships

Many readers might have had an experience along the following lines. You’re on a call, in a meeting, at an event – and someone just happens to let slip that they are doing a postgraduate apprenticeship through their work.

Questions bubble up: isn’t this person someone in a position to fund their own studies? Or perhaps: don’t they already have a master’s degree? You might even be thinking: your manager really lets you duck out of work for training so often?

Now this is pure anecdote – and forgive me if it’s not quite as frequent as I’m assuming – but it’s proved to be a pretty powerful one as debates over apprenticeships have percolated in the press and in the back of policymakers’ minds for the last few years. Allied with controversies over supposed “MBA apprenticeships” (or more recently, MBA top-ups and management training for senior executives), it’s led fairly directly to where we are now.

The government has announced that “a significant number” of level 7 apprenticeships will be removed from levy eligibility in England. The accompanying enjoinder for employers to fund them by other means (if they so choose) is likely the death knell for most of the affected courses, given that without the incentive of levy spending they will largely look like ungainly, over-regulated and rather long bits of exec ed.

Now we still don’t know exactly what decision the government is going to take. And Labour’s moves here do have other motivations – the policy intention is to stop employers spending their allowances on (older, already qualified) existing staff, and therefore give them a free hand to take on younger apprentices at lower levels, including with so-called “foundation apprenticeships”, though there is zero detail on how this shift in employer training priorities is expected to come about.

But still – if this was the only priority, money could have come from elsewhere. The fact remains that level 7 apprenticeships have various black marks hanging over them, whether or not justified, which have made them a safe target to go after. Is it really a good use of taxpayers’ money to fund long and expensive courses of what is overwhelmingly in-work training?

Whose fund is it anyway?

A big part of the issue, however, is this sense that the levy is really “taxpayers’ money”. It isn’t – it’s half a per cent of an employer’s annual pay bill, assuming said pay bill is £3m or more. Alison Wolf’s recent report for the Social Market Foundation vividly spells out the issue here – employers have become hyper-aware of what they “owe” and are incentivised to spend it as fast as they can, a perverse incentive of the current system which has made level 7 programmes more attractive than policymakers assumed.

Much of Labour’s current skills policies have their genesis in a period when employers were not successfully deploying their own levy contributions, and there was a question of how better to direct underspends. This is very much not where we are now. And there are many employers who are not well set-up to pivot to entry-level apprenticeships (think solicitors, for example), or who are stressing their own workforce’s need for higher-level upskilling and pursuing productivity gains rather than a larger headcount.

It could be that the non-apprenticeship part of the growth and skills levy will help square this circle – employers will be able to invest in shorter, possibly more useful workforce training this way, rather than running headlong towards level 7 programmes as the only game in town. The problem is that the government has gone very quiet about this, and we have no sense of what kind of courses will be in scope here.

And much like with the employer national insurance rise, it doesn’t seem to have been thought through how publicly-funded bodies are meant to respond here – NHS trusts and local councils being big users of the apprenticeship levy, by dint of their size. If the government doesn’t want them spending their levy funds on this type of provision, is it asking them to spend cash from elsewhere in their budgets?

Caught in the middle

Stuck between employers’ wishes and government’s aims (or the imagined taxpayer investment) are those education and training providers who have poured resources into making higher-level apprenticeships work. And when we’re talking about level 7 qualifications, it’s universities that have done a lot of the running.

If you had said a decade ago that many if not most universities would be founding and scaling up teams dedicated to reaching out to employers, thinking about training needs, even coordinating levy transfers across partners and supply chains (as the Edge Foundation’s recent research found) – well, it would have sounded like something dreamed up by a think tank, a laudable ambition unlikely to ever come true. And yet, here we are.

The Department for Education and Skills England may decide to limit only a couple of standards – as the chart below shows, simply scrapping the Accountancy and Taxation Professional and Senior Leader standards would dramatically change the landscape (though we’d likely be back in the same position in a few years having a similar conversation about the Senior People Professional and Systems Thinking Practitioner ones).

