Courses advertised as fast-track routes to becoming an electrician could be preventing budding professionals from progressing into the sector.
Experts from the Electrical Contractors’ Association (ECA) said that college-run, classroom-based courses for potential electricians were a “waste of money” and were being “mis-sold”.
Talking to Construction News, ECA chief operating officer Andrew Eldred and head of external affairs Jane Dawson said the government-funded courses could be pushing potential electricians away and deepening the skills gap. The ECA has had meetings with the construction minister Sarah Jones to raise the issue and discuss how the money could better be used.
The college courses are meant to lead to apprenticeships. However, fewer than one in ten of the 23,000 people a year who enrol on the courses progress to apprenticeships, Eldred said.
“In every part of the country, pretty much, the numbers on the classroom-based courses far outweigh the numbers starting the apprenticeships,” he said. Nationally, the ratio of classroom-based enrolments to apprenticeship starts is about 3:1, but that rises to about 8:1 in London and 6:1 in Birmingham.
According to Eldred, around 8 per cent of the course graduates progress into apprenticeships nationally, Eldred put the low apprenticeship numbers down to the courses being “mis-sold” as a direct route into being an electrician.
“If you go on any college website, they will present it as: ‘This is your route to progressing into becoming an electrician’. So to a significant degree, I think there is scope to say this is being mis-sold,” he said.
He added that both the course funders and the students were being mis-sold.
Eldred estimated that taxpayers funded the classroom-based electrical courses to the tune of £70m in 2022/23.
“How is that spending justified?” he said.
Mis-selling the courses, he added, was also driving people away from doing an electrician apprenticeship as they do not want to spend more time studying.
“Quite a lot of people end up disappointed – they had a higher expectation of what’s going to happen next,” he added.
He called for the money spent on the college courses to instead go towards other parts of the training industry, such as the apprenticeship standard. The money could be used to pay tutors and assessors on the course closer to an electrician’s rate of pay, for example.
The money could also go towards other training routes such as Adult National Vocational Qualifications (NVQ) – most of which are self-funded.
In August, research by the ECA revealed that the industry needs 12,000 newly qualified electricians every year to meet increasing demand in England.
