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Investigating the experiences of the many stakeholders of degree apprenticeships

by Andrea Laczik, Kat Emms, and Josh Patel

Degree Apprenticeships (DAs) have been ascendant in popularity and visibility since their launch in 2015. They are of particular interest to us at the Edge Foundation, where we’ve long championed novel approaches to the alignment of employer needs with provider offer and of the importance of access to high quality education experiences. In our recent event hosted with the SRHE’s HE Policy Network, we explored how DAs fit in the English higher education system, and reflected on their purpose.

DAs are offered across 17 industry sectors by employers ranging from SMEs to large national and international employers and are widely used in the public sector including in policing and the NHS. Studying on a DA programme is an opportunity to earn alongside learning at degree level and without paying tuition fees. About 100 higher education providers currently deliver this learning. The content of the curriculum is designed in partnership with employers, and employers fund DAs through an employer levy which employers can claim against to fund apprenticeship training. The number of DAs continue to grow, with participation up 8.2% to 46,800 in 2022/23.

While DAs were originally designed to address skills shortages and contribute to national economic growth, there has been some debate as to how effective DAs are as instruments to increase access and widen participation as claimed. It is also unclear how far the content of the curriculum should be determined by immediate employer needs versus the duty to prepare an effective and productive workforce for the future.

Our presenters provided productive and complementary perspectives on these questions from different stakeholders around DAs: employers, students, and mentors.

Employers and returns

Andrea Laczik and Kat Emms presented findings from Edge’s forthcoming research report on ‘Degree Apprenticeships in England’. This work based on interviews with nearly 100 stakeholders provides a broad sample of experiences of these groups which hitherto have often been considered in separation. Here we concentrated on employers’ motivations to engage with degree apprenticeships.

Employers favoured the sustainable employment and progression opportunities moulded closely to their needs that DAs facilitate. Some employers did see this as an opportunity for upwards mobility and diversification of the workplace. As one SME employer told us:

‘There are too many people in the IT industry that are like me. Okay, so we’re talking middle aged white guys… degree apprenticeships allow people who wouldn’t consider getting into this industry from a variety of backgrounds, creeds, colours. I want to increase the diversity in IT’.

Apprentices were also valued for their ability to apply theoretical learning to practical applications in work, for their developed communication and teamworking skills.

However, it was primarily large employers who had both greater resource and capacity to administer their levy funds and input into the design of DAs, meaning their DAs are often more closely aligned to their needs compared to SMEs. Many employers prioritised operations at the expense of workforce development and struggled with what was perceived as the loss of an apprentice for their off-the-job training for one day a week. The serendipity of the deployment of DAs in most sectors indicates a lack of clarity, dispersion, and embeddedness in employer thinking, behaviours, and strategising. There is a place for regional authorities to help administer levy transfer schemes, which may be underutilised currently.

Apprentices and belonging

Julie Pepper and Katherine Ashbullby, University of Exeter, explored how degree apprentices negotiate dual identities as both employees and students, and how this affects their relationship with the university. The degree apprentices they spoke to regarded themselves as employees first and foremost. This may be linked to the fact that they felt disconnected from a traditional university life and experience. However, many also regarded themselves as lifelong learners with distinct qualities including industry experience, connections and resilience. They discussed their ‘journey of transformation and change’ which they were able to fulfil through a DA. The weight of the dual identity nevertheless came with increased pressures.

The identities Julie and Katherine described bear considerable resemblance to that in existing research on part-time learners. And they illuminate some of differences between the highly structured programmes of employment-oriented identity formation in DA models and the more ‘open’ identity formation of UG courses. This is a productive difference. But it involves a trade-off – full time students have a disconnect with employers which mirrored DAs’ disconnect with socialisation opportunities in educational institutional communities.

Mentors and mentoring

Aimee France, Claire Staniland and Karen Stevens presented on their research, with Trudy Sevens from Sheffield Hallam University and with Josh Patel from Edge, on the role and identity of Work Based Mentors (WBMs) of degree apprentices in Allied Health Professions (AHP). DAs are increasingly important in NHS workforce planning. Defining the role of a WBM and identifying good practice is consequently valuable to ensure the success of DAs. As Aimee, Claire and Karen discussed, WBMs have a unique role distinct from an academic tutor or workplace assessor. Their role is both pastoral and acting as a bridge between the academic world and practice, particularly helping to identify opportunities to better integrate theory and practice. This is critical to providing recognition, perhaps accreditation, and effective training for WBMs. The formalisation of such roles might be welcomed, but only if important virtues of voluntarism, care, and reciprocity are maintained. The relevance of these findings outside AHP is likely to be high regarding other liminal mentorship roles.

