Trailblazers apprenticeships
Apprentices: the next generation
The government’s new Trailblazers ‘Apprenticeship in Law’ initiative has taken a step closer to realisation. CILEx has played its part in making that happen. Polly Botsford investigates.
About the author
Polly Botsford is a freelance legal journalist
By 2020, the government wants 3 million new apprentices in place across all sectors of the economy, and is relying on its Trailblazers Apprenticeship programme to realise this dream. For legal services, this has seen the formation of the Trailblazers Apprenticeship in Law. CILEx and CILEx Regulation have been involved in this journey, and were engaged in the formulation of the ‘Standards’ needed to get the ‘Apprenticeship in Law’ up and running; CILEx’s director of education, Vicky Purtill, was at the forefront of CILEx’s efforts.
The new Trailblazers ‘Apprenticeship in Law’ will enable school-leavers to become either a paralegal, a Chartered Legal Executive or a solicitor by undertaking a two- to six-year apprenticeship at a law firm or organisation (the length of time depending on the level they are seeking to attain). Though apprenticeships are not tied to the academic year, the first Trailblazers ‘Apprenticeships in Law’ will be available from September 2016 (employers are likely to wait for A-level results before an apprentice starts his or her training).
The notion of legal apprentices is, in itself, pretty novel and only started in earnest a few years ago. There are around 420 registered apprentices currently on the CILEx route (at Level 3 or Level 4). These apprentices are under the existing apprenticeship framework (called the Specification of Apprenticeship Standards for England – SASE for short) but this will be phased out and replaced by Trailblazers Apprenticeships. There are significant differences between the old and new regimes in terms of what kind of apprenticeships are on offer and how they are assessed.
Though there are no figures yet, anecdotally, firms and organisations have responded positively to the new Trailblazers ‘Apprenticeship in Law’ . Jenny Pelling, business director at CILEx Law School (CLS), says: ‘Legal organisations are really taking note now of apprenticeships. We have a number of organisations who are actively recruiting for September 2016. This is at all levels, though mainly paralegal, and from a range of firms, local authorities and in-house .’
ITV and BBC, for instance, have both publicly stated that they will be offering Trailblazers Apprenticeships. For ITV, it is a means of creating more business-oriented lawyers. As Andrew Garard, general counsel at ITV, tells the press: ‘We see the new apprenticeship route as a great opportunity to create solicitors who know ITV’s business inside out at the point of qualification. This can only enhance our quest to make our lawyers true business partners’ (see page 5 of this issue). The BBC is working with CLS to deliver the Paralegal Trailblazers Apprenticeships from September 2016.
In order to establish the Trailblazers ‘Apprenticeship in Law’ , the government required the sector to set what are known as ‘Standards’ ; these pinpoint the knowledge and competencies needed for each type of apprenticeship. These were drafted over the course of 2014 and were eventually published in autumn 2014, having received ministerial approval.
What the government also demanded was that the new Standards (there are separate Standards for each of the three main levels: paralegal (Level 3), Chartered Legal Executive (Level 6) and solicitor (Level 7)) be authored by employers themselves. For law, they were developed by a group including firms such as Eversheds, Addleshaw Goddard, Olswang, and DAC Beachcroft, as well as in-house teams at Barclays and the Royal Bank of Scotland. These organisations were joined by CILEx, CILEx Regulation and the Solicitors Regulation Authority.
Vicky Purtill explains why this employer-led method was a critical component if Trailblazers was to be successful: ‘Employers feel more empowered through the process and have more confidence in the process: they have contributed to the content and so the new apprenticeships should be delivering what the employer believes needs to be delivered.’
She explains: ‘Employers have really thought about what those jobs actually entail. They were able to set standards for a particular job rather than set standards for a qualification. For instance, the Standards for a paralegal set out what a paralegal is and what the role consists of – so the Standards should deliver what is required.’
CILEx, with its 50 years of experience in vocational legal qualifications, played a crucial advisory role in setting the Standards. Vicky Purtill says: ‘We worked alongside industry leaders who called upon our significant expertise, and were asked for advice on the educational elements.’
The Standards did also have to be designed to be broad enough to enable a wide range of legal services employers to make use of them. Jenny Pelling believes that they are: ‘I would say that the Standards have managed to achieve that breadth. This is borne out by the fact that we have such a wide range of employers - from high street firms, to international law firms, to local authorities and in-house legal teams in very different areas of legal practice - all using the Standards.’
