Apprenticeship scheme

[paulears]

I'm a little confused about the actual qualifications that are being used to qualify people for the various schemes on offer. The ones I'm seeing, like the one posted today seem to use BTEC Level 2 as the formal qualification that's taken while doing the 'training'. What worries me is that this level is very basic and simply working in a venue will allow all the pass level criteria in the practical units will be a piece of cake! The business content should also not exactly stretch them. I guess my point is that historically, an apprentice learned things that others didn't know, but in these schemes the qualification is the same as people would have got by a year in college? Fair enough they've had some money, but they've also worked hopefully quite hard, and I'm just worried that the only reason venues do the scheme is to get full time staff for a lower price, and the college running it get funding for students they only monitor and assess and don't have to teach? The benefit to the apprentice is simply some money rather than no money but 37+ hours a week of unsociable hours instead of 16 or less at college?

 

Is this really the best it gets? Many venues do things very different from others, so the training will full of holes, but still tick the right boxes.

 

Maybe the Blue Room should like the ad today, make sure he actual qualification gained is clearly stated in the blurb, I note many of these scheme don't even mention what you actually get. What I don't understand is why they don't do it at level 3 which is where the more advanced stuff is. My wife's doing a Level 2 where she works in a pharmacy and I can answer everything she is being asked and when I'm stuck I can find info on the net in seconds. It doesn't mean I am any good! After all, Level 2 is GCSE level suitable for a 14 year old at school. For somebody older at work it's not exactly hard!

[vinntec]

Hi Paul - as a teacher who has just retired :) I share your concern. However this is a one year course which includes a level 2 (GCSE) qualification so probably aimed at people with no or few GCSEs. I see some colleges are offering an "advanced" version of this which is level 3 (A Level) which would be a natural follow on. The recent apprenticeship advert on Blue Room says go to theatre website for more info but I can't find any mention of it and neither does the college connected with it! However the college does run the level 3 course (1 x A level) with the theatre already - as an apprenticeship would not usually be for one year! Or alternatively the advert on BlueRoom should say level 3 as it implies people with A levels? Peter

UPDATE:

Found it hidden on theatre's About Us page by searching the site. So I am confused - a one year apprenticeship at such a lowly level?

[Brian]

I think that most modern apprenticeships are...

 

a) just another way of getting people off the unemployment register

b) a way of employers getting cheap labour and

c) aren't worth the paper they are written on.

 

I did a proper engineering apprenticeship. It took four years to do and included 4 years of part-time education; 2 years to get an ONC and a further 2 to get an HNC. The education was at a Technical College and comprised one day a week with 5 2-hour lectures a day. If you didn't have the entry requirements for the ONC (3 good O levels/CSEs) then you did an additional two hours in the evening every week.

 

On the other 4 days you spent your first year at the employer's training facility where everyone was brought up to the same level. The next two years were spent rotating through all the different departments in the factory and the final year was spent attached to the department that you were going to end up working in.

 

It pains me to see what passes for an apprenticeship these day but sadly reflects the 'no-one can fail' culture that seems to pervade education.

[paulears]

That's my experience to, Brian - What would be a Level 3 followed by a Level 4/5. Level 2 seems a bit pointless. Back when PLASA were investigating on the job training with a proper qualification I was a bit mystified then why it was pitched at Level 2, when most people in employment are clearly already working at Level 3 or above. What's the point of getting qualifications at such a low level?

[Brian]

What's the point of getting qualifications at such a low level?

Indeed, having such low expectations is bad for both the employer and the apprentice.

 

My suspicion is that within the 'ruling elite', apprenticeships are seen as something for people who aren't bright enough to go to university to do. Let's face it, government ministers both past and present of either political flavour smell are hardly a broad cross-section of working society. It's always an amusing waste of time to try and find out what real world experience any of them have.

[Just Some Bloke]

Back in the 90s when I was lecturing in FE we used an RSA qualification to hang the course on. It provided a piece of paper at the end to show you'd achieved something, but most of your 2 years were spent working on music, dance and drama towards some sort of end (usually performances and other opportunites to show what the students could do). Our main aim was not to get them through the qualification (though that was required too) but to take them to a place where they could go out and get some sort of work in the Performing Arts (mainly at entry level, but that leads on from there). We later found that there was another course elsewhere in the country where a group of learning difficulties students were using the same qualification to hang a "it doesn't matter what they do as long as they get a piece of paper saying they've achieved something" course on.

