Driving Workforce Success: Solutions for Appenticeships

Tēnā koutou katoa. Nau mai, haere mai. Welcome to this Concove, Te Hūrā and Alan and Clark webinar, Driving Workforce Success Solutions for Apprenticeships.

Today we'll be discussing how training advisors can revolutionise apprenticeship outcomes using the six conditions of systems change methodology. Ko Catherine Hall, tōku ingoa, and it's my pleasure to welcome you to our kauri room. For those of you who might be joining us for the first time, let me introduce Concove.

Concove is the construction and infrastructure centre of vocational excellence. We focus on research projects that drive long-lasting change, aiming to solve issues in the construction and infrastructure sectors through vocational education. The training advisor project is one of three key initiatives that we've undertaken to explore the roles of the main educators in vocational education.

The employer, who has apprentices or trainees in their organisation, the classroom-based educator, such as those that you'll find in a polytech or a private training institution, and the training advisor, who works alongside the employer and apprentice or trainee. These projects offer essential insights into the support systems needed to drive meaningful structural changes that benefit both learners and employers. As individual projects, the three provide some great insights and actions.

Together, I think they're even more powerful. So we're weaving those three projects together into a project we're calling at the moment the Trilogy, to ensure that we provide practical outcomes for those delivering education in the workplace, vocational education providers, and also policymakers. We want to strengthen the backbone of our sector, our educators.

We partnered with Alan and Clark on this piece, taking a deep dive into the role of training advisors and driving apprentice success. Alan and Clark is an Australasian-based consultancy dedicated to making a positive impact on communities throughout Aotearoa, Australia, and the Pacific. Their specialties include strategy, change management, programme delivery, policy, research, and evaluation.

Both Concove and Alan and Clark share a strong commitment to empowering you to overcome the challenges facing vocational education. Today, we're going to be covering an introduction to the six conditions of systems change, the challenges hindering apprenticeships, how applying the six conditions methodology leads to effective, lasting change, and targeted strategies to enhance apprenticeship outcomes. Before we delve into the project, please drop any questions you have into the chat.

I have a nifty little tablet here, and I'll be able to pick them up as we go. And then for those other questions, we'll loop back to those at the end. After the session, we will provide a recording, slides, and a summary of the key points and any templates that we talk about through our discussion.

It's now my pleasure to introduce our panel, who will share their expertise and experiences. I'm going to hand over to Sean to start. Awesome.

Yeah, thank you, Catherine. So, kia ora koutou. My name's Sean Stack, and I'm a senior consultant to Alan and Clark.

And I was the senior researcher on this project, and I'll pass over to my colleague, Georgia. Yeah, kia ora, thanks. My name's Georgia Jackson.

I'm also a senior consultant here at Alan and Clark, and I was the researcher on this project. Kia ora koutou. My name is Stuart Beresford, and I'm a senior consultant at Alan and Clark as well.

And I was the project manager and one of the researchers. I provided research support to Georgia and Sean during this project. Kia ora, thanks, Stu.

Thanks, team. I've read the report a few times, and there's a lot of information in this particular report. Can you tell us what the objective of the research was? Thanks, Catherine.

That is actually quite an interesting question. The apprentices, as you know, are an effective way for learners to advance their career in the construction and infrastructure sector. Employers who take on apprentices are responsible for providing adequate training and supervision so that they meet the qualification requirements and gain suitable work experience to appropriately prepare them for employment.

Each apprentice is assigned a training advisor from the relevant education provider to support the apprentices' progress through their qualification. Training advisors also assist employers to help apprentices learn and mentor apprentices to enable them to become confident tradespeople. However, some challenges have been observed with this support.

For instance, some employers expect training advisors to teach the technical skills, which is not their role. Focusing on the six conditions of systems change, our research has as its objective to explore the support provided by training advisors, which is seen as important for building capacity for greater success for apprentices in those sectors. It can also contribute to better training outcomes, including completion rates and the timing to complete the qualification.

Absolutely. I'll just jump in quickly, sorry, because I just want to mention that we also looked at the support that training providers provide training advisors. To the people that are in the sector, you're probably already familiar with the amount of tongue twisters that come when you're talking about this stuff.