Providers and social justice

Charlynne Pullen, also of Sheffield Hallam, turned to the perspective of providers, drawing on her research with Colin McCaig, and Kat Emms and Andrea Laczik from Edge. In the current uncertain higher education landscape, providers are motivated to strengthen and diversify their applied provision to draw on ‘untapped markets’ of student demand. Cultivating this market requires substantial efforts to stimulate interest from employers and potential students. How far these efforts do broaden entry and widen participation varied. With the growing awareness of DAs, concerns have arisen around so-called ‘middle-class capture’ of DA opportunities by candidates who likely would have attended HE regardless. DAs have high entry requirements, sometimes including assessment centres, and providers have limited means to influence recruitment which is ultimately the purview of employers. This meant that DAs currently display a contested role in enabling individual social mobility. Opportunities for school leavers seemed limited, though there is an arguable role for DAs in widening participation and entry to higher-level professions for adult learners. Social justice can potentially be achieved through DAs in two ways – either through social mobility of degree apprentices, and/or through widening participation in HE. DAs can offer social mobility for existing employees (as can any substantial on-job training) but will have no substantive role in widening participation to HE on current measurement methods which focus on young people, because DAs aimed at 18-year old school leavers do not attract the same level of diversity as existing undergraduate degrees offered by providers.

Conclusions

DAs represent one of the most exciting innovations in the way providers approach the design and delivery of degree level education in the UK. Together, this research indicates that while for employers and learners who can take advantage the benefits are substantial, there is work to do to improve their accessibility. DAs are still small scale. And, first and foremost, they are jobs. If employers do not have degree level vacancies, DAs cannot be offered. Until there are programmatic efforts to simulate job creation, distributing resources between employers, evidencing the impact of DAs more clearly, and identifying best practice in areas such as mentoring, would help strengthen the effectiveness of DAs.

Edge will be publishing three of the pieces of research on DAs featured in this blog in September and October 2024. To keep up to date with our research, sign up to our mailing list, or follow us on Twitter @ukEdge and LinkedIn.

The Edge Foundation is an independent, politically impartial foundation, inspiring the education system in order to help young people acquire the knowledge, skills & behaviours to flourish. Andrea Laczik is the Director of Research, Kat Emms is an Education and Policy Senior Researcher, and Josh Patel is a researcher.


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Work-based learning and assessment during Covid-19

by Nick Mapletoft and Andy Price

Nick Mapletoft and Andy Price

This is one of a series of position statements developed following a conference on ‘Building the Post-Pandemic University’, organised on 15 September 2020 by SRHE member Mark Carrigan (Cambridge) and colleagues. The position statements are being posted as blogs by SRHE but can also be found on The Post-Pandemic University’s excellent and ever-expanding website. The authors’ statement can be found here.

The purpose of this blog is to provide an insight into how an alternative provider of higher education, an English private university centre (University Centre Quayside (UCQ)) specialising in work-based learning (WBL), continued to deliver to degree apprentices throughout the Covid-19 pandemic. WBL is a particular branch of higher education that is based upon work and should benefit the employer, which in itself creates tensions. The post considers the impact on apprentices, who work for different employers throughout England including NHS frontline workers, through remote tutorials and remote assessment. It also considers varying employer responses from abandoning or postponing apprentice starts, to maximizing the opportunity for off-the-job training for staff on furlough and starting a programme in specific response to the pandemic.  

UCQ delivers its fully integrated Chartered Manager Degree Apprenticeship (CMDA) and BA Hons in Professional Management via a modular approach, with subject specific modules lasting seven weeks. Each module consists of two days of taught sessions delivered by a Module Lead with up to twelve students in attendance, supported by one to one tutorials and work based assessment via a Professional Development Assessor. Whilst for most students the university campus is an inspiring and invigorating place to learn, it is not uncommon for WBL students to do most of their learning at work, or at a business venue. Up until February 2020 all taught sessions were delivered face to face at venues throughout England, tutorials were often conducted remotely, work-based assessment was undertaken at the employer’s premises.  

When the Covid-19 situation started to unfold, UCQ began successfully transitioning to 100% online delivery through the principles of user centred design (ease of use), Human Factors and agile team working. The curriculum itself was largely unchanged, however different pedagogical techniques were necessary to better facilitate online delivery. Module Leads continuously improved online delivery through an iterative process of continuous feedback  from students and their employers. 