 

Very much horses for courses, I suppose. As long as the course itself is good, it doesn't matter too much what the students get at the end of it. Ours is not an industry where people pay much attention to your paper qualifications.

[paulears]

Indeed - I once had to verify a programme for performing arts in a building labelled Brain Injury Recovery Department. There were some great people on the course, but all had had serious head injuries, and were being enouraged in their recovery. Most were in wheelchairs, many couldn't actually speak, and some couldn't move. They were doing something at Level 1, and what is called entry level. The criteria in general seemed to be take part, and be there. Indeed, the latest Level 2 BTEChas had these lower levels added into the spec, so if you can't get Level 2, you fallback to Entry or Level 1. This I reckon is simply crazy, as the standard is so low that the entire course, as a qualification, is worthless. As therapy or a recovery process it's fine - but the level for conventional adults is so low that the only reason such a qualification exists is to allow everyone to have one!

[kerry davies]

When 50% of kids are pushed toward degrees, where do the tradesmen come from? In Brian and my cases we were probably capable of graduating back then, let alone today but the middle 40%, especially of teenaged males, were trained in a skills-based vocational manner. We all gained the knowledge of how our industry, skill and companies worked and some went on to degrees and management.

 

A political decision was made to commercialise Further and Higher Education and push 50% through rather than 20% of kids. What is the end result? Managers now have degrees and not a clue as to how the industry or company they are joining actually works. The few recruits to skills training are from the bottom 50% educationally rather than the middle 40% and are harder to educate and train. We have a huge unskilled labour pool, an inefficient managerial pool and the gap in the middle is filled with "Polish Plumber".

 

Either we abandon the bottom 50%, exporting the jobs and skills, and rely on immigrant skills or we lower numbers in HE and train a lot more in the middle and train them properly. You can decide for yourselves which course you believe our government made in 1979.

[Just Some Bloke]

As my dissertation towards my PGCE pointed out (!) the problem is that there was a move in the 90s to bring all qualifications into the tickbox way of marking. The idea is that you split a job into its component parts and if the candidate can do each of them then they can do the job as a whole. Thus, if your job is to put up an LX rig then you may have to prove you can:

Correctly read a rig plan

Choose the appropriate lanterns/fixtures

Rig them in the correct place

Get power to them

Get DMX to them

Ensure you don't overload the bar

Ensure you don't overload the power supply

etc. etc. etc. until you've covered all the "competencies" required to prove you've done the job as a whole.

This already begs the question "how many times do you have to do this to prove it wasn't a fluke"? but we'll put that to one side for now. The real problem is that in the Performing Arts then the question "did the singer sing the song?" is equally valid at levels 1, 2, 3, 4 and 5 so how do you differentiate between an entry level performance and a postgraduate performance? "Did the candidate sing in tune?" should be a Yes from Level 1 really so where else do you go? I feel that as an assessor I would be able to differentiate what level the performance was at and that was always OK under the old O Level, A Level ways of working because it allowed the examiner to use his or her experience to just say "that performance was fine for an O Level grade A but not really good enough for an A Level grade C" for instance, but when it's a matter of ticking a box then what should the question be that I'm looking to answer?

 

So we end up with questions like "Did the candidate sing in performance?". Well our candidates sung rather well and some of the Learning Difficulties people probably did very well bearing in mind their understanding of what was required, thus gaining them a pass, but the same performance by one of our candidates may never have made it to being put in front of an audience so the candidate would not have been able to tick that box. Same award, intentionally made to be an easy Yes or No tickbox so everyone is marked the same, but they're not!

 

Like I say, in my mind it's the quality of the teaching that's important not the award itself (same reason a BA from Oxford is seen as more impressive that a BA from Bridlington).

[paulears]

Teaching? what teaching? My wife's NVQ has been done by here with no teaching whatsoever. She is expected to teach herself! They have assessors, but no teachers - crazy.

 

The singing in tune bit has always annoyed me, there is never a criterion that sets a quality standard - so you can't put totally in tune = D, mostly in tune = M and occasionally in tune = P. I had a big battle when one criterion was to do with safety. I successfully argued that you could not have P,M and D for safety. You were either safe or not safe. So the fudge was to make the criterion about knowing about safety, not BEING safe.

 

I worry that these apprentice scheme have no real training element in them. So many of our theatre disciplines are called team working, but every member of the team at work is concentrating on their own task. They have no time to double up, or act in a monitoring or guidance role. We have work experience, that features no work, just watching. We now have apprenticeship schemes that feature work, and little training, and we have real work that has no spare capacity for guiding or training new people. Crazy really!