With over 12,000 signing the petition urging the GOC not to allow optometry apprenticeships, feelings are clearly running high, but little of the online furore offers any suggestions on how an apprenticeship might operate to provide a quality educational experience that results in safe and competent practitioners at the end. The ‘debate’ at 100% Optical was nothing of the sort as the discussion stayed within the panel, there being no time for questions from the standing room only audience.
Nevertheless, the panel clarified some important points and raised valid concerns including those of the Ophthalmic Practitioners’ Group outlined in Optician last week, which were answered to some extent. Once the apprenticeship standard is agreed by the employers’ trailblazer group the panel made clear that only higher education institutes can award degree level qualifications. It would then be over to the universities and colleges to decide if they wanted to get involved and how they could adapt their programmes to meet a route to registration that would require as a minimum 20% off-the-job training.
It was suggested that the off-the-job training for apprentice optometrists might be around 35% rather than the minimum 20% permitted by apprenticeship rules. It will be interesting to see how this might work, as it is almost exactly the reverse of the typical current situation where students spend three or four years full time at university and around 18 months on average on their pre-registration period.
A key point was also made to separate out the concepts of work-based learning versus that of an apprenticeship, which although similar, are not the same thing. For example, many dispensing opticians qualify through a blended learning route supplementing distance learning with either day-release or block-release periods at college or university while working full time, but none receives apprenticeship funding as a DO apprenticeship standard has not yet been agreed.
Similarly, blended learning optometry has recently become a reality with students splitting their time between practice, university, and online/independent study, but one wonders how even a seemingly readymade optometry apprenticeship will fit in with apprenticeship rules. At the heart of this is the definition of ‘on-the job’ and ‘off-the-job’ learning.
The Education and Skills Funding Agency has defined off-the-job as ‘learning that is undertaken outside of the normal day-to-day working environment and leads towards the achievement of an apprenticeship’. A key aspect is that off-the-job training takes place during normal working hours, but where would that leave optical apprenticeships?
For example, trainee DOs typically work full time five days per week and attend say four weeks of block release per year, which only equates to around 10% of off-the-job training. The distance learning coursework they undertake each week is typically done in their own time, a system that has worked well enough for decades. Day release trainees meet the 20% off-the-job training requirement if they count their day at college as one of their five working days, and again their homework requirements cannot count as off the job training unless they are paid for the time they spend
on it.
One way to meet these requirements for off-the-job training, while leaving sufficient productive time in the work place, might be to contract trainee dispensing opticians or optometrists to work the statutory maximum of 48 hours. This way, in addition to their block release, apprentices would effectively be paid to carry out a notional amount of study dependent upon their standard working week. Assuming six eight-hour days this might be one day per week (or one week in five) at university, four days per week (or four weeks in five) working, and the equivalent of one day per week of independent study.
Notionally, this might be worthwhile as a training method for dispensing opticians. After all most trainee DOs are already sponsored by their employer, earn while they learn, and are used to working six days per week once study time is taken into account. But how would it work for optometry?
The whole of the apprenticeship, including the pre-reg year, would seem to require 20% off-the-job training so pre-reg productivity could be reduced by a fifth compared to today, more if the apprentice was a qualified DO or contact lens optician, or if 35% transpires to be the off the job requirement. ‘Training can be delivered at the apprentice’s normal place of work but not as part of their normal working duties’ but it is not clear what this would entail once College Stage 1 competencies or similar have been completed. Time with the supervisor perhaps? But this would dramatically reduce the productivity of the practice, potentially for four years or more, and would likely be unsustainable.
So, protectionism and snobbery aside, will optometry apprenticeships have a future?