RiskXtraDecember2018

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x RISKXtra Apprenticeships: Revolutionising the Security Business Sector Apprenticeship Levy of 0.5% of their overall bill. Introduced to encourage larger businesses to invest in apprenticeships, the Apprenticeship Levy fund is flexible. Broadly speaking, employers can choose how it’s spent. It’s even possible for an organisation to establish its own Academy and take control over learning. Many think of apprentices as being only youngsters. They believe that only manual trades offer apprenticeships. They guess that employers fund most of the learning and believe that apprenticeships are just for addressing a given company’s core skills. Peter Sherry outlines what apprenticeships really look like in today’s security business sector and why they’re so vital for its ongoing development Ask most people to describe the typical apprentice and they’ll likely speak of nonacademic, working class 16 year-olds, perhaps a little older, embarking on their first post-school learning experience by dint of enrolling in a September-term apprenticeship. In today’s society, it’s often taken for granted that an apprenticeship is a youth’s introduction to an employer. Apprenticeships have been with us since the Middle Ages and maintained their popularity well into the 20th Century, gradually falling out of favour only in the 1980s. They were rebooted in 1993 as ‘Modern Apprenticeships’, after which point point NVQs were introduced and the apprenticeship evolved to embrace new trades, new ways of working and, indeed, new generations of learners. Although apprenticeships have changed with time, then, it seems that – for many – the overriding view of them hasn’t. Just as change has visited business, change has also come to apprenticeships, and particularly so in the last set of Government overhauls. Many businesses in many sectors have yet to fully come to terms with the significant changes that have occurred which, in myriad ways, upend our understanding of what an apprenticeship is (or, indeed, can be) in the real world. There’s now substantial financial help for organisations, with many apprenticeships being up to 90% funded. Organisations with a wage bill of more than £3 million (that’s less than 2% of UK employers, by the way) are subject to the Heightened effectiveness Today’s apprentices can be any age. Apprenticeships are no longer just for school leavers. Apprenticeships can help the long-term unemployed into work, enable those made redundant from one role to work in another and also help organisations to take on people with greater life experience. Companies can even reskill individuals from within their own business to be apprentices for roles where they can be demonstrably more effective. Organisations need many skills. In the security sector, these skills could well be focused on customer service or team leadership. Every company should offer great service to outshine the competition and win the hearts and minds of customers, while polished team leadership goes a long way towards smoother operations and greater profitability. It’s true that the security sector’s ‘beating heart’ apprenticeship is Fire, Emergency and Security Systems, but companies wanting the benefits of apprenticed learners across the whole business can place nominated individuals on team leader/supervisor apprenticeships as well as customer servicecentric courses of learning. Almost half a million learners started an apprenticeship last year, with just a quarter of them being under 19 years of age. Apprenticeships are successful, too. Within the same time frame, 92% of learners said their career prospects had improved, while over 90% either went into work or further training.* The benefits are not just for learners, either. Employers find that apprentices deliver exactly the skills they need and create a more loyal workforce. They discover that apprenticeships are a highly cost-effective form of training. Clock’s ticking on the Levy April last year witnessed significant changes to the way in which apprenticeships in the UK are funded. Those organisations faced with a wage bill of over £3 million are now required to pay 62
Training and Career Development an Apprenticeship Levy into a digital fund managed by the Education and Skills Funding Agency. The idea was a simple one: to encourage employers to make apprenticeships a bigger part of their skills acquisition process by ensuring that they would put money away for it. Once in the fund, businesses had two years in which to spend the money. A year down the line from the introduction of the Apprenticeship Levy, the Open University published the troubling results of its analysis of the fund’s status in ‘The Apprenticeship Levy: One Year On’. It was discovered that around £1.2 billion of funding was sitting unused. The Open University submitted a Freedom of Information request and found that just £108 million of funds were withdrawn between April 2017 and February this year. Perhaps more worryingly, 40% of business leaders reported treating the Apprenticeship Levy as a tax (which it isn’t), while around 17% of those questioned said they didn’t expect to recoup those funds. Are organisations simply treating the Apprenticeship Levy as a tax and writing it off? This only really makes sense if we assume that those businesses don’t know how they can spend the money. That’s more likely to be the heart of the problem. In 2017, it wasn’t just that funding changed. Apprenticeships themselves received a fairly substantial overhaul which seems to have resulted in an ‘uptake lag’ while organisations come to terms with what those changes look like. For example, apprentices can now be pretty much of any age. While this opens up terrific