The head of Ofsted, Amanda Spielman, made some telling points in her address to the Annual Apprenticeship Conference held in Birmingham on 22 March.
In an unusually blunt speech she highlighted the key issues her inspectors had found in their pilot inspections of apprenticeship providers since the new apprenticeship levy scheme began.
She identified underlying concerns that the new scheme was neither providing a good match to employers’ requirements nor those of young people leaving school for work.
For example, 40 per cent of newly approved apprenticeships were in the higher-end, degree-level categories while only 7 per cent of young people seeking apprenticeships were in that category.
• A longer version of this article is on the web as Apprenticeship problems raised