So, introducing the ‘Mind the Gap’ research project that was looking into supporting Black and Minority Ethnic Communities into Apprenticeships, skills and training with Realise Futures, working alongside MENTA.

MENTA, the Suffolk Enterprise agency has been working with small and medium sized enterprises for the past 30 years, primarily focusing on new, emerging and existing business. We identify skills gaps; we’re looking at the way in which owners develop their business and also looking at how they integrate with employees.

One of the areas which we’re focusing on within this research is in particular Black and Minority Ethnic organisations, looking at how they integrate with Apprenticeships and looking at where they will be able to develop their businesses in a range of different opportunities.

Hello, I’m Matthew Hancock and I’m the Minister for Skills and Enterprise and I’m speaking to you today because we want to see a more diverse range within Apprenticeships of people from an ethnic minority background. What we’ve got to make sure, that as Apprenticeships spread - and they’re increasing in number very fast - that as they spread; they properly reflect society and the economy that they serve. So, we want to broaden the range of people in Apprenticeships.

The aim - to explore the reasons for under-representation of Black, Asian and Minority young people in Apprenticeships, we’re also modelling culture of innovation, through diversity. We aim to work in partnership with the businesses for SME’s and micro businesses within the BAME Community on Norwich Road, to really look at why they do not access apprenticeship opportunities to grow their businesses.

We find that this research has given us some significant impact into how we can progress, how we can look at things strategically and also look at how operationally we can increase the bottom line benefits of those businesses along Norwich Road. ALEX TILL Chief Executive Officer, MENTA

Well the benefits of offering Apprenticeships, is that obviously the girls will have first-hand knowledge and experience of working in a salon and they would be quite knowledgeable of how a salon works from day to day. The disadvantages having an apprentice, especially when they first start, is that you know, they don’t have a lot of skills, so you have to be very patient with them until they can gain some skills.

I would say that Apprenticeships are extremely valuable to our organisation, they’re a crucial part of how we’ve been able to grow so quickly. The success we’ve had is very much attributed to the Apprenticeship schemes we’ve been running. Yeah and we’ve been lucky in the area to have such a good pool of high quality apprentices coming through the business and being put forward to us by organisations like Key Training. Yeah, very, very important.

We don’t do any formal Apprenticeship opportunity, either backed by local or national government, or any trade organisation. What we do however, is we recruit locally, one trainee per annum to train up within the business and develop it ourselves. The reason why we don’t use any nationally backed Apprenticeship scheme is in the past when we’ve tried it – and we’ve done it on a number of occasions - we’ve found the actual, methodology in terms of the tick box approach and the quality of the candidate we have got is not that great, compared to the ability for us to go out and get who we want, when we want them

Before I started here, yeah, I found it very difficult to find a job Before I started here, yeah, I found it very difficult to find a job. I was getting turned down a lot and not getting a lot of replies back, so I wasn’t sure where I was going wrong with the applications or in the interviews even if I got that far. Yeah, and this is the first full-time job I’ve had, kind of thing.

My name is Kerry Chambers, I work for Suffolk County Council within the Skills Team and I an apprentice until the 25th of this month, when I graduate. I started here at 16, which is quite young to start here at the County Council. I’m about to finish and hopefully I will be working as an Apprenticeship Development Officer within the Team to develop Apprenticeships further. Over the next 12 months we’ll be developing an awful lot. This year we’ve been to 27 high schools doing various activities, interview days, Apprenticeship workshops. This coming academic year, what we’d like to do is work with lots more schools across Suffolk and provide a service to them.

If you are an apprentice yourself, be an ambassador, go and sell its benefits. If you found being an apprentice good for you, good for your career, get out there and sell the message.

Becoming an apprentice has helped me out with skills a lot, I’ve learnt a lot of new things since I’ve been here and obviously it’s a stepping stone, somewhere to start out – hopefully it will pus me on somewhere further. I think Apprenticeships could be promoted a lot more. It was easy for me because I’ve got internet at home, but not everyone has access to that, so there needs to be more done – word of mouth, or posters, anything like that.

Apprentices that we have taken on, I would estimate that we’ve offered permanent employment to at least one in four of those people and we’ve had some real success stories with that. Everita, whose one of our most successful Senior Consultants started off as an NVQ Apprentice. The Head of our Database Administration Team actually started off as an apprentice and he’s currently doing his NVQ level four in Management, which is great for him. He’s managing a small team of people now, so that’s more success stories. We’ve got four of our Recruitment Consultants, Blake, Brett, James and Liam, who were all apprentices; they’re now full time members of the team through recruitment, successfully.

So that’s a call to Employers, you know, look wider So that’s a call to Employers, you know, look wider. Apprenticeships are partly there to be able to broaden your talent pool and find people who you may not have considered employing without the Apprenticeship.

There needs to be a lot of work done on closing the participation gap There needs to be a lot of work done on closing the participation gap. We need to work together with the advisors in schools and the advisors in other organisations such as the Job Centre, and the New Ipswich Youth Guarantee City Deal team, and providers to get the message out to young people and to employers, so that we can bring the knowledge of what is available, together with the vacancies that are existing in Ipswich today.

We’ve framed some of the research and innovation around skills, enterprise and employability and we’ve focussed directly on some of the main findings. Initially, Black, Asian and Minority Ethnic groups do not reference themselves to this category. So when we talk about these groups, we need to actually address what the needs are of individuals and their businesses rather than just doing it as an homogenous term. ALEX TILL Chief Executive Officer, MENTA

What we’re looking at now, in working with MENTA, is developing bespoke programmes for businesses. So, transferring our good practice from dealing with individuals on a community level, to offering more professional and business skills to those organisations within the area that we’ve been researching. SALLY BUTCHER Head of Service Realise Futures Learning and Development

The perception of Apprenticeships is very, very different within Black and Minority Ethnic organisations, as they often use their families and other cultural opportunities to develop their businesses and the skills which are centred around them.

We’ve also got to look at local business support organisations We’ve also got to look at local business support organisations. One of the issues we’re finding is that as businesses establish themselves, they don’t actually look at the support and the opportunities that are available. ALEX TILL Chief Executive Officer, MENTA

So for us at the moment, we’re looking at innovation and growth, we’re looking at how we can develop those businesses both in terms of skills, enterprise and employability, but also looking at where Local Authorities can become engaged with the research, some of the findings. And also organisations such as New Anglia Local Enterprise Partnership, who at this moment are currently looking at a Governmental level, increasing the number of skills, the number of jobs, and the number of small businesses that are being established. ALEX TILL Chief Executive Officer, MENTA