To the casual observer, apprenticeships are the big success story of the last decade. Having collapsed with the decline of industry in the 1980s, apprenticeships were revived by the Labour government and are positively soaring under the coalition. Government figures released today show a huge increase of 63.5% in the year after the election, and provisional figures for this year show a further 10% jump.

In an era where most of us work in front of a computer screen, there's still a romanticism attached to apprenticeships. They conjure up images of Britain's industrial past and a time when employers took a young person, probably a young man, under their wing and taught them the tricks of a trade. Unfortunately, the days where an apprenticeship provided a young worker with a mark of quality and experience are long gone. Engineering is still one of the top ten apprenticeship sectors today, but the low paid service sectors dominate, with customer service, business administration, and hospitality and catering topping the list last year.

An engineering apprenticeship is completely different – in terms of the pay, duration, time spent training, level of skill imparted, and the prestige and future career opportunities – from an apprenticeship in retail. More than half of engineering apprenticeships are offered at level 3, compared to just 22% in customer service and 13% in hospitality and catering. While an engineering apprentice enjoys an average of 10 hours a week in off-the-job learning, for a retail or customer service apprentice the average in 2008 was just one hour a week. Minimum stipulations brought in last year made this up to under two hours a week – a level well below what other European countries would expect.

The shift from an industrial to a service economy is only part of this story. Government targets to increase the number of apprenticeships, combined with a lack of interest from many employers, have led to a watering down of what constitutes an apprenticeship. Labour widened apprenticeships to include level 2 qualifications, which evidence suggests have little to no value in the labour market, and opened them up to adults, meaning they have lost their purpose as a tool to prepare young people for entry into the labour market.

Although the Conservatives criticised this approach in opposition, there is little sign that they have changed policy in government. Apprenticeship policy under the coalition is still effectively grounded in targets, rather than efforts to tackle the long-standing problem of low demand for skilled workers among employers outside of the traditional apprenticeship sectors.

Look closely behind today's figures and the headline statistics do not look quite so strong. In an increasingly competitive job market, employers have become more reluctant to hire and train young people. The figures for 2009/10 to 2010/11 show a welcome increase in apprenticeships for young people and in higher level apprenticeships. But the biggest jump comes in a three-fold increase in apprenticeships for over 25-year-olds, accounting for 40% of all schemes, the vast majority of whom are existing employees.

Provisional data for 2010/11 to 2011/12 looks even worse, with apprenticeships for young people down on the previous year (126,300 compared to 131,700 last year). Most of this year's growth comes from another boost to the over 25-year-olds, which now make up 44% of the total. What's more, the figures also show that workplace skills training for adults has fallen by 275,400 places, suggesting that employers have simply shifted their workers onto apprenticeships to continue getting government funding.

The lesson is that the targets don't work. Numbers make good press releases but this brings with it the temptation to fiddle the books. Rebadging low-level workplace training programmes does not an apprenticeship make. At a time of high youth unemployment, more high quality routes into good jobs for young people are very welcome. Unfortunately, too much of the growth in apprenticeships appears to add to the stock of low level training programmes for workers in low skilled, low paid jobs with few progression prospects. We need a focus on quality and not quantity.

Tess Lanning is a senior research fellow at the Institute for Public Policy Research (IPPR) and co-editor of Rethinking Apprenticeships

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