Training advisors are employed by training providers, and so it was really important for us to consider what are training providers doing to support their training advisors to do their role as well as they possibly can. I just wanted to flag that up front because we will be covering that as well. And it is a tongue twister because sometimes training providers aren't actually providing training, but we're going to get into that in a little bit.

Before we talk about the specific process that you used, tell us a little bit more about what exactly is systems change? Yeah. If I had to describe systems change super briefly, which I definitely do because I've got a lot to get through here, I'd summarise it by saying that it's a holistic approach to understanding and solving problems. And in my view, it's the understanding problems bit of the summary that's most important in the context of what we're going to talk about today.

Because in my experience, if you can develop a really comprehensive understanding of the factors that contribute to a system producing less than ideal outcomes, potential solutions naturally become apparent. Okay. So we asked Alan and Clark to give us the specific or to use the specific six conditions methodology.

Can you give us a quick overview of the elements of this methodology? I think that one's for you, Sean. It is. Yeah.

So this is pretty easy because it's what it says on the box. The key elements of the six conditions methodology are the six conditions themselves. I'm informed the audience should be able to see them up on a slide now.

So the conditions are really just a way of categorising the different things that act on individuals and organisations within a system to determine what outcomes the system produces. What I like about this methodology is that the categorisation system is relatively simple, and it's also very comprehensive. We didn't encounter anything that we heard that we couldn't fit sort of reasonably neatly into one of those conditions, which then makes the analysis process relatively simple as well.

Yeah. We love it as well. But can you tell us a little bit more about what's the significance of the upside down pyramid? Yeah.

So that's the other key element. So that's the hierarchy that they're organised into, the conditions are organised into, and the audience can see that they're structured across three levels, transformative, relational and structural. The hierarchy is important because it reflects the depth and difficulty of influencing different types of change within a system.

So structural conditions, these are the sort of easy ones to see and change, policies, practices and resource flows. They're more tangible and visible. Relational conditions, relationships, connections and power dynamics, they operate at a deeper level.

So that's sort of becoming a little bit harder to sort of see and understand what you need to do to change them. And then at the sort of deepest and most difficult level to see and understand are the transformative conditions, that's mental models. And those involve sort of understanding and changing deeply held beliefs and assumptions.

So an example of that would be someone's prejudice, someone's bias. So for instance, in the construction industry, it may be that those engaging in construction industry don't have the same level of intelligence as, for instance, people that go into universities. Yeah, yeah.

So that is an example of a mental model. And then other ones, and the ones that we sort of more ended up focusing on were ones around what do people understand that their role is within the system? What do they understand? What's sort of their perceived contribution to the outcomes of the system? And how do they fit into it? And definitely, you know, like in terms of the literature that we reviewed, you know, the mental models, that bias comes into play, particularly with regard to parents and their reaction when their kids want to undertake an apprenticeship in construction and in the infrastructure area, where they don't see that as being as valuable as, for instance, other vocations. Or even between trades, like, you know, if you've got a parent who's a sparky, then you can see how that sort of places maybe some pressure that you should become a sparky compared to a plumber or something like that.

So great conversation. But I'm going to take us back to the research. So at a high level, Georgia, how did you put the methodology into practice? Yeah, of course.

So we followed a three phase process to apply the systems change methodology. So firstly, we wanted to understand the system. Who are the actors? What are the existing structures? What are the existing conditions? And what outcomes is the system trying to produce? And what is it actually producing? This helped us to identify some key challenges, what things are occurring within the system that are causing a bit of a disconnect between that expectation and reality.

And then thirdly, we identified some recommendations around what conditions are required to remove the challenges and why. I'll note that while we've set these out as sort of progressive linear steps, in practice, they often occur concurrently with more or less overlap, depending on who you're talking to and what challenges you're considering. We'll kind of go through these steps and through a bit more detail in the next sort of few phases of the webinar.

