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In this Lunch and Learn, Anna Morrison takes you through everything you need to know to get started with apprenticeships.
She explains how apprenticeships work, how they're funded and the extra incentives and grants you could access for your business.
Whether you're taking your first steps into apprenticeships or looking to see how they have changed in recent years, this session covers all of the essential steps and the ways that you can maximise apprenticeships to support your workforce.
The benefits of apprenticeships for your business
How to get started with apprenticeships
Understanding government incentives and funding for small businesses
Anna is a small business owner and a national expert on apprenticeships.
Having founded Amazing Apprenticeships in 2015, her business has supported millions of individuals with apprenticeships and technical education information and guidance.
Working with schools and colleges, employers (of all sizes) and government, she is uniquely placed to advise businesses that want to understand what apprenticeships involve, and how to get started.
Her extensive and exemplary work with employers, training providers and policy makers has established her as a respected speaker on apprenticeships, and has seen her invited to support and contribute to countless research papers, legislative developments, media commentary, conferences and roundtables.
Anna was awarded a CBE in the 2019 Queen's Birthday Honours and an honorary Doctorate in 2021, both in recognition of her services to apprenticeships.
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Lightly edited for clarity.
Caitriona: Hello, everyone, and welcome to today’s Lunch and Learn. My name is Caitriona, and I’ll be your host today. For those of you attending a Lunch and Learn for the first time, Enterprise Nation is a vibrant community platform for start-ups and small businesses.
I’m pleased to introduce Anna Morrison, who’s the founder of Amazing Apprenticeships. In this session, Anna takes you through everything you need to know to get started with apprenticeships.
If you have any questions throughout the webinar, please post them in the chat, and we’ll do our best to answer them at the end of the session. Today’s webinar will be recorded, and we will send a follow-up email with the recording and further resources later today.
Over to you, Anna.
Anna Morrison: Hello, everyone. Great to be with you this afternoon. As Caitriona said, my name is Anna Morrison, and I’m the founder and director of Amazing Apprenticeships.
Anna: We’ve been working on a brilliant campaign this year called Small Business Summer, engaging with small businesses across the country to help explain the benefits of apprenticeships. We’ve also been working with young people in schools and education settings across England to help them understand the benefits of being an apprentice in a small business.
We are a small business ourselves – I’m a small business owner, and we have 10 employees at Amazing Apprenticeships. We do huge amounts of work around apprenticeships, working with over 5,500 schools and colleges, and with thousands of employers of all sizes.
We also work with the government to point out where apprenticeship policy isn’t quite working for businesses on the ground. So it’s really brilliant to be with you today, and huge thanks to Enterprise Nation for hosting our session.
So today’s workshop, we’re going to go through some of the basics of apprenticeships and how you can get started, and we’ll touch on the new funding and incentives available for businesses as well.
What you can see on the screen is a guide that we’ve written and put together for businesses, particularly for small businesses. A lot of what I’m saying today is mirrored in that guide, so you can download it free of charge from our website and use it to come back to some of the points I’ll touch on.
Before we start, we’d really like to get a bit of insight from you on where you’re at and how confident you’re feeling about apprenticeships. Caitriona, if we could launch the poll, please, that would be great.
Great – so you should be able to see a poll on your screen: how confident do you feel in the steps involved in setting up an apprenticeship programme for your business? Very confident, fairly confident, or not very confident.
It’d be great if you could take a couple of seconds to click on the response that best fits where you’re at. Don’t worry if you’re not feeling very confident – that’s not a problem, that’s why we’re here to help.
If you’re very confident, that’s great, and perhaps you’ll have some insight to share through the chat or Q&A today. I’ll let Caitriona decide when it’s an appropriate time to pause and share those results, and then we’ll move on to the basics of apprenticeships.
The reason I think it’s really important to go back to basics is that apprenticeship policy changes all the time. It’s a bit of a political hot potato – one that gets passed around – and lots of people are very passionate about apprenticeships.