But once the government starts taking a pick-and-mix approach to standards (as opposed to letting a properly independent arms-length body do so), it opens the door to it happening again and again. If there is a substantial defunding of level 7 apprenticeship standards, expect the next few years to see targets on the back of others, even at level 6 – and an accompanying disincentive for universities to keep pressing ahead seeking out partnerships with employers.

The removal from levy eligibility of standards that currently have a high uptake will have an immediate impact on those providers invested in them. Below, DK has charted apprenticeship starts by higher education institution (and a few other public bodies as they are lumped together in the DfE data, though as you may have noticed above some for-profit universities appear in the private sector category instead).

The default view in this chart shows level 7 starts in 2023–24, broken down by standards, so that you can plumb the impact on different providers of different approaches to defunding. And if you’re getting nervous about what else Skills England might fancy doing once it’s finally got the level 7 announcement out of the way, you can look at provision at other levels too.

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February 10, 2025
The barriers that must be removed for degree apprenticeships to meet NHS workforce targets

The recent notion that level 7 apprenticeships will be ineligible for support from the apprenticeship levy has caused consternation amongst training providers, especially in healthcare.

Training providers and employers are urgently seeking clarity on the government’s position – the current “announcement without action” leaves stakeholders unclear about next steps and further risks the reputation and role of apprenticeships in skills development.

The development of advanced roles in health or shortened routes to registerable qualifications significantly relies on level 7 apprenticeships. The NHS Long Term Workforce Plan is full of examples of how advanced and new roles are needed now and in the future.

Once again, decisions are being made by the Department for Education without consulting or collaborating with the Department of Health and Social Care, which means that questions are left unanswered. It is not the first time that training providers and University Alliance have called for joined up thinking and, unfortunately, it certainly won’t be the last.

Expansion of opportunity

Health apprenticeships at the University of Derby started small with level 5 provision about ten years ago (subsequently expanding to levels 6 and 7) – we could not have foreseen the enormous expansion of opportunity both in health and other industries that would follow.

I am proud to say that “I was there” when the nurse degree apprenticeship standard was approved in 2017 – the culmination of two years’ collaboration between the Nursing and Midwifery Council, government, Skills for Health, employers and training providers.

There were challenges, but we made it, and it opened the door to transformation in how healthcare professionals are educated.

A bumpy road

But the journey remains bumpy, and apprenticeships seem to be experiencing a particular period of turbulence. New research conducted by the University of Derby on behalf of University Alliance demonstrates the need for change in how the levy is utilised, the importance of partnership working, and the support that those involved with apprenticeship delivery need in order to secure successful outcomes.

While the NHS Long Term Workforce Plan of 2023 is itself being refreshed, we can be confident that apprenticeships will continue to have a significant part to play in workforce development. However, our new research has shown how and where employers and training providers need support to make this happen.

Employers told us how expensive they find it to support apprenticeships, with apprentice salaries, backfill and organisational infrastructure contributing to the financial burden. We know that apprentices need significant support through their learning journey, taking time and investment from employers.

To make apprenticeships truly successful, the support required is over and above that normally expected in healthcare programmes, yet apprenticeships are specifically excluded from the NHS Healthcare Education and Training tariff. This feels like a double whammy – no support from the tariff and no flexibility in how the levy could be utilised differently, meaning that the responsibility remains with the employer to resource.

Equally, training providers reported the additional activities and responsibilities associated with the delivery of apprenticeships. The University of Derby has recently successfully completed its inspection by Ofsted. The week of the inspection required input from teams across the University, but the enduring responsibilities of compliance and record keeping make this a continuous activity for a skilled and specialist team.

The Education and Skills Funding Agency then came hot on the tails of Ofsted – while this is not unexpected, it has again required teams from across the University working long hours to be audit ready. These inspections have served as a reminder of the regulatory burden placed on training providers, especially in healthcare.

A matter of commitment

Today marks the start of National Apprenticeship Week. At the University of Derby, we are hosting a week of activities and events, encouraging aspirant apprentices and a range of employers to come and find out more about what apprenticeships can do for them. It is heartening to hear that the number of young people coming to the campus this year has more than doubled since last year’s event.

