"I hope that our report will trigger a serious investigation into the financial well-being of apprentices and lead all political parties to commit to making apprenticeships more accessible for all.
Nine derelict homes in the community were being refurbished under a training scheme to assist young community members to gain skills, although the community claimed that funding was only available for 12-month periods, making apprenticeships (which run for several years) impossible to offer.
The trust has launched an employer pledge encouraging businesses to introduce measures that make apprenticeships work better for young women.
While Creative Skillset's O'Connor argued the case for an apprenticeship route for every role, Unionlearn's Wilson countered that what was needed was not to make apprenticeships universal, but to make ones that exist better.
This is irrefutable evidence that the government's unprecedented investment, backed by tough new measures to ensure that quality matches quantity, is helping make apprenticeships the gold standard in vocational training.
"We are proud to be the first company to support the Young Women's Trust pledge to encourage businesses to introduce measures which make apprenticeships work better for young women".
David Cameron has pledged to make apprenticeships the "new norm" for school leavers who decide against going to university.
The past 20 years or so have seen a number of initiatives designed to make apprenticeships better meet employers' needs, and thereby induce employer participation, but results have been somewhat mixed (Hogarth et al. 2014).
One of the ways in which employers' costs can be reduced is through reducing some of the direct costs, such as apprentices' wages, but this may make apprenticeships less attractive to would-be apprentices, especially those of a quality sought by employers.
Although high apprentice pay makes an apprenticeship more attractive for youth than school-based education (because it lowers the opportunity costs of acquiring education), high apprentice pay lowers a firm's incentives to provide high quality training that goes beyond providing merely the firm-specific skills necessary to perform work within the firm.
