Apprenticeship training in England: a cost-effective model for firms?

In England, the government plans to incentivise spending of billions of pounds over the next few years promoting apprenticeships, with most of the finance raised from the apprenticeship levy on employers. Promoting more apprenticeships is designed to improve England’s skill base – a government policy priority given the relatively low level of skills and educational qualifications amongst a large part of the country’s workforce. But does such a policy make sense in an English context, with a historically limited participation of many employers in work related formal training? Is additional spending on apprenticeships likely to lead to positive economic returns for employers, workers and for England itself? And how varied are the net economic returns by employer and by sector? What works for one category of employment may not bring positive gains where returns to training are much lower. To answer these questions the JPMorgan Chase Foundation, the Education Policy Institute and the Bertelsmann Stiftung have come together and partnered with the internationally acknowledged economist Prof. Dr. Stefan C. Wolter to explore the costs and benefits of apprenticeship training for companies in England. This report by Prof. Dr. Stefan C. Wolter and Eva Joho brings a much needed degree of rigour and quantification to a policy area which is too often characterised by assumption, hunch, and international experience which may not apply in a very different country context. The authors have used evidence from Germany, Switzerland and Austria to simulate the costs and benefits of an apprenticeship policy applied in an English context. They are aware of the limitations of this approach - not least given the different tradition of employer engagement in England - but the analysis in this report is important and could help guide employer and government policies in directions that maximise economic returns and limit low return scenarios. In particular, the return by occupations is shown to be highly varied based on the return and cost characteristics of each sector. The returns by employer within each sector also vary markedly. The key conclusions the authors have derived in the report could help steer English policymakers and employers in more evidence based directions, which should help ensure that England’s large investment in this area is properly informed by evidence and more likely to yield positive returns. In addition, the present study complements studies with a similar methodology in Spain (2016) and Italy (to be published 2018), which will enable learnings for successful implementation of apprenticeship models across countries

Apprenticeship training in Italy: a cost-effective model for firms?

In times of rapid technological progress and increasing digitalisation in many areas of work and life, it is more important than ever to provide young people with the best possible skills for their entry into the world of work. It is certainly important to provide them with a solid theoretical knowledge base. However, it is also important to impart practical skills to ensure that they are able to adapt to the needs of the labour market. Post-school education in Italy, while providing good formal skills in this respect, is not sufficiently responsive to the needs of the labour market. With this in mind, dual training models have become politically more attractive in Italy and are already being implemented. But despite political support and the reforms in recent years, the popularity of dual training models has hardly increased. From an international point of view, this development is hardly surprising. On the one hand, interest in dual vocational training is increasing: learning a trade at two locations – in a company and at a part-time vocational school – means that apprentices gain valuable professional experience while they are still training, which enables a smoother transition to the labour market. As a result, there is less youth unemployment and a better supply of skilled labour for industry. On the other hand, reforms of this kind often encounter a major obstacle when it comes to practical implementation: a lack of commitment by the companies, especially in countries where an in-company apprenticeship tradition is absent. First and foremost, companies see training as an operational loss: why pay to train an apprentice when qualified employees can be recruited directly on the labour market? What businesses often fail to see is that in-house training does not merely incur costs, but that it also results in monetary benefits, and sometimes in net profits before training has even been completed. However, the question is: under which conditions? The costs and benefits of training are not invariables, they depend on a wide of variety of parameters such as the level of apprentices’ pay, the industry in question, the duration of training, recruiting costs for qualified skilled workers on the labour market – not to mention the quality of the training course. To examine the situation, this study uses simulations to investigate how these parameters would have to be designed in Italy in order to make dual training more attractive for Italian businesses. The conclusions derived in this report are intended to assist Italian policymakers and employers to make more evidence-based decisions, to ensure that Italy’s labour force investments are more likely to yield positive returns

A recurrent de novo mutation in KCNC1 causes progressive myoclonus epilepsy

Progressive myoclonus epilepsies (PMEs) are a group of rare, inherited disorders manifesting with action myoclonus, tonic-clonic seizures and ataxia. We sequenced the exomes of 84 unrelated individuals with PME of unknown cause and molecularly solved 26 cases (31%). Remarkably, a recurrent de novo mutation, c.959G>A (p.Arg320His), in KCNC1 was identified as a new major cause for PME. Eleven unrelated exome-sequenced (13%) and two affected individuals in a secondary cohort (7%) had this mutation. KCNC1 encodes KV3.1, a subunit of the KV3 voltage-gated potassium ion channels, which are major determinants of high-frequency neuronal firing. Functional analysis of the Arg320His mutant channel showed a dominant-negative loss-of-function effect. Ten cases had pathogenic mutations in known PME-associated genes (NEU1, NHLRC1, AFG3L2, EPM2A, CLN6 and SERPINI1). Identification of mutations in PRNP, SACS and TBC1D24 expand their phenotypic spectra to PME. These findings provide insights into the molecular genetic basis of PME and show the role of de novo mutations in this disease entity