opportunities for organisations to reskill current and more senior employees, it also enables them to fish in a wider resource pool. While we understand that this kind of change – to name but one – can take time to embrace, the bigger challenge is how this is communicated to the outside world. An outside world wherein the perception of the apprentice is that of a young adult taking on a trade skill. In short, how do you create an induction message that resonates with a more mature audience and doesn’t make them feel like this is last-ditch ‘sympathy’ training? Talk of ‘valid apprenticeships’ Challenges such as these are not trivial and cannot be solved overnight. It’s clear from conversations that many organisations have yet to fully identify these issues, let alone create a pathway towards resolving them. In the example cited, many employers just don’t yet perceive that training older team members is a ‘valid apprenticeship’. “Those organisations faced with a wage bill of over £3 million are now required to pay an Apprenticeship Levy into a digital fund managed by the Education and Skills Funding Agency” While this makes the underspend seem like an employer problem, let’s be clear that there are enough issues to go around. For example, while it’s theoretically possible for the Apprenticeship Levy to be spent on ‘different types of apprenticeships’, there’s some confusion as to when this is a ‘real apprenticeship’ and when it’s ‘spending apprenticeship money on training’ (even within Government departments). Rules can be enforced in perhaps too hard and fast a way, which means that the goal of broadening just what an apprenticeship can be is one that’s nigh on impossible to meet. In addition, there’s that good old red tape. It really hasn’t lessened its grip, and with so much change to apprenticeship programmes, that red tape is potentially as hard to navigate now as it has always been (if not harder). The clock’s ticking on the ever-diminishing portion of the two-year funding window that remains. While accepting that we’re just a year into some of the biggest reforms ever undertaken in the apprenticeships landscape, it’s clear that organisations could do with hastening their activity. Otherwise, the money they’ve put aside will evaporate. Let’s not ignore the smaller organisations who don’t pay into the Levy fund, either. They may well not be facing the same deadline, but they’re missing out on the same opportunities. Understanding the changes Skills for Security’s role is to help security businesses understand these changes and then re-orientate the way in which they undertake apprenticeships to be most effective. This can be different for each organisation. Some organisations (usually those of the larger variety) may choose to establish their own Academy and take greater control over apprenticeship programmes (yes, this can be done), although they would be as regulated as any third party provider. Setting up the Academy would itself be no trivial matter. Others may have to assess their apprenticeship needs against their next few years’ learning and development plans. There isn’t one solution, then, even though there’s one problem. Companies in the security sector must move towards embracing change otherwise money and opportunity will slip from their grasp. *Source: Education and Skills Funding Agency Security businesses wishing to discuss apprenticeships should contact Peter Sherry at Skills for Security by sending an e-mail to: info@skillsforsecurity.org.uk Peter Sherry: CEO of Skills for Security and Chair of the Skills Working Group at the Security Industry Authority 63 www.riskxtra.com>
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x www.riskxtra.com RISKXtra Securit
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x RISKXtra December 2018 Contents 4
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x RISKXtra Editorial Product upgrad
Page 7 and 8:
News Update Government efforts focu
Page 9 and 10:
News Analysis: ISC Report on UK Mai
Page 11 and 12: Opinion: Developing Security Skills
Page 13 and 14: Opinion: The Security Threat of Unm
Page 15 and 16: x RISKXtra BSIA Briefing Back in 20
Page 17 and 18: What Fire System Would You Choose t
Page 19 and 20: Cyber Security: Partnership Working
Page 21 and 22: Duty of Care: A Culture of Mutual R
Page 23 and 24: Certification in the Security and F
Page 25 and 26: FIRE SAFETY Management & Installati
Page 27 and 28: Thankfully, those taking the instal
Page 29 and 30: Evacuate everyone EN54-23 Approved
Page 31 and 32: FIRE SAFETY Vimpex makes move into
Page 33 and 34: FIRE SAFETY Kentec to showcase fire
Page 35 and 36: x www.riskxtra.com RISKXtra Securit
Page 38 and 39: x RISKXtra Showcase: Security Guard
Page 40 and 41: x RISKXtra Showcase: Intruder Detec
Page 42 and 43: x RISKXtra Showcase: Perimeter Prot
Page 44 and 45: x RISKXtra Showcase: Critical Commu
Page 46 and 47: x RISKXtra The Changing Face of Sec
Page 48 and 49: x RISKXtra The Changing Face of Sec
Page 50 and 51: x RISKXtra Meet The Security Compan
Page 52 and 53: x RISKXtra Failing to Plan is Plann
Page 54 and 55: x RISKXtra Whether it be the desire
Page 56 and 57: x RISKXtra CCTV Cameras and Fire De
Page 58 and 59: x RISKXtra ‘Mastery’, ‘Autono
Page 60 and 61: x RISKXtra People and Processes: Th
Page 64 and 65: x RISKXtra Risk in Action Jacksons
Page 66 and 67: x RISKXtra Technology in Focus Tech
Page 68 and 69: x RISKXtra Appointments John Hirst
Page 70 and 71: ACCESS CONTROL ACCESS CONTROL ACCES
Page 72 and 73: CONTROL ROOM & MONITORING ADVANCED
Page 74 and 75: POWER UPS - UNINTERRUPTIBLE POWER S
Page 76: Emergency Stairway Evac+Chair prov
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RiskXtraDecember2018

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