Government injects cash into creative industries’ apprenticeship scheme.
Up to 1,125 new apprenticeships will be established in the creative and cultural industries, thanks to funding granted to the
National Skills Academy (NSA) by the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills. The NSA was one of 12 organisations to win an 8% share of £7m of Government funding to set up new Apprenticeship Training Associations (ATAs) and Group Training Associations (GTAs). The announcement of the funding, which will support a total of over 14,000 apprenticeships for 16–24 year-olds, places the creative sector among industries recognised as “vital for the country’s economic growth”. Other winners come from the environmental, engineering, manufacturing, logistics and business administration sectors.
The NSA, which is based in Thurrock and has close links with 19 Founder Colleges and a network of industry member organisations from the cultural sector across England, has hailed the funding as “a significant step forward in the creative and cultural sector’s campaign to provide more mainstream training opportunities”. It will establish an Apprenticeship Service and manage the new programme from April 2010, and take responsibility for recruiting, employing and training apprentices, and for supporting the organisations and education providers involved. The agency will be called Creative and Cultural Apprenticeships and will function as an ATA, placing apprentices with host employers in the creative sector. However, the funding will not subsidise the wages of apprentices.
A spokesperson for the NSA said the organisation has always recommended, through its Creative Apprentices scheme, that cultural sector businesses should pay apprentices the national minimum wage (between £125 and £203 per week, depending on age), although the national minimum for apprentices is £95 a week. If the host business is unable to continue supporting an apprentice, the trainee will return to the ATA and be reassigned to another business. The NSA’s scheme will cover theatre, live music, craft, cultural heritage, design, literature, and the performing and visual arts.
The NSA is a subsidiary of Creative & Cultural Skills (CCSkills), the Sector Skills Council for the creative industries, which has estimated that by 2017 there will be a shortage of 30,000 skilled offstage and backstage workers. Tom Bewick, Group Chief Executive of CCSkills, said the new scheme was “one step towards ensuring that we have the skilled workforce we need to remain the largest cultural economy in the world as a proportion of GDP”. Martin Bright, founder of New Deal of the Mind, told AP that “any proposal to create job opportunities in these difficult times is very welcome... The sector now needs to match this initiative with some imaginative schemes for creative entrepreneurs.” Bendy Ashfield, the Apprenticeships Manager for the Royal Opera House, said the announcement “will open up the possibility of apprenticeships to smaller scale organisations” and lessen both the risk and the administrative burden.