Do people want a Skills or Apprenticeship Levy? FE Soundbite Edition 683

Welcome to the FE weekly Soundbite Edition 683! So what do people want, an Apprenticeship Levy or a Skills Levy? So we asked!

This is the weekly e-newsletter and e-journal brought to you by FE News: ISSN 2732-4095. We know life is busy, so here is a snapshot of the latest announcements and epic thought leadership articles from sector influencers and cool thinkers across FE and Skills this week on FE News.

I hope you enjoyed FE Soundbite last week… the Apprentice takeover. I think it would be good to change the perspective and view on Soundbite, so we are going mix it up a bit in the future.

So do people want an Apprenticeship Levy, a Skills Levy or something else?

We had a couple of cool articles this week on the Levy. My mate Tom Bewick got me thinking with: Budget Statement 2023: is the scrapping of the apprenticeship levy on the cards? and then Mark Cameron wrote: Transparency and understanding will help the Apprenticeship Levy debate and its potential reform.

All of this got me thinking… what do people want… An Apprenticeship Levy, a Skills Levy, to Scrap it all together or something else? So, instead of just wondering, I set up a poll on LinkedIn… the poll results were really interesting:

56% of people wanted to see the Levy become a wider Skills Levy, 26% wanted the Levy to be purely for Apprenticeships, 15% want to scrap the Levy and only 2% want something else… interesting, especially as according to the data the people who answered were MD’s, Chief Executives, Owners and Lecturers.

That is a lot of NEETs!

According to the latest ONS data, 788,000 are now NEET! … or 11% of young people! What?!

We also had a great article from Resolution Foundation today looking at both ends of the labour market… and alarmingly both are struggling to be in employment: Exploring Economic Inactivity and NEETs: What Are Their Challenges?

Ever wondered what ‘Economically Inactive’ means? Well check out the article above to find out more.

Learning and Work also shared some findings on how 50 career changers pivoted as a result of reskilling pilots.