Yeah, I think it's also important, Catherine, just to take a moment to also just go through exactly how we came about identifying these challenges. Look, we commenced by this research by developing an understanding of how tertiary education providers facilitate training and the support that they provide to apprentices and employers during and before the delivery of the apprenticeship programme. We undertook a literature review, 72 journals were examined, you know, on work-based training in the construction and infrastructure sector, both in New Zealand and in comparative jurisdictions.

There are actually a number of articles by New Zealanders in the space, which is really good to see. So we got, you know, some really localised research in the space. We also spoke to 10 key informants from the representative bodies that look after the construction or work in the construction and infrastructure space, about what was working well, potential challenges, and suggestions for improvement.

We gathered data from different training providers on the progression and completion rates of their apprenticeship programmes, which is contained in the slides. And one of the things that, you know, the key takeaways for me is just the number of apprenticeships that are currently taking place in New Zealand. It's over 80,000, and of that number, a significant portion, almost over 40%, are in the construction and infrastructure area.

But we also collected qualitative and quantitative data from employers, training advisors and apprenticeships, through a survey, through focus groups, and as well as one-on-one interviews that we held during the course of the project. And all this enabled us to understand the system more deeply, so that we could identify the key challenges, and then develop recommendations to address those challenges. Great.

Thanks for taking us through that comprehensive approach. So, Georgia, we heard about systems change methodology, and it sounds like identifying the challenges was a key priority for you. Can you tell us a little bit more about the challenges that you did identify? Yeah, of course.

So, the data we collected from the interviews, the survey responses and the literature review showed that the construction and infrastructure sector is generally working pretty well. That being said, the data did signal some challenges being faced within the sector. So, when we analysed the data we'd collected, we identified seven key challenges, which you should be able to see on the screen now.

And one of the key challenges we identified was the confusion around what a training advisor is, and what they actually do, as we've sort of already alluded to. We heard that training advisors were seen as a bit of a jack-of-all-trades, and that they're responsible for a lot. For instance, as well as supporting apprentices and their employers, training advisors were often asked to fulfil other functions as well.

So, for instance, they were asked to fill a sales role sometimes for their training provider. Sometimes they've been asked to fill pastoral care and counselling roles for apprentices. And it wasn't uncommon as well for them to be asked to support employers with IT and tech-related issues that they were having connected to the training provision for apprentices.

We've got one question that kind of relates to what you're talking about, Georgia, that's just come in from, or came in a little earlier from Raymond. Did you get, or have you any experience or thoughts on using retired tradespeople to return to the industry to support the training of apprentices in the industry? I mean, that's a great question. Yeah, great question.

Yeah, I mean, there would be absolutely no reason why not to, I think. And that's actually really interesting, because was it Raymond that had asked that? Yes, that's Raymond that asked that. What you've sort of got at there is that, through our research, we've sort of understood that the skill set that's required to be an effective training advisor is extremely rare, like the breadth and depth of... The combination of skills.

The combination of sort of technical skills, soft skills, like just being personable, being organised, that's a very small pool of people that could be doing pretty much anything, to be honest. And so there's definitely an argument to be made where if there are retired tradespeople that have those skills, there should be no barrier to widening that pool of people. I wouldn't be using them.

And that lived experience that the retired tradespeople have from being on site, understanding the working environment in which our young apprentices are being involved in, I think is really crucial. And so they will be able to address some of the softer skills, the softer issues that the apprentice may be encountering when they're doing their day-to-day work. Yeah.

Back to you, Georgia, to continue with the challenges. Yeah, yeah, absolutely. So all great content off the back of that question.

And some of that, I think, might come up later in the webinar as well. So keep watching, Raymond. But yeah, so while all those sort of additional or ancillary ad hoc kind of tasks are really important, and we appreciate that they're not going anywhere, we did wonder whether reducing the number of additional responsibilities placed on training advisors might give them more time and capacity to spend fulfilling the core function of their role, which is ultimately to navigate apprentices and employers through the apprenticeship process.

Georgia, how many apprentices would a normal training advisor have or be responsible for? That is a big question with an even bigger answer, because it really can range. You know, we had anything from sort of 35, 40 up to the late 100s. Really? 100? Over, yeah, well into the 100s.

