Hurdles to offering a solicitor apprenticeship degree

King’s College London (KCL) recently considered creating a solicitor apprenticeship degree in conjunction with City Century (a consortium of firms who wish to drive the uptake of solicitor apprentices within the City). City Century’s goal is to improve the participation of under-represented groups in the legal profession. However, the current apprenticeship regulation is not assisting this aim. As KCL discovered, there are several major barriers to Higher Education Institutions (HEIs) providing a solicitor apprenticeship degree.

Enhanced administration and increased cost

Apprenticeships are funded through an employer levy paid at a rate of 0.5% of an employer’s annual pay bill for those employers with an annual pay bill of more than £3 million. The Education and Skills Funding Agency (ESFA) stipulates detailed Apprenticeship Funding Rules to regulate the use of the employer levy. As a result of the Funding Rules, HEIs will incur significant additional cost and operational change required for apprenticeship degrees. HEIs will need to put in place arrangements for individual onboarding (for example, an apprentice is required to have an individual needs assessment and skills scan assessment against the nationally set Solicitor Apprenticeship Standard, an assessment of the impact of prior experience and learning and the creation of an individual training plan). This individualised approach to each apprentice will be alien to many HEIs, where their usual onboarding approach is done en masse and is not tailored. In addition to onboarding, each apprentice needs an individual learning record, which is submitted monthly to access the employer’s levy funding. All of this requires additional resources, with an accompanying cost. HEIs who offer apprenticeships in other disciplines will be familiar with these costs, which means any apprenticeship offering must be considered across disciplines to be cost-effective.

The skills coach

Under the Funding Rules there is a requirement for a tri-partite meeting to be held between the HEI, the employer and the apprentice, four times a year. Pastorally, apprentices are likely to require enhanced support to balance their work four days a week, in conjunction with studying for a law degree (or completing their off-the-job training as it is known in the Funding Rules). The HEI will therefore need to engage a ‘skills coach’ who is responsible for conducting the tri-partite meetings on behalf of the HEI and will have overall pastoral responsibility for the apprentice. The engagement of skills coaches is in addition to academic staff, thereby further increasing the cost to the HEI.

Solicitors Qualifying Examination

The end point assessment of a solicitor apprenticeship is the Solicitors Qualifying Examination (SQE). The preparation needed to pass the SQE1 and SQE2 assessments is different from the preparation needed to pass a law degree and many HEIs will not engage in SQE training. Whilst some HEIs have converted their law degrees into an SQE-preparation course, other HEIs, including KCL, have partnered with an SQE preparation course provider. In the context of a solicitor apprenticeship, however, this begs the question of who is providing the SQE element of the off-the-job training, and the Funding Rules have a level of complexity around subcontractors to the main provider of the apprenticeship. The apprentice will need to remain the responsibility of the HEI, notwithstanding that the actual delivery may be undertaken by the partner or, alternatively, the SQE materials may have to be licensed to the HEI to teach this material. The need to underscore this delivery with technology to track, and assist, students in preparing for the SQE prohibits many HEIs from doing this.

Ofsted

The quality of the off-the-job training for all apprenticeships falls under the remit of Ofsted. HEIs will be familiar with dealing with the Office for Students (OfS) and the Quality Assurance Agency in relation to existing offerings, but few HEIs will have any experience of dealing with Ofsted inspections. The practical reality of an Ofsted inspection is daunting for a HEI. An inadequate rating means that the ESFA will remove the apprenticeship provider from the Apprenticeship Provider and Assessment Register. For HEIs with apprenticeships across multiple disciplines, Ofsted also rates the institution as a whole, so failures within one faculty could lead to the failure of apprenticeships across all faculties.

Solutions

Whilst tailored approaches to each apprentice and the use of skills coaches can have obvious benefits, the complexity of the regulation around this and the cost of dealing with it, is prohibitive, given that the maximum amount permitted to be paid from the levy is £27,000 for the entire six years of the apprenticeship. At a time when university funding is coming under increased pressure, anything with significant additional costs is unlikely to be pursued, particularly as the Funding Rules require that 20% of the levy is not paid until the apprentice finishes their end-point assessment (passing the SQE), giving the HEI working capital shortfalls. Labour have promised to reform the apprenticeship levy, so it remains to be seen whether any changes implemented will solve these problems and whether their attempts to reform apprenticeships more generally provide solutions to the difficulty around the SQE assessment and the use of sub-contractors. Prior to the Review of Post-18 Education and Funding in 2019, responsibility for regulatory oversight of Level 6 and 7 apprenticeships also lay with the OfS, rather than Ofsted, so if Labour’s reforms were to reinstate this position, then that would also make apprenticeships more palatable.

The concept of apprenticeships is fundamentally sound and the aim of widening access to the profession is clearly an important goal, but the way solicitor apprenticeships are currently implemented creates reluctance for many HEIs to engage with them. The current system prejudices apprentices by not giving them the full range of choice of HEIs available to solicitors following a traditional route to qualification. Given Labour’s promises to reform this area, it is hoped that this position will change over the course of the next parliamentary term to allow for apprenticeships to become a more common offering at leading HEIs.