Apprenticeships being stretched and potentially in danger of losing their good status

When we mention apprenticeships, I think we all think about the traditional 1 or 2 year training programme with some day release at college. That's changing quickly, and not necessarily for the better.

The National Apprenticeship Service has lots of 12 or 26 week apprenticeships advertised - indeed my own daughter did a 12 week contact centre apprenticeship in the summer. The problem with these is that often all the time is spent in a training environment with none or virtually none in a real working environment - to me that's not an apprenticeship at all.

Plus it gives no time to the vitally important aspects of literacy and numeracy training - hopefully Functional Skills.

These 12 week programmes have a very bad spell about them - why do providers always try to reduce good programmes down to point of being pointless, are we the only country where quality and experience is less important than getting the boxes ticked as fast as possible?

Time for a re-think on this - perhaps BIS need to provide unequivocal guidance about Functional Skills and length of time to stop providers trying to break and bend the system.