And I think, yeah, that's potentially part of some of the challenge, though not always. It really varies depending on what structures are in place. To support those training advisors, for instance, location is a big one.

If you're travelling to multiple different regions to look after all those apprentices. So if you're the training advisor in the South Island, it's quite a... Yeah, or if you're sort of responsible for Northland, that's not a compact region. And I think we should probably be really clear that it's sort of an easy assumption to make that higher number of apprentices equals bad or more difficult.

But there's just so many, like Stuart and Georgia were talking about, there's so many factors that... And those factors include what's the training advisor's employer doing to support the training advisor to carry out their responsibilities for those people. And so you can think about a situation where you might have 100 really high needs apprentices across a range of different needs, versus 100 apprentices who are completely on track and you're sort of just checking in. And the sort of support that the training provider provides the training advisor to sort of broker for those apprentices can be really determinative of whether that becomes an issue or it exacerbates issues.

But it's definitely not... We're not standing here saying that's an issue in and of itself. So the answer is it's complex and complicated. Yes, a common theme throughout the research.

But that's sort of... We'll get to our recommendations, but that's what we've sort of tried to address with our recommendations is to provide a way of thinking about what the training advisor can and should do and what other people should do to support them so that work-based learning providers can keep their business models relatively unchanged, but really sort of maximise what a training advisor can do for everyone involved in that relationship. So Georgia, back to you. There was some commonalities, I understand.

There were, and that kind of segues quite nicely into the commonalities that we found across the challenges. So we found that relationship building is really key for the success of all parties within the tripartite relationship. And for those of you at home who haven't heard the term tripartite before, that relates to the relationship... The three-party relationship consisting of the training provider, who's usually represented by the training advisor, the learner, usually the apprentice, and the apprentice's employer.

So collaboration between interested parties at all levels was a really key theme as well that emerged from the challenges. For example, collaboration between the tripartite actors is really important when developing, say, a training plan for an apprentice. Another key theme that we came across was rooted in the understanding of the roles and responsibilities, as we've kind of spoken about already, of the different parties involved in the apprentice's journey.

So I was going to ask you about Māori and Pacific apprentices, but what we're going to do is see if we can loop back to that question and just carry on with some more of the findings. Yeah, perfect. So once you understood the challenges, what happened next? Yeah, so next is sort of to understand what conditions in the system need to change to address the challenges.

So if we think back to the diagram, that's sort of what mental models need to change, what policies, practices, relationships, power dynamics, all of that, what of those need to change to address the challenges? And it's really important to note that our view is that any changes needed to be mutually supportive and reinforcing so that they'd be able to be embedded long term. You don't want to sort of have a situation where we come in and say, you need to do this and do this, and then in two years' time, the sort of rationale for that has been forgotten and some of the supporting stuff has fallen away and then it just goes back to what it was before. So, sorry.

No, I was just going to say that you need the system moving in the same direction all at once. 100%, yeah, it needs to be a consolidated approach. And that was one of the things that came out of the literature review, actually, was just how important that would be.

Yeah, and then also out of the literature review, how much potential there is to change the system and still achieve good outcomes. Because overseas jurisdictions have completely different ways of doing things. Like, I know you gave a really interesting presentation on the German way of doing it.

Fundamentally different from what it sounded like, still produces really good outcomes. So there's clearly scope to change. Yeah, and so, yeah, so... Back to what's on the screen.

I think there was 10 recommendations. Yeah, yeah. So, yeah, so there were 10 recommendations.

You can see them on the screen now, I assume. Top two are system-level transformative recommendations, with the rest pitched at the training provider level to allow for practical next steps. Transformative ones, they focus on establishing a clear system-level understanding of what the ideal function of a training advisor is in that tripartite relationship, and then enabling that function to be carried out at a system level.

And you can see the other recommendations set out alterations at the structural and relational levels. And they provide suggestions for how training providers can support the transformative changes that we've recommended, assuming they agree, obviously. Do you want to talk us through the transformative recommendations? Yeah, yeah.

