Education and Skills Bill
12:00 pm
Professor Lorna Unwin: I would not say it is an illusion. Completion can mean many things, because apprenticeship frameworks differ considerably from one another. The only requirement is for a national vocational qualification plus key skills. The technical certificate requirement was dropped last year, and from inquiries I have made, the number of sectors that have dropped the technical certificate seems to swing between four and six. Again, we do not have real information on how many apprenticeships still include the technical certificate. If you do not include it, and if completion is based entirely on the NVQ and the key skills, we are down to—in some sectors and in some apprenticeships, particularly at level two—the assessment of the NVQ on the job, which can often be done in quite short periods of time. The notion of completion varies in terms of what is being completed and the length of time that it takes.