OF525 Employer Surveying

As set out in the Post-16 Skills Plan, Government has embarked on a series of significant reforms to vocational and technical qualifications, including Functional Skills, Apprenticeships and introducing new Technical Education Qualifications. With this in mind we want to: (1) Establish a benchmark for how these qualifications and assessments (or their closest fore-runners) are viewed and used by employers. (2) Understand the specific issues/ features/ characteristics that lead to employers either valuing or rejecting these qualifications and assessments. Being able to track a range of metrics on behaviours and attitudes to these over time will give us a clear indicator of whether the reforms we implement lead to greater employer confidence in the qualifications and assessments we regulate. Also, getting to the fundamental reasons why employers do or do not place value on them will help us understand why this is the case, and therefore what could be done to improve public confidence in them.