Those are the fun ones. So we've only got limited time, so I'll keep it reasonably high level. For anyone watching who wants to know more, be able to read the report published on CONCODE's website.

There should be a link somewhere eventually. If you could go to the next slide, please. We will provide that link for you.

Yeah, yeah. So the first transformative recommendation was that training providers should consider adopting the title learning navigator for their training advisor roles. Or if not the title, because I recognise that some people, some organisations are invested quite heavily into that, so that's fine.

But at least the way of thinking about that role internally. And we made this for a couple of key reasons. And I've been talking for ages now, so.

Yeah, sure, we'll give you a break. Thanks, Sean. So when we spoke to industry stakeholders, including training advisors themselves, we found that there was quite a lot of inconsistency in the title, the role and the responsibilities that were assigned to training advisors across the industry.

As we mentioned earlier, the training advisor role has become a bit of a jack of all trades position. And perhaps because of this reputation, we heard that some employers don't actually understand that training advisors aren't there to deliver training on site to apprentices. That is actually the role of the employer.

And so we suspect that this might be a little bit resulting from the fact that training appears in the title training advisor. I know that there was at least one person we spoke to who was very emphatic about this point. And my understanding from the report was that that recommendation came not just from apprentices, but also came from the training advisors themselves, as well as employers.

Yeah, yeah, no, that was kind of across the board we heard about that. So yeah, we also heard that apprentices can sometimes be treated as employees first and learners second. And as apprentices are often young, maybe relatively junior compared to the others in the tripartite relationship, they don't always have the knowledge or the agency or the confidence to sort of ask for the clarity around their training.

They absolutely deserve. Yes, as a result of this, employees don't always deliver on training for their apprentices. Yeah, in part because of a reliance on training advisors to do that.

This is just one example, though, of why we think it's important to clarify roles and responsibilities. So within the parameters of sort of our research project, we've recommended a move away from the term training when referring to training advisors. I can see the thinking around changing the word training.

But what's the significance of the navigator element that you're recommending? Yes, so that's probably my favourite bit, to be honest. So after speaking with training advisors, employers and apprentices and training providers, it became apparent that despite like pretty huge variation, to be honest, in the sort of context in which apprenticeships are delivered and the different parties are working and things like that, most people had an intuitive understanding of what the ideal role of a training advisor is in that context. And so sort of thinking back to some of the issues that Georgia spoke about with the challenges, like providing IT support and things like that, that obviously needs to be done.

But it sort of became apparent that that's not really like the best use of a training advisor's time. And so we sort of, we came to the view that, and this is pretty much everyone recognises this, that training advisors are ideally placed to sort of spot issues occurring in the apprenticeship and then to broker the support that's required for those issues to be resolved. And brokering is usually, that's usually sort of the training provider who employs the training advisor will have support systems in place, like for example, learning support pastoral support.

And the ideal function of a training advisor isn't to be the counsellor for an apprentice, it's to spot the need that this apprentice needs a counsellor or this apprentice needs help with reading or needs help with numeracy, refer that apprentice into systems that the training provider has. And then the training advisor can go back to doing that sort of issue spotting role for all their other apprentices. And you can see when you sort of frame it like that, that possibility of supporting 150 apprentices becomes much more realistic sounding.

Yeah, so it's basically just a way of making this sort of intuitive understanding more explicit. And we've just been held up a 10 minutes remaining time, so I'll go through a bit more quickly. But yeah, so we went with navigator because basically it's as close as we could get in one word to describing sort of what that role, read the report, we did a really good description I think in the report, very metaphorical.

And it's a beautiful Maori word to sum that up too, right, karahi. Yeah, exactly, yeah. And then really important to note, while I'm trying to be quick, is that a lot of training providers had built systems around this intuitive understanding, but it didn't really seem to us like any of them were truly comprehensive.

And there seemed to be a degree of disconnect between what the sort of leadership of training providers thought was happening, and then what the experience of apprentices and training advisors on the ground was. And so sort of we thought that really clarifying what that function should be would help that disconnect be removed over time. That's a really interesting recommendation.