Finally, the word is beginning to spread about apprenticeships, and we find school leavers are increasingly well informed about their post-16 and post-18 options.

The week’s events will be ably supported by our employer partners and apprentices, truly reflecting the partnerships that have developed over the years. These partnerships take a significant amount of investment on all sides – anyone in the vocational education and training world will know that strong partnerships take time and effort to build and maintain. But even the briefest of conversations with apprentices will tell you that it is all worth it. Their confidence, passion and knowledge (their skills and behaviours too) shine through. In a city like Derby, the awareness of the positive difference you are making not only to the apprentice, but also to their family and friends, is never far from your thoughts.

It is difficult to know how the advent of Skills England will impact the pace and scale of reform, but the present inertia may set the country back – and it certainly will if a blanket approach to level 7 apprenticeship funding is adopted, and lack of join-up between DfE and DHSC remains the status quo.

National Apprenticeship Week 2025 has the potential to be a force for good – and should be the week that all stakeholders commit to making a difference.

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February 10, 2025
A blanket removal of funding for level 7 apprenticeships will damage government plans to boost infrastructure

Level 7 apprenticeship growth has been one of the higher education success stories of recent years.

Our technical education system is weak by international standards, yet high level technical skills will be vital to the urban planning and infrastructure improvement ambitions of our current government, while at the same time boosting social mobility by allowing those who can’t afford to study on a traditional course at university the opportunity to gain a postgraduate qualification.

It therefore would appear counterintuitive that the government has been hinting that many if not all level 7 apprenticeships could have their eligibility for levy funding removed, couched in language of prioritising spending on growing lower level and new “foundation” apprenticeships.

This proposed redistribution fails to acknowledge that progression benefits apprentices at all levels, as those moving into senior roles create new vacancies or advancement opportunities via the positions they vacate.

Build baby build?

Nowhere is this clearer than in the built environment sector. The UK’s housing crisis is the pivotal issue that this government has promised to tackle. Their promise to build 1.5 million new homes by 2030 is ambitious – it has been labelled unachievable by the CEO of the UK’s largest housebuilding company because of skills shortages, and most councils are reporting that it won’t be possible to achieve.

If such a goal is to be accomplished, it will demand highly skilled professionals to streamline planning processes, deliver housing projects, and support regional infrastructure development.

At my institution, London South Bank University (LSBU), 70 per cent of our level 7 apprentices are on the chartered town planner standard. On a day-to-day basis they address planning bottlenecks and ensure that housing and infrastructure projects meet the various regulatory and environmental standards. Only last month the first level 7 chartered town planner apprentices in England graduated successfully from LSBU having joined their employer with no prior experience in the planning sector aged 18 after completing school.

Over half of the employers we work with at LSBU on level 7 apprenticeships are local authorities. Our apprentices enable councils to deliver projects in the wake of increased demand and reintroduced mandatory housing targets. The suggestion that, as employers, local authorities should step in and pay for the level 7 apprenticeships themselves is fanciful. The legacy of austerity has left one in four councils expecting to apply for an emergency government bailout in the next two years. If the Treasury decides to remove levy funding, employers will not be able to fill the gap.

If the UK hopes to comply with the Future Homes Standard and the National Retrofit Strategy V2, more highly trained architects are required. The profession is in high demand but short supply – it had been on the Shortage Occupation List until the previous government abolished the list last April.

Level 7 architect apprentices, of which LSBU currently train 78, design energy-efficient buildings and support urban regeneration. They contribute to both public housing schemes and private sector developments by driving innovation in sustainable construction and are already supporting the government’s ambition to retrofit five million homes by 2029.

Growth ambitions

In addition to their clear role in developing infrastructure, level 7 apprenticeships are vital for social mobility. They open doors for individuals from underrepresented groups, in part because apprentices earn whilst they learn and aren’t put off by the prospect of incurring student debt. A true leveller of the playing field, they provide excellent career progression opportunities and higher earnings potential. A greater proportion of our level 7 apprentices are from black, Asian, and minority ethnic (BAME) backgrounds (55 per cent) and are female (52 per cent) than those studying apprenticeships at lower levels.

