Opinion: Apprenticeships vs degrees – it isn’t as simple as that

During National Apprenticeship Week, Professor Ian Dunn, Provost of Coventry University Group, explores how recent skills reforms could better support learners and employers by recognising degrees and apprenticeships as complementary routes within a lifelong learning system.

While there’s much to admire about the UK Government’s apprenticeship reforms, scrapping targets for university places in favour of pushing more people towards apprenticeships reinforces an obsolete view of education as something decided early and fixed for life, rather than a process that supports different routes into work and continued learning over time.

Replacing one headcount target with another is fuelling unhelpful debates about which educational route is more “worthwhile” or “economically wiser” and is shifting attention away from what should be the real focus: how this £725m investment is bolstering a skills system that both supports and values choice, learning and upskilling throughout working life.

Headcount targets are a problem

Rather than uniting the UK’s education sector, participation targets tend to set different routes against each other, sending signals to young people about what leads to success and encouraging competition between institutions instead of collaboration.

Progress won’t be achieved by casting degrees and apprenticeships as rivals competing for the same students, when they in fact support different skills, careers and circumstances and are complementarily within the wider education sector.

The sector needs to be empowered to meet the economic and social imperative for education to be lifelong, accessible and developing the right skills in the right places over time. We must be allowed to adapt to the reality of repeated movement between work, learning, retraining and upskilling as roles and sectors evolve.

Aligning learning and upskilling with evolving industries

This constant movement is driven by the speed at which industries are changing, as new technologies and shifting patterns of demand create new roles while altering and displacing old ones. In this environment, staying employable is less about holding onto a fixed set of skills and more about keeping them relevant and adapting as labour markets shift.

For businesses, this translates into the need for a mix of skills and capabilities that are built and rebuilt over time. Applying knowledge in practice and exercising critical thinking and adaptability are valued as highly as technical expertise. It’s why so many education routes now blend study with work experience, recognising that skills are developed through movement between learning and work.

Providers should be encouraged to work together to design pathways that evolve alongside industries and are invested in and easily accessed. They also need to be properly connected so people can build skills across different stages of life and change direction as their careers develop. Such harmony is difficult to achieve when the focus is on funnelling people down a single route early on. Pressuring young people into intensive training tied to industries they may not remain in risks wasting time and investment and runs counter to the adaptability the economy now demands.

Universities are essential to apprenticeship growth

At the core of any university should be a commitment to not only teaching and upskilling workforces, but to also evolve its education offer in line with the economy it serves. Our own roots lie in combining education with technical and professional skills to meet the needs of local labour markets and that legacy still drives us today. It is reflected in the way we deliver both academic and technical routes, work with employers to support skills development and contribute to wider conversations about how the modern skills system should evolve.

To stay aligned with workforce needs, universities must be willing to rethink and reform what and how they teach. For us, that has meant expanding our provision to better reflect different learner needs and ambitions by opening campuses abroad, launching our National Institute of Teaching and Education, changing how we deliver degree programmes and investing in apprenticeships.

As an economic development partner, our role is not only critical to delivering apprenticeships, but to supporting their long-term growth. Our provider, Better Futures Apprenticeships, supports more than 4,000 learners and works with more than 1,000 employers, placing it among the UK’s top 50 training providers. As employment patterns evolve, learning expectations shift and employers play a greater role in defining occupational skills, the impact of our apprenticeship provision can be seen in the bolstering of NHS talent pipelines and in sustained partnerships with local employers that are key to regional growth.

A skills system built on choice and opportunity

When a range of educational opportunities are accessible and properly supported and people feel empowered to choose between them at various stages of life, communities retain talent, employers gain the skills they need and growth becomes inclusive.

Progress ultimately lies in building a system that values lifelong learning and upskilling, judging success by the strength of the skills in the workforce than by the route taken to acquire them.