Were there any specific examples?

Examples that you came across that enabled or disabled some of the clarification of responsibilities, Georgia? Yes, so let's give Sean a break. But yes, we found that there were several structural and relational examples that were really key to clarifying roles and responsibilities. We've woven quite a few of these into our recommendations and into the report, but they're applicable to a number of actors across the sector.

Despite being pitched kind of initially at sort of the training provider level, I think there's a lot that lots of different people could benefit from. So a couple of the good policies and practices that we came across were, and I'm hoping there are some people watching that might be able to take these and implement them in their workplace. So developing a written training plan at the beginning of someone's apprenticeship, detailing overall goals and actions on how to meet them.

This kind of a training plan could also include, you know, a column for roles and responsibilities for the different actors that everybody sort of signs off on. And speaking of signing off on, having a kickoff meeting at the beginning of an apprenticeship between that tripartite group of the apprentice, employer and training advisor was something that was also seen as being really key and kind of one of the biggest things that could be done to improve outcomes for everyone. Georgia, my understanding is that some providers already have, you know, policies in place around a training plan, around a kickoff meeting, but in practice that's not actually happening.

Was that the finding that you came to? Yeah, that is exactly the finding that we came to, and I think that sort of speaks to that. There are six conditions of systems change, and I think that's why policies and practices are perhaps separate in that hierarchy because, yes, it's all good and well to have the policy, but if it's not being implemented in practice, then obviously things fall by the wayside. So that's another really practical way of implementing that methodology.

And there's more in the report to cover that off. Yeah. Okay, so you talked about two transformative recommendations.

What was the second one? Yeah, so the, back to me, sorry. The second one is for construction, and this is a big one, for the construction and infrastructure sector to enable at a system level the transfer of apprentices across different trades and training providers. And our view is that this is essential if training advisors are actually to be able to fulfill like a navigating role in the system, not just within a particular training provider.

And adopting this, our view is that it will benefit individual training providers, and we'll get into some of why. But basically, we heard that from training advisors how much more difficult it is to be supporting an apprentice who's in a trade that doesn't suit their skills, interests, and personalities, particularly when the training advisor knows from their experience that this person would be a great fit in a different trade. And then the way it sort of is at the moment, there's an incentive on the training advisor to not, you know, not try and get them out.

And you can understand fully why that is the case. Yeah. Yeah, it's a really strong recommendation though.

So why do you think it's a good one? Yeah, no, we totally get that this is a big call. But we also think it's a really great example of a mental model that is really well established when it comes to apprentices. From the beginning of our stakeholder engagement, we heard stories of apprentices really either not enjoying or being poorly suited to the particular trade they were training in, as Sean sort of has already mentioned.

The situation, you know, that sort of situation sounded pretty painful for everybody, to be honest. You can have unhappy apprentices who aren't really interested or motivated to progress. You have frustrated employers who are struggling to keep, you know, help their apprentices progress.

And similarly, for the training advisors and training providers, it sort of feels a little bit like pulling teeth, trying to keep that train moving. The training advisors who had been in the situation said that they were quite conflicted, as Sean sort of noted. For the sake of the apprentice, they really want to be able to advise them and help them along to sort of end up in the right trade.

But because of the structure of the system, there's a financial incentive for training providers to hold on to their apprentices once they've signed up. So additionally, from an apprentice's perspective, there's the implication of losing any credits or unit standards that they might have already gained when switching trades, again, because of the way that it's sort of organised at a systemic level. But it works in other parts of the system, like the university system, for example.

Exactly. You think you go to uni, start a law degree a year, and you think, absolutely not, not for me. And it's, you know, it's relatively easy to sort of switch into a different course and transfer your credits or at least some of them with you, even if it's quite a different, you know, a different course that you're switching into.

Or a different department. Exactly. So we know that that model works in other tertiary training sort of settings.

Environments. Yeah. Yeah, so we believe that the system needs to operate in a non-competitive way on this point.