Most of our level 7 apprentices are under the age of 25, so the characterisation that they are simply the reserve of older learners is unfounded. For example, at LSBU, we provide tailored pathways for young learners to embark on higher level apprenticeships in regionally relevant sectors from level 2 to level 7 through our unique group model which includes London South Bank Sixth Form (a new technically focused sixth form academy concept) and London South Bank Technical College (the first technical college for a generation).

Level 7 apprenticeships are central to this government’s ambitions around growth, sustainability, and equality of opportunity. Despite recent increases in uptake, they have actually accounted for a slightly smaller proportion of the total apprenticeship budget over the last couple of years.

Every standard addresses unique challenges and supports sector-specific needs. A blanket removal of funding from level 7 apprenticeships will risk planning reforms and housing developments. At the very least, apprenticeships in the ten sectors prioritised by Skills England as growth-driving need to be protected from Treasury cuts.

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February 10, 2025
Degree apprenticeship delivery needs strengthening to realise their potential

Degree apprenticeships have, ten years from their introduction, stimulated innovative models of delivery and nurtured productive relationships between employers and education and training providers.

Their rapid growth has, however, invited questions as to whether they are the right instrument for introducing young people to the workforce, or whether Apprenticeship Levy funding would be better spent elsewhere. To consider and evaluate degree apprenticeships, the Edge Foundation in collaboration with colleagues from the Universities of Bath, Huddersfield and Oxford, conducted nearly 100 interviews with large employers, SMEs, education and training providers, degree apprentices and policymakers.

Our research confirmed degree apprenticeships represent a unique confluence of theoretical higher education and practical skills and promote both academic achievement and workplace competency. Our primary finding was, however, that there is considerable heterogeneity in delivery of these programmes. This flexibility is degree apprenticeships’ greatest asset; it simultaneously, however, increases their complexity.

Aligning employer needs

Our research found numerous examples of pragmatic, trusting partnerships between education and training providers and employers. As one education and training provider told us:

I was able to bring my employer partners with me to the university […] So it’s been great to sit down and […] say “what is it that is missing?” […] And them saying “can you do this? Can you do that?” […] so I can truly say, from the heart, this is for the first time, we are truly, truly, employer-driven.

However, it remains challenging to engage the full spectrum of employers. Employers engage in these initiatives primarily out of a concern for workforce development, striving to support employees’ professional growth while addressing existing or upcoming skills shortages. However, despite their significance in the UK economy, engagement with SMEs remains challenging.

Trailblazers, for example, that design apprenticeship standards, have struggled to engage and represent the needs of SMEs. Resource-poor businesses like SMEs often struggle to realise an immediate return on investment for their input. The process is resource intensive, and even with employer and input from regulatory bodies and sector-specific organisations, there is tension in whether professional body requirements can keep pace with modern workplace practices.

Diversity in delivery structures

The delivery of degree apprenticeships varies widely even within the same sector, with different patterns of block study, virtual or face-to-face sessions, workplace experiences, placement rotations, and assessments. We heard from apprentices whose learning environment was entirely virtual, featuring asynchronous methods such as recorded lectures and digital resources, to fully in-person models with collaborative project work.

Concerns about coordinating theoretical elements with workplace roles remain a high priority, with regular communication between employers and tutoring staff viewed as essential. Nonetheless, there is some evidence of excellent integration of learning with workplace practice and, as one education and training provider told us:

we have huge amounts of anecdotal discussions from employers about the very real, not just skills and talent impact, but the business benefits that students are bringing.

Positively, degree apprentices experienced learning outcomes and developed skills that surpassed typical undergraduate levels, and many apprentices and employers recognised they had significant advantages in employment for their present and future careers.

Support systems for apprentices

Employer mentors’ relationships with apprentices are varied, with providers offering different types of mentorship, from personal tutors to skills coaches. The coordination of tripartite reviews – involving apprentices, employers, and education and training providers – acts as a critical connection among all stakeholders. Apprentices also frequently reported they had formed important and supportive relationships with other apprentices, particularly those who were attached to large employers, where structured support networks were often in place – another area of divergence between the apprentices’ experiences of large and smaller employers. Nevertheless, despite apprentices with SMEs being less likely to have access to similar collegial groups of apprentices at similar career levels, they often praised their employers and team members for offering a supportive and nurturing environment for their development.