Of course, the Standards do also have to fulfil the regulators’ wish list. Harvey Sandercock, education portfolio holder for the CILEx Regulation Board, is optimistic: ‘It is essential that the new apprentices are guaranteed to achieve the same standards of expertise as other Chartered Legal Executives and we are confident that they will. The training and assessment arrangements ... will provide a new generation of specialist lawyers with a firm grounding in the practical legal skills which their employers and clients value, supported by high academic standards.’
Apprentices under the new regime will have to get through what is known as an ‘end point assessment’ in order to complete their training, another crucial difference between the existing apprenticeship frameworks and the new Trailblazers ‘Apprenticeship in Law’ . The type of assessment will vary depending on the level: while both complete a portfolio at the end of the apprenticeship, Level 3 apprentices (to be paralegals) will have to sit two written exams with real-life scenarios; Level 6 apprentices will be assessed through a case study which will analyse their ability to see a case from beginning to end, as well as their knowledge and competencies along the way.
Vicky Purtill explains why there is a new focus on assessment: ‘In the past, there was criticism of some of the apprenticeships because employers felt that there was no real way of assessing fitness for the role. There was a sense that apprentices needed to be tested on whether or not they could do their job to a sufficiently high level at the end of the apprenticeship.’
The government is keen to focus on maintaining quality and is setting up an Institute for Apprenticeships (to be in place by April 2017), which will act as a governance body and will ‘continue to drive up apprenticeship quality to the highest level’ .
Under the new regime, the end-point assessment cannot be undertaken by either the training provider or the employer, but instead by a third party organisation in order to, as Vicky Purtill puts it: ‘introduce independence into the apprenticeship assessment process’ . This is a similar approach to that which has been taken with the new end-point assessment for solicitors (known as the Solicitors Qualifying Examination (SQE)) where the final assessor cannot be the same organisation as the training provider.
Jenny Pelling makes the point, however, that a training provider will still be ‘instrumental’ in assisting a student with the ongoing assessments during the course of the apprenticeship, and ‘in preparing for any final exams’ .
One controversial element of the new Trailblazers Apprenticeships is funding. The government will continue to support apprenticeships by funding some of their training, but it is anticipating making apprenticeships ‘sustainable’ , by which it means self-funding . Although employers will be able to draw down funds (and take up a variety of small allowances), at the same time the government is introducing an apprenticeship ‘levy’ for the largest employers. Details of this have yet to be published, but it is understood that this will effectively act as a tax on employers whose wage bill is above £3m (the levy is already referred to as the ‘apprentice tax’ or ‘payroll tax’ ). The levy is set at 0.5% of that bill insofar as it is above the £3m figure. Employers can then get a £15,000 rebate if they take on apprentices.
The government argues that the payroll tax will only affect 2% of employers, and yet will raise £3bn by 2019/20. The money will be spent solely on apprenticeships, the cost of which is forecasted to be around £2.5bn across England and Wales.
The Trailblazers Apprenticeship initiative started life in a review of the existing framework by US entrepreneur Doug Richard (of ‘Dragon’s Den’ fame) in 2012. In his review, he argued for the need to drive up the quality of apprenticeships, including having a rigorous assessment process, and give employers more control over training and which training providers to use.
Doug Richard also stressed the benefits of going back to the traditional notion of an apprenticeship. He writes: ‘An apprenticeship was at its very heart a relationship between an employer and an apprentice, too often that is not the case today – apprenticeships instead [are] becoming a government-led training programme, shaped by training professionals not employers. The relationship between an employer and an apprentice must once again rise to the fore.’ The government used the Richard Review as the basis for its Trailblazers Apprenticeship programme, picking up on the review’s main themes.
There appears to be no doubt that apprenticeships are a ‘good thing’ . For those looking for a career in law but without the means or wherewithal to go to university, these new apprenticeships will provide a new pathway which is good for social mobility and good for diversity. According to government reports, if you choose to be an apprentice, it will enhance your career prospects; if you are an employer, apprentices will increase overall productivity. In fact, we all benefit in economic terms too: the government says that there is a tangible economic product from apprenticeships; it estimates that a Level 3 apprenticeship delivers a net benefit of £28 for £1 of government investment.
There are already 140 Trailblazers in a range of sectors (these are as a result of Phase 1 of the government’s plan – the legal sector is in Phase 2) and over 350 Standards: a good start. But what really matters is that employers go out and recruit apprentices, and that there are candidates there who want to get recruited. After all, 2020 is only four years away.