The whole system will benefit if this is something that everybody buys into. We also sort of think that if all providers bought into this recommendation, that any losses would come out in the wash, you know, like someone goes from one trade to the other and, you know, vice versa. So it's kind of, it's a mutually, hopefully beneficial system for everybody.

So we're going to move ahead quickly because we've got some questions coming through. But a reminder for those of you who are interested in knowing more about the systems change framework, you can contact the Ellen and Clark team. We'll click the button on screen and one of the team will be in touch.

If you're interested in reading the report on training advisors in the construction and infrastructure space, that is available at the Concove website. So, but before we move to the questions, I think it would be, I do need to mention that and let people know that there are more webinars that Ellen and Clark is running. The next webinar is on stop wasting money on consultants, how to maximise value from external experts.

And this will be a candid spin-free discussion and that will cover such issues as whether you should contract or not contract a consultant. The contracting and scope management, cost efficiency tactics, as well as setting out some real case studies and real world examples of the consulting practice. And if you, there will be, there is a button on your screen where you can register for this webinar.

Great, thanks, Drew. We have really enjoyed working with Ellen and Clark on this project. That's not a plug.

But if you're interested in that webinar, please sign up. A reminder too that Concove are also going to have webinars on the other two projects in this series. One in February next year where we have weaved all three projects together and we'll be able to talk to you about that.

So remember, if you've got any questions, add them to the chat and I'm going to jump into some questions that are coming through now. So we have a question from Victoria. What can TEOs, and that's tertiary education organisations or funders for apprenticeships do to support these solutions for success? Yeah, I'm happy to take that one.

So we think that the best thing that TEOs, so ITOs, PTEs, that sort of thing, ensure that, you know, the policies and practices that we've sort of talked about today, including kickoff meetings, progress reporting, that sort of thing. Make sure that all those policies and practices are established and that they're being enacted regularly. I think another thing, especially for funders that they can do is sort of look at how the funding channels are influencing those structural and relational conditions.

So there might be some unintended consequences with current funding structures that could be addressed. Another kind of cool thing that I think a collective of funders and TEOs could do is to come together as a group and start some of those collective discussions on how you can sort of influence systemic change. And maybe drive some cost efficiencies through the system at the same time.

Yeah, absolutely. Okay. So Jan has a question, and they're coming in thick and fast, which is great, but Jan has a question.

What did you find out about quality assurance checks on employers, training advisors unfamiliar with our trade and length of block courses being too short? So you probably can answer the first part of that question, I'm hoping. Just around the quality checks on employers. So quality assurance checks on employers, that's a great example of sort of the one of our view on what the training advisor's ideal role is.

That's sort of like right squarely in the definition of navigator, that you're the one that has the relationship with the apprentices. You're the one that actually sees what the site is like. And so that's sort of a perfect opportunity for the training advisor to spot issues that's occurring there.

But then we don't think that it should be the training advisor's role, necessarily, to resolve those issues. That's the type of thing that we think would be better escalated to someone within the training provider, that that's what their job is. And then that training advisor can go back to focusing on all their other employers, all their other apprentices, getting to know them, carrying out that issue spotting function really well.

Yeah, one example of that from one of the individuals that we engaged with, that person spoke about that often apprentices will be assigned to a particular work gang. For instance, on a construction site and that work gang might not be right for them. It might be that particularly young female with people that have some very biased views around, well, it could be just simply that they're very, their mental model, that they're overprotective.

They don't want the female to climb the ladders, to lift the heavy weights. And therefore, that the female apprentices are being unconsciously restricted in the types of tasks that they can do. And whereas there could be other work gangs from the same employer who are just much more open, much more accommodating.

And therefore, while the training advisor is not there to solve the problem, the training advisor can bring that to the attention of the project manager or the coordinator of the apprentice and encourage them to move them from one work gang to another or one team to another. I've got a question here from Richard. Do you have any data on the correlation between the level of training advisor support and learner achievement and overall success? Off the top of our heads, probably not.

But that's, I think, one of those questions that we get. That's one we'd be keen to get back to you on. We need to look at what we could do with what we got from the survey.