You may have picked up in the media recently a piece of work called the Milburn Review, where Alan Milburn has been looking at the crisis in the number of young people not in education, employment, or training. Because of that, there’s a real focus from the government at the moment on how we can create more apprenticeship opportunities, and how we can focus some of those on the young people who need them most.
So, Caitriona, can I check – I can’t see the results, but are the results in?
Caitriona: Hi, Anna, yes, the results are in – 80% of attendees are not very confident, and 20% are fairly confident.
Anna: Okay, great, great – you’re in the right place. So let’s go on to some of the basics, like I said, because even if you’ve worked in apprenticeships for a long time, they change all the time.
So first of all, who can be an apprentice? Apprenticeships can be for anyone over the age of 16, so those who have completed Year 11 or equivalent, and they have no upper age limit.
However, you’ll spot I’ve put an asterisk in, and that links to the note on screen that says some restrictions apply. The government, in helping to refocus apprenticeships towards young people, has started to introduce some age restrictions on certain levels or types of apprenticeships.
That includes level seven apprenticeships, which can only be funded for 16 to 21-year-olds. I’ll do more on this as we go through the session, so don’t worry.
Some foundation apprenticeships are only for 16 to 21-year-olds, or 22 to 24-year-olds with an education, health and care plan, or care leaver or prison leaver status. That’s similar for level seven: 16 to 21, or 22 to 24 with an education, health and care plan or care leaver status.
Then we’ve got a new apprenticeship launching this August, the business admin level two apprenticeship, which will only be funded for 16 to 24-year-olds. So we’re seeing some shifts here from the government to try to direct how employers create opportunities, and to make sure some of them are focused on young people.
The levels of apprenticeship go from level two through to level seven. When we’re talking about apprenticeships, we use both words and numbers – I’ll come back to the levels on my next slide.
Apprentices must be employed. They can be on a permanent or fixed-term contract, and they can be for new employees or existing members of staff, so it’s quite flexible in how you can use apprenticeships.
Currently, more than half of apprenticeship starts are by individuals aged over 25, which is partly why the government is saying we need to do something to help refocus them towards young people.
The duration of an apprenticeship can be anywhere between about eight months and six years. Some apprenticeships are shorter by design – foundation apprenticeships, the programmes only for 16 to 21-year-olds or 22 to 24-year-olds with certain criteria, are designed to be eight months.
So the idea is that after an eight-month apprenticeship, the individual ideally progresses onto the next level. There are other exemptions, though: sometimes if a member of staff has already achieved some or part of the qualifications included in the apprenticeship, their total duration can be reduced, meaning a shorter programme.
But as an absolute minimum, eight months is the shortest time period.
Now, when it comes to delivery models, many of us will be familiar with the old day-release model – four days a week in the workplace and one day a week at college or with a training provider. That still exists in many industries and with many training providers.
But we also see a greater use of technology now, so we find online programmes, hybrid programmes, and a mix of the two. Sometimes it’s block release, where an apprentice may do some of that learning for two or three weeks at a time, or even a whole year of their programme taken up with training before returning to the workplace.
So it’s important to talk to your training provider about delivery models.
The other thing to note on delivery is that when we talk about apprenticeships, we use two bits of language: on-the-job and off-the-job. On the job is the time when the apprentice is with you doing their normal work, and off the job is when they undertake their training.
They’re not necessarily away from the workplace, especially if it’s online – they can still be in work but doing their learning, so they’re off their typical tasks and activities. The government sets the minimum number of hours of off-the-job training for each apprenticeship, and that has to be paid time.
So gone are the days when off-the-job training was done in apprentices’ evenings, weekends, or their day off. It now has to be within their paid, contracted hours – it’s an important change that’s come in.
Apprenticeships can actually be full or part-time. I think by default we often see that they’re full-time programmes, and that’s the majority of opportunities we see advertised.
However, they can be part-time, either because you, as a business, can only offer a part-time position or because the individual needs it to be part-time. Perhaps they have a health condition or a caring commitment, meaning they wouldn’t be able to undertake a full-time position.