For the delivery of remote lectures, UCQ initially set up additional GoToMeeting accounts, avoiding Zoom due to published security breaches. Some client (employer) firewalls prevented students from joining GoToMeeting sessions, and student feedback requested more virtual small group working and more interactivity between the learners (as we would expect in a normal physical learning environment). Scholars continue to debate the importance of the social setting and interaction on an individual’s learning, with classrooms typically being focused on some social interaction. Replicating a synchronous learning model with strong social and personal interaction is however one of the hardest aspects to replicate on-line. Microsoft Teams was considered to be the best solution to facilitate the desired interaction. All UCQ staff and students now have Microsoft Office 365 accounts including Teams. Teams benefits from additional privacy settings to obscure the background, where there was a potential safeguarding implication with children being home schooled through the lockdown and the Summer. The same technology was used to capture work-based assessments, for example observing a CMDA student chairing a virtual meeting.

Apprentices’ employers were impacted by Covid-19 in different ways depending on their market sector and the attitudes of their leaders. Those in the hospitality and some service industries were unable to work from home, with staff put on furlough. UCQ sought to continue to engage furloughed staff in the CMDA programme, maximizing the opportunity for off-the-job activities. One large employer in facilities management embarked upon a national apprenticeship promotional campaign to extoll the advantages of apprenticeships to their furloughed workforce. Other employers aborted their enrolments, some because the pandemic resulted in uncertainty or loss of staff, others, for example in logistics, because they became too busy as a result of an increase in workload. Some potential students postponed their enrolments whereas some accelerated their applications as they saw their employer investing in them for the next 40 months as a reassurance.

UCQ’s students have managerial responsibilities which they needed to maintain during Covid-19. This meant that they faced challenges studying as a degree student, whilst simultaneously facing new tensions in their professional existence. As working from home was adopted by those that could, our managerial students needed to adopt new virtual team leadership roles. Anecdotally students started to show a heightened interest in academic areas of leadership and remote working, quickly developing new managerial skills in response to the Covid-19 situation. A core principle of the CMDA being the relating of theory to practice, meant that students now needed to grasp the issues created by Covid-19 as they emerged. Some students fed back to UCQ staff that the CMDA programme had provided a welcome  intervention and stimulating area of focus throughout the pandemic. Others described how the skills and knowledge they had acquired were helping them to cope as managers through rapid application, contextualisation and critical reflection of new skills and knowledge. 

Some students asked for further consideration but there was no formal grading safety net and all modules still needed to be completed in full and on-time to ensure progression, as the CMDA standard needed to be met in full. However, a core principle of the UCQ CMDA delivery is to work with students in terms of the pressure of their extant management roles on their academic responsibilities and to have a responsive and flexible approach to successful assignment completion. This would also include a fair and equitable response to any issues of grade erosion. Close monitoring of attainment showed an overall increase in assignment marks and a continuous improvement in progression.

In an attempt to understand the effect on students, UCQ sought student feedback at the start of the pandemic and then after six months, whilst closely monitoring results and progression. Feedback showed a high level of satisfaction in the UCQ experience, with many students preferring the remote delivery model as it saved them travel time and expense, it also resulted in UCQ staff being easier to contact as they were no longer travelling long distances.

Summary of key findings

There are substantial differences in the way that employers have responded to the pandemic and the resulting effect on their investment in staff learning and assessment. Apprentices have responded differently too, with some having withdrawn from the programme, some postponed their start date, some have taken a break-in-learning, whilst the majority report to have been better able to focus whilst working from home and to have found studying on the CMDA a positive distraction (from Covid-19) and professional support in their new ‘crisis’ management roles.

Nick Mapletoft holds a professional doctorate from the University of Sunderland, and graduate and post graduate qualifications in computing, leadership and management, business and enterprise, and education. His post-doctoral work centres on work-based learning (WBL) approaches and pedagogies, and the WBL university. He is the Principal and CEO of the University Centre Quayside, an approved boutique provider of higher education via degree apprenticeships.

Andy Price has over twenty years’ experience in higher education and is presently Programme Leader for the CMDA at UCQ. He has held various academic and leadership roles elsewhere in the sector including Head of Enterprise Development and Education at Teesside University and Assistant Director of the Institute of Digital Innovation. Andy is a long-standing champion of work-based learning and has led significant curriculum development in this area