Great. I think it would be a nice one to be able to come back on. From Kim, has there been much thought about bridging the gap between theoretical knowledge and practical skills for apprentices? And how is the gaps captured, monitored and reported, if at all? I can take that one if you're so happy for me to.

I think that's going to be one of the really good things to fall out of the trilogy that CONCOVE is doing, because I don't think we could necessarily answer that question just from the training advisor's position in the system. For example, not all training advisors assess. So we can't, so, you know, there's sort of, this is a bit of a non-answer and I apologise, but there's some intricacies.

There's some intricacies and it's not something that I think we could be really definitive upon. But I imagine that after the trilogy is sort of tied together, that's one of the answers that I think we'd be hoping to fall out. So come along to the trilogy.

Catherine, could I just come back to the previous question that you asked around, like, is there a correlation between the training advisors and completion rates? There have not been any studies and there have been, people have started to, there haven't been any studies in New Zealand, I should say, on this. But there have been studies in Australia where they've looked at particularly dropout rates and whether the support provided to young apprentices is higher when they have, particularly a mentor, somebody that can support them through the training programme. And the evidence is quite clear that yes, if they've got a mentor that can help them, that can, what is it, work with them to overcome some of the barriers, some of the stigma, some of the pressures that are being faced.

And there has been a lot of research done on mental wellbeing in the construction area, particularly amongst apprentices. And it is shown where that if they have that mentorship support, which is one, which is not necessarily for a training advisor to deliver, but something that they need to be aware of and need to monitor, then that does actually improve the final outcomes. It makes the apprenticeship more enjoyable and also decreases the potential that the person will drop out or worse, will have long standing mental health issues associated with their training.

It's always great to draw on the examples that we can get from offshore because we don't hold all the answers that we have here. And super quickly, that's also a minor, we can't be very specific about it, but I do know that there is work going on in another sector at the moment to sort of quantify the effects of investment and mentoring apprentices in terms of dropout rates and things. So you know about that as well.

We had a question from Alex, which was, did you look at whether the right learners were being enrolled into apprenticeships? That is that they had the literacy and numeracy skills required to be successful. I know, Richard, sorry, Alex knows that the Level 3 programmes have all but disappeared since the Apprenticeship Boost Scheme has been in place. So any thoughts on that, on the enrolment process and the reviewing of apprentices before they start their apprenticeship? I think that the role of the training advisor is not just during the apprenticeship programme, but also it's quite important at the beginning of the apprenticeship programme and also in the pre-apprenticeship period.

So that is in the courting phase, So that's where I would see it important to ensure that the trainee, that the apprentice has the necessary basic foundation so that they can undergo, he or she can undergo the training programme. And I do think that there is a need for, I mean, many training advisors do operate, work with the apprentices prior to the programme starting. And when they're courting, when they're expressing interest in the programme, I know training advisors do attend career days and do attend, go to schools and work with people.

And I do think that that is something that can be addressed through that process. And then it would be, I was going to say, I think that's also like one of those, you know, it's a classic sort of example of where that navigation function kind of comes in, where if someone does enter a trade and needs some more support with the literacy or numeracy or sort of something else to enable them to complete their apprenticeship, that they can help absolutely get that support for that apprentice. And it could also be something that that collective of the work-based learning organisations could take a look at as to how they might support that function and what they would need from the rest of the system to be able to enable that to happen.

I had one quick question here, which should be very easy to answer from Sue. Did your research involve the work-based learning divisions of Te Pūkinga? Yes. Yeah, we have to be a wee bit like, we don't want to accidentally identify anyone, you know, but yeah.

OK, great. So unfortunately, we've run out of time to answer all of the questions, but we're happy to connect with you afterward to address any further queries and discuss any potential ideas or opportunities that could support you. Simply click the button on your screen and one of us will be in touch.

Thank you very much for joining us today. Ngā mihi nui, a recording of this webinar will be made available and you can also find the final report on CONCO's website. Just click the button on your screen to download it, but be sure also to subscribe for future updates on more webinars that are coming out from us.

That's all from us today. Ngā mihi mai oha and we look forward to seeing you at the next one. Thanks so much team.