Education and Skills Bill
12:00 pm
Professor Lorna Unwin: This is a complicated issue. I want to stress first of all that apprenticeships clearly need to be fit for purpose. We need to ensure that we have apprenticeships that have the support of employers, reflect the needs of sectors and so on. At the same time, where we are investing public money in apprenticeships we want, as a society, to ensure that the young people and adults going through them should be exposed to an experience that gives them qualifications that have currency in the labour market and can also help them to progress. The problem that we have with the NVQ is that it is a totally different animal, according to the sector. Some level 2 NVQs contain very little underpinning knowledge, and are very easy to acquire through assessment on the job. Other NVQs are much more substantial, and the difference across level 2 and level 3 is quite remarkable. There is also a problem that some level 2 NVQs do not even give a proper platform for NVQ level 3. So there are big problems with the qualification itself.