Ms Meadhbh Costello:

There has been considerable work ongoing by the national apprenticeship office and SOLAS to progress that action. A lot of it is more on the governance and quality assurance side. We just have a bit of uncertainty as to what the impact is going to be on the ground for both apprentices and employers regarding the roles and responsibilities of the consortia as part of this new model. They have also proposed the clustering of apprenticeships together.

We are a bit unsure as to how that is going to operate. We need more clarity. At the minute, we are seeing very successful apprenticeship programmes and we do not really understand why there would be a reason to cluster them together if they are already quite successful in their own right.

What underpins all this is a sustainable funding model. We currently have two separate types of funding models - for the craft and consortia-led apprenticeships, respectively - and this leads to discrepancies in the employer experience. One example is the off-the-job training and how that is covered. In craft, it is covered by the State whereas the employer has to continue paying the apprentice in the consortia model. We would like to see an increased incentive for the consortia employers, particularly SMEs, so that they can better cover the costs associated with leaving the apprentice out on training, the backfill and potentially the mentorship, etc. Our big suggestion around the single model is to have that sustainable funding model.