—By Zac Aldridge, CEO of Accelerate People

I couldn’t have had a more predictably typical academic journey through education. GCSEs, A Levels, university, graduate job. How fortunate I was. I even went to university during the time of grants and, being from a single-parent family, left uni without any loans to pay back. That kind of approach to higher education feels like a long time ago, but it was this millennium. Just. I don’t know that I consciously chose that route, rather that it was expected and therefore, that’s what I did.

If I’d been born 28 years later and had received my Level 3 results last week instead of in 1997, I wonder if my journey would have been the same. Probably. But I’d hope to be braver with my choices (based on better careers guidance than we got in the 1990s!). I know plenty of relatives and children of friends who have chosen to do apprenticeships, or degree apprenticeships over recent years. 28 years ago, that wouldn’t have been an option. Even though it now is, it still feels like a brave choice. Perhaps that’s a generational thing and simply being familiar with the options makes choosing the less popular one less of a big deal. Either way, what a great thing it is that those options now exist.

More students are choosing apprenticeships over university than ever before. This Prospects survey from this month says that the university route for A Level students has declined in popularity by 7% since 2022, and that 25% of the same students are planning to do an apprenticeship, up from 15% over the same period. Increasing numbers of students believe they can have a good career without going to university, value the fact that they can start earning money faster, and think they will receive better training through a job or apprenticeship.

This is great to read, until you notice one thing. The survey was asked to A Level students. Not Level 3 students, just A Level students.

You can draw a few conclusions/assumptions from that:

Maybe the survey did ask a proportion of all Level 3 students, but “A Level” was the term used to summarise the group. This is a problem, because Level 3 does not just mean A Levels, and we need to change that. See Darren Hankey, principal of Hartlepool College, as the best example of someone who challenges this assumption brilliantly, far more often than he wants to, I’m sure.

If the survey was only directed at A Level students, I suspect the numbers considering an apprenticeship are lower than they would have been had a proportion of the whole Level 3 cohort been surveyed. Outside of A Levels, nearly 240,000 Level 3 results were issued this year. That’s not a small number and we shouldn’t be missing these students out of our analysis, particularly when that analysis is related to apprenticeships.

Often, students studying vocational or technical qualifications are more certain of the career they want to end up in than A Level students. So, missing them out of a survey about university alternatives ignores a very switched-on group of young people who will hit our workforce and fill our skills gaps more quickly than university graduates.

I suspect a similar survey of Level 2 students would ignore those undertaking vocational alternatives to GCSEs, too. With Foundation Apprenticeships now available to add, in theory, even more work-based options into the melting pot, it’s important we acknowledge the progress made in diversifying options at 16 and 18. Just as importantly, we should acknowledge that we’re nowhere near where we should be in celebrating the achievements of technical and vocational students as loudly as we do their academic peers.

28 years ago, perhaps there was an excuse. There isn’t anymore.

👉 Don’t miss the main edition — click here for the full update.

Sam Sawyer on “The Antidote to Reform Anxiety? Radical Clarity”. Stay tuned!

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Apprenticeship Insights: is a ClickZ Media publication in the Education division