We have some lived experience of Scotland's apprenticeship system in our household and if that is anything to go by, Anas Sarwar's Labour or any other political party looking to overhaul the country's training and skills network has got a helluva task on its hands.

For more than a decade, Scotland has layered review upon review without fixing the fundamentals of how apprenticeships are funded, organised and valued. And as the OECD warned in 2022, Scotland’s system “disproportionately favours higher education over apprenticeships”, with employers expected to increasingly shoulder the costs while university tuition remains fully funded.

That structural imbalance has shaped political and institutional behaviour, with ministers boasting about free university while work‑based routes that could drive productivity are left as the poor relations.

At the same time, the system has become more complex than coherent. Skills Development Scotland (SDS), the Scottish Funding Council, individual colleges, sector bodies and now a new skills planning and policy unit all have a say in design and delivery. Each body has its own priorities and reporting templates which has resulted in a maze of frameworks, contribution rates and pilot schemes that might make sense to officials but feels opaque to employers and would‑be apprentices.

Time for an 'honest discussion' about apprenticeships

About 95% of firms that take on apprentices are SMEs or micro businesses with 10 or fewer staff, meaning they have less capacity to navigate the maze and shoulder costs. There are similar bandwidth issues within the colleges that provide the classroom element of learning........

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