Could we fund PhD studentships using the apprenticeship levy?
The funding available to recruit PhD students is surprisingly small, and is hard to access. In the mid-long term, this poses massive problems. This is perhaps particularly acute in Chemistry, where undergraduate lab teaching relies heavily on having enough postgraduate students.
I have been wondering whether a University could part-fund PhD programmes by creative use of the Apprenticeship Levy. This blog is my attempt to think that through. I’m not sure it would work, but I think it's worth considering whether it could fly.
In broad strokes, the plan I want to test is this:
A student works as a research apprentice, and is paid as an apprentice who gets access to Apprenticeship Levy resources;
As part of their apprenticeship, apprentices learn how to perform and publish research;
Charge the Apprenticeship Levy for training research apprentices, freeing up internal funds to pay for research apprentice salaries;
Apprentices submit a PhD by publication on the basis of work they did while employed as an apprentice.
It is important that the ‘by publication’ route is used here. Apprenticeships absolutely cannot be used to fund a traditional PhD (at FHEQ Level 8), and the ‘by publication’ strategy is an attempt to honour this prohibition.
Is there a way of making the model above fit with the opportunities of the Apprenticeship Levy? Let’s see!
Editorial Note
I’ve been sitting on this draft for a few months, mostly because it is both technical and speculative (rarely a persuasive combination in a blog). But this week I saw the government punting the idea of school teacher apprenticeships and I thought perhaps the bar is lower than I had judged.
What is an Apprenticeship?
An apprenticeship is on-the-job training, and is increasingly being formalised into programmes recognised by the Government. As an apprentice you ‘earn as you learn’, typically in an entry-level role. Some apprenticeships available in my postcode are Dental Assistant and Sports Coach, with salaries in the region of £9-15k/year.
It is fair to say that research apprenticeships aren’t a common way of thinking about a PhD, but nor is it an outlandish description. UKRI PhD pay is at around the level of the salaries seen for apprenticeships, the position is extremely junior within the well-defined career structures of research organisations, and the socialisation into a profession is something which characterises both a traditional apprenticeship and a PhD.
The Apprenticeship Levy
Large UK employers (with wage bills over £3m) pay 0.5% of their wage bill into a pot called the “Apprenticeship Levy”. This is a legal obligation. Some large businesses are exempt, but I understand that Universities are not. This money is ringfenced for spending on training apprentices on a ‘use it or lose it’ basis: after two years the Government redistributes unspent money for smaller companies to use.
The money can only be spent in certain ways. Specifically, the funds must be used to help apprentices gain training and qualifications. These qualifications must be set out in an approved programme of apprenticeship training and they must also be deemed necessary to being effective in the job. The levy funds cannot be used to pay wages, to ‘top up’ unnecessary qualifications, or to pay for qualifications which aren’t approved as part of the apprenticeship. There is a specific prohibition against using the levy to pay for MBAs, though the apprentice or employer is free to pay for an MBA independently.
Can it be used for Research Apprenticeships?
The Levy money cannot be used to pay salary, and nor can it be used to pay for the bench fees or qualification fees of a PhD. The wording of the MBA clause, though, means a ‘by publication’ route to a PhD would likely be legitimate.
The key hurdle seems to be approval of the apprenticeship programme. To use Levy funds effectively, Universities would have to formalise a lot of the training which is already provided (e.g. a course on scientific writing, being trained in handling air-sensitive compounds, learning to use the PXRD machine and software). Full economic costing of this highly specialist training is something Universities can readily calculate and charge to the Levy account. This use of Levy money would free up discretionary funds which could then be used to pay the salaries of research apprentices. For example, if you could pay an academic’s salary by charging the Apprenticeship Levy for them running a really good course on interpreting XPS data. Then you would have more money to pay the salary of research apprentices.
A lot would rest on the exact numbers here. My understanding is that most organisations struggle to spend their Levy accounts, so the money is often going to waste. For every £10m of wage bill, the Levy would accrue £50k. For a big University, that means there could be really significant scope to employ a large number of research apprentices.
The judgement may differ between universities, though, especially as there are also costs to consider with apprenticeships as compared with studentships. Research apprentices would be true employees of the University, which would generally attract employee benefits like pension contributions and parental leave. Added to this is the cost of the ‘by publication’ PhD, which must be shouldered by either the apprentice or the University.
Approved Training
To provide training, Universities would have to register as a training provider, likely as the subcategory ‘employer-provider’.
This requires a short submission form to begin discussion with the Department for Education.
Getting the DfE to say ‘yes’ seems like the really big hurdle in my proposal. The scope to see the research apprenticeship as being in Bad Faith is fairly large, despite (i) a traditional PhD being a time-honoured form of apprenticeship; and (2) the shift of the UK’s economy into the services sector. On the other hand the quality of training on a research apprenticeship would be extraordinarily high, and could help HEIs think more strategically about how to engage with providing support for other apprenticeships.
Would this be a good idea?
There are reasons why developing research apprenticeships might be unattractive to a University, even if they were technically possible. In my view there are two important moral considerations.
De-funding traditional apprenticeships.
Universities are massive organisations which normally employ many traditional apprentices. Aggressively shifting money towards research apprentices might damage the provision which existing apprentices can currently access. If the Levy money is already spoken for, then diverting it would be wrong in my opinion. But if the Levy money isn’t being used? Perhaps then it would be worth considering whether research apprenticeships could work. This judgement would need to respond to local situations.
Administrative burden
There will be a substantial administrative cost to working out whether the research apprenticeship model could work, and to treating research apprentices as employees. The parallel existence of research apprentices and PhD students would also require administrative labour. Though some of this could be charged to the Levy, it might still not be worth it after running the numbers.
Conclusion
I don’t know if this would work, but do I think it’s worth considering: securing funding for PhD studentships is surprisingly hard in the UK as research grants typically cannot be used to fund them.
Convincing the DfE to let Universities spend their own money on training people rigorously to do superb research is surely a realistic goal, especially as it could a pragmatic way to support a struggling sector through a period of substantial economic recession. There is also a hard economic case for increasing the number of productive “knowledge workers” in the modern British economy; framing PhDs as apprenticeships-plus-publications might be a very traditional way of addressing a very modern problem.