Engineering news
Graduate and postgraduate-level apprenticeships in advanced engineering will be launched this year, skills minister Matthew Hancock has announced.
It will be the first time that apprenticeships at such levels have been available and comes after changes to the Specification of Apprentices Standards for England – a document that sets out the requirements for apprenticeship frameworks.
The move allows the provision of level six and seven apprenticeships, which are equivalent to bachelors and masters degree level.
Hancock said: “In the past, apprenticeships were restricted to only some trades, and some parts of the economy. These new apprenticeships will help more young people to receive on-the-job training.”
Similar apprenticeships in other subjects including law and accountancy will also be launched.
Apprenticeships have proved a popular alternative to university study in the light of the government's new tuition fees regime.
Figures released by the National Apprenticeship Service (NAS) reveal that demand for the apprenticeships available in 2012 far outstripped supply.
At least 1.13 million applications were made through the NAS online apprenticeship database for around 106,000 vacancies last year. The NAS database contains around 80% of all apprenticeship vacancies.
Engineering and manufacturing technologies drew in the second-highest number of applications across all sectors, with 211,294 applications chasing the 15,000 vacancies advertised on the database.
Ann Watson, managing director of EAL, a qualification awarding organisation for the engineering and manufacturing sector, said: “The NAS figures reveal a huge gap in supply and demand – with applications far outweighing vacancies. Manufacturing apprenticeships in particular proved extremely popular, with over 40,000 applications for 3,500 places advertised on the NAS database.”
She added: “Apprenticeships are a highly effective recruitment tool, ensuring new employees have the exact skills and knowledge required for the job. More needs to be done to promote apprenticeships to employers, support them to take on apprentices and make them more aware of the support that is already available.”
The news comes as the university admissions service UCAS released its final figures for 2012 – the first since tuition fees trebled to £9,000. University applications dropped 6.6% to 653,600 across all subjects compared to the previous admissions cycle, said UCAS.
Data on the number of students accepting places on engineering courses is mixed, with some disciplines accepting more students than the previous year and others facing a fall in numbers. Among those on the up are general engineering, with a 15.7% increase in acceptances, and mechanical engineering, up 2.6%.
Disciplines seeing a fall in the number of acceptances include aerospace engineering, down 4.3%, electronic and electrical engineering, down 9.5%, and production and manufacturing engineering, down 10.2%.
Watson added: “Demand for higher education weakened last year, when higher tuition fees were rolled out, while apprenticeships went from strength to strength.
“While work still needs to be done, the public perception of apprenticeships is slowly shifting, aligning the vocational pathway with higher education as a valuable pathway into a fulfilling, highly skilled career.”