Ms Fiona Longmuir:

My understanding is that apprentice demand from people who want to become apprentices is outstripping places at the moment. It is outstripping the number of employers we have. Scaling up the number of employers we have is vital. I hope the Institute of Physics will be able to play the convening role we talked about earlier in identifying those sectors and businesses within those sectors that might be interested in apprenticeships. We run up against the stereotypes we have talked about and I am sure that businesses are affected by those stereotypes too and think that an apprentice would not work within their businesses. We also know that a lot of industries do not consider themselves to be physics. I often meet people who tell me they do not employ any physicists. I will ask what they do and be told they do robotics. There are these interlinking stereotypes coming together to make physics apprenticeships a bit of a nightmare. We must engage those employers and industries to show the value of apprenticeships. It is about learning on the job. It is the perfect mixture of more academic-style learning and on-the-job experience. All employers could benefit from an apprenticeship model if they were creative about how to implement it within their businesses.