Repeatedly throughout our evidence, stakeholders of all types stressed the importance of effective communication as key for helping learners to see the connections between their work and their academic study. But this could be highly resource intensive, and we found ETPs were not confident in the sustainability of their provision. Education and training providers report that much of their activity around degree apprenticeships is compliance-driven, often overwhelmed by complex auditing and reporting processes that intersect with internal monitoring mechanisms, requiring considerable additional resources, administrative structures and staff. These multiple bodies can sometimes measure quality in incompatible ways. These burdens were significant enough that some education and training providers questioned the feasibility of continuing to offer degree apprenticeships.

The long-standing challenge of work-related learning, that features throughout vocational programmes, is ensuring the on- and off-the-job training work seamlessly together. Degree apprenticeships certainly exhibit instances of good practice here. But our research also highlighted the great deal of variability in delivery of degree apprenticeships. The linchpin of the quality of learning on a degree apprenticeship programme is directly related to the quality of collaboration between employers, education and training providers, and apprentices.

Employers and education and training providers in particular should work together to share and implement best practice and ensure that the content of the taught elements and the apprentice’s learning on the job connect and relate to each other as regularly and deeply as possible. Likewise, allowing increased flexibility in the apprenticeship standards, as we have seen in places such as the Netherlands, would allow degree apprenticeships to keep better pace with the rapidly changing economy and workplace practices.

Finally, we have learned that despite degree apprenticeships offering brilliant opportunities for people to both begin and develop their careers, their success rests on enough opportunities being available in the first place. This requires reducing barriers that hinder the engagement of education and training providers, employers and apprentices. Notably we have found the administrative burdens in relation to accountability on the part of education and training providers, and the management of DAs, as well as the ability to transfer levy funds, on the part of employers, are all persistent barriers to wider engagement.

With degree apprenticeships coming under scrutiny following the government’s announcement to broaden the Apprenticeship Levy into a Growth and Skills Levy, articulating their strengths and identifying where challenges lie is key to securing their sustainability and ongoing success.

You can read the full research findings from Degree apprenticeships in England here or sign up to attend the online launch event 10.00-11.30am UK time on Tuesday 28 January.

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January 28, 2025
Deafening Silence on PIAAC | HESA

Last month, right around the time the blog was shutting down, the OECD released its report on the second iteration of the Programme for International Assessment for Adult Competencies (PIAAC), titled “Do Adults Have the Skills They Need to Thrive in a Changing World?”. Think of it perhaps as PISA for grown-ups, providing a broadly useful cross-national comparison of basic cognitive skills which are key to labour market success and overall productivity. You are forgiven if you didn’t hear about it: its news impact was equivalent to the proverbial tree falling in a forest. Today, I will skim briefly over the results, but more importantly, ponder why this kind of data does not generate much news.

First administered in 2011, PIAAC consists of three parts: a test for literacy, numeracy, and what they call “adaptive problem solving” (this last one has changed a bit—in the previous iteration it was something called “problem-solving in technology-rich environments). The test scale for is from 0 to 500, and individuals are categorized as being in one of six “bands” (1 through 5, with 5 being the highest, and a “below 1,” which is the lowest). National scores across all three of these areas are highly correlated, which is to say that if country is at the top or bottom, or even in the middle on literacy, it’s almost certainly pretty close to the same rank order for numeracy and problem solving as well. National scores all cluster in the 200 to 300 range.

One of the interesting—and frankly somewhat terrifying—discoveries of PIAAC 2 is that literacy and numeracy scores are down in most of the OECD outside of northern Europe. Across all participating countries, literacy is down fifteen points, and numeracy by seven. Canada is about even in literacy and up slightly in numeracy—this is one trend it’s good to buck. The reason for this is somewhat mysterious—an aging population probably has something to do with it, because literacy and numeracy do start to fall off with age (scores peak in the 25-34 age bracket)—but I would be interested to see more work on the role of smart phones. Maybe it isn’t just teenagers whose brains are getting wrecked?

The overall findings actually aren’t that interesting. The OECD hasn’t repeated some of the analyses that made the first report so fascinating (results were a little too interesting, I guess), so what we get are some fairly broad banalities—scores rise with education levels, but also with parents’ education levels; employment rates and income rise with skills levels; there is broadly a lot of skill mis-match across all economies, and this is a Bad Thing (I am not sure it is anywhere near as bad as OECD assumes, but whatever). What remains interesting, once you read over all the report, are the subtle differences one picks up in the results from one country to another.

So, how does Canada do, you ask? Well, as Figure 1 shows, we are considered to be ahead of the OECD average, which is good so far as it goes. However, we’re not at the top. The head of the class across all measures are Finland, Japan, and Sweden, followed reasonably closely by the Netherlands and Norway. Canada is in a peloton behind that with a group including Denmark, Germany, Switzerland, Estonia, the Flemish region of Belgium, and maybe England. This is basically Canada’s sweet spot in everything when it comes to education, skills, and research: good but not great, and it looks worse if you adjust for the amount of money we spend on this stuff.

Figure 1: Key PIAAC scores, Canada vs OECD, 2022-23

Canadian results can also be broken down by province, as in Figure 2, below. Results do not vary much across most of the country. Nova Scotia, Ontario, Saskatchewan, Manitoba, Prince Edward Island, and Quebec all cluster pretty tightly around the national average. British Columbia and Alberta are significantly above that average, while New Brunswick and Newfoundland are significantly below it. Partly, of course, this has to do with things you’d expect like provincial income, school policies, etc. But remember that this is across entire populations, not school leavers, and so internal immigration plays a role here too. Broadly speaking, New Brunswick and Newfoundland lose a lot of skills to places further west, while British Columbia and Alberta are big recipients of immigration from places further east (international migration tends to reduce average scores: language skills matter and taking the test in a non-native tongue tends to result in lower overall results).

Figure 2: Average PIAAC scores by province, 2022-23

Anyways, none of this is particularly surprising or perhaps even all that interesting. What I think is interesting is how differently this data release was handled from the one ten years ago. When the first PIAAC was released a decade ago, Statistics Canada and the Council of Ministers of Education, Canada (CMEC) published a 110-page analysis of the results (which I analyzed in two posts, one on Indigenous and immigrant populations, and another on Canadian results more broadly) and an additional 300(!)-page report lining up the PIAAC data with data on formal and informal adult learning. It was, all in all, pretty impressive. This time, CMEC published a one-pager which linked to a Statscan page which contains all of three charts and two infographics (fortunately, the OECD itself put out a 10-pager that is significantly better than anything domestic analysis). But I think all of this points to something pretty important, which is this:

Canadian governments no longer care about skills. At least not in the sense that PIAAC (or PISA for that matter) measures them.

What they care about instead are shortages of very particular types of skilled workers, specifically health professions and the construction trades (which together make up about 20% of the workforce). Provincial governments will throw any amount of money at training in these two sets of occupations because they are seen as bottlenecks in a couple of key sectors of the economy. They won’t think about the quality of the training being given or the organization of work in the sector (maybe we wouldn’t need to train as many people if the labour produced by such training was more productive?). God forbid. I mean that would be difficult. Complex. Requiring sustained expert dialogue between multiple stakeholders/partners. No, far easier just to crank out more graduates, by lowering standards if necessary (a truly North Korean strategy).

But actual transversal skills? The kind that make the whole economy (not just a politically sensitive 20%) more productive? I can’t name a single government in Canada that gives a rat’s hairy behind. They used to, twenty or thirty years ago. But then we started eating the future. Now, policy capacity around this kind of thing has atrophied to the point where literally no one cares when a big study like PIAAC comes out.

I don’t know why we bother, to be honest. If provincial governments and their ministries of education in particular (personified in this case by CMEC) can’t be arsed to care about something as basic as the skill level of the population, why spend millions collecting the data? Maybe just admit our profound mediocrity and move on.

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January 7, 2025