What happens then is that the apprenticeship can still be undertaken, but it may take longer to complete. So if someone is working part-time – half of a typical working week – you might expect the apprenticeship programme to take twice as long, because they still have to meet all the hours of commitment that the government sets.
Apprentices are paid a salary, and you can decide as an employer what you pay your apprentices. However, there’s an important thing to note: the national minimum wage for apprentices is currently £8 per hour.
You’ll need to look on gov.uk, because there are certain ages where it only applies for the first year of the apprenticeship, and then it needs to change to the standard national minimum wage for that age. There’s loads of information on gov.uk that you can look up.
Many employers pay their apprentices more, and that’s up to you – but that’s the minimum you can pay.
Now, English and maths is another area that’s changed. Previously, all apprenticeships had to include English and maths if the apprentice hadn’t achieved GCSE or O-level standard.
However, the government has said that many employers found this unnecessary – an apprentice doesn’t always need to go back and do the equivalent of a GCSE. So the government has changed the rules: if the apprentice is aged 16 to 18, and doesn’t hold English and maths, they’ll be required to work towards functional skills.
But if the apprentice is over the age of 19, the employer can decide. Some employers in some industries will say English and maths is still really important to them and want to keep it – that’s fine. Others might say they don’t need it for that job role and want to take it out – that’s fine too.
So there’s a bit more flexibility now. And financial support – there are now potentially up to about £8,000 that you can access as an employer towards the cost of taking an apprentice on, and I’ll tell you about some of those later this morning.
So I’ll just explain the levels for you. As I said earlier, we use numbers and words, and it can be a bit confusing: level two, three, four, five, six, and seven.
Level two is foundation or intermediate apprenticeships. Foundation apprenticeships are those programmes designed to be just eight months in duration, just for 16 to 21-year-olds and 22 to 24-year-olds, as I mentioned earlier.
Intermediate apprenticeships are level two programmes, and these can be really great for individuals taking their first steps into a role where they have little or no experience of that industry or job role. They can be suitable for school leavers, and also for adults who might be retraining or reskilling into a particular area.
Then we have level three, advanced apprenticeships. These are supposed to be equivalent to A levels, T levels, or a BTEC.
I really don’t think it’s helpful to compare apprenticeship levels to academic levels, but we are where we are. The reason being, I think being able to do the job is totally different to being able to pass a test and achieve a qualification.
It doesn’t matter how qualified you are – sometimes you’ll need to start at level two or level three because that’s how you learn to do that job.
Higher apprenticeships is actually an umbrella term we use to cover levels four, five, six, and seven. But really, when we’re talking about apprenticeships, we typically mean level four, which is equivalent to the first year of a degree, or level five, equivalent to the second year of a degree.
Then we have level six, which is a degree-level apprenticeship – a full bachelor’s degree – and level seven, which is a master’s-level qualification.
So I hope you can see that although you may use level two or level three to bring someone leaving school or college into your business, you could also be thinking about higher and degree apprenticeships to support your existing members of staff.
Some businesses design degree apprenticeship programmes for young people to join them straight from school, college, or elsewhere. Others use them to support career progression through the different steps. Your training provider will be able to support you with all of it.
So, just to talk you through some of the steps involved in setting up an apprenticeship: first of all, you need to think about the job role in your business. But really crucially, you also need to think about where that role sits within your business, and whether that team has the capacity to support and nurture an apprentice – someone brand new to the role.
Sometimes businesses look at their busiest department and think they need capacity there, so let’s put apprentices in. That might not always be the best place for an apprentice, because you need a line manager or mentor who has the time and availability to support their apprentice, too.
So you need to think about the job role – what is it you want your apprentice to be doing? Then it’s time to get the training in place, so you’ll need to engage with a training provider.
You may already know one – a college, a local provider, or an independent provider you want to work with – that’s great. But if you don’t, you can look at the different providers out there.
There’s a link that takes you through to Find Apprenticeship Training. Before you do that, you need to work out which apprenticeship standard is going to be the best fit for the role you’re considering.
There’s another website – Skills England, at education.gov.uk. Skills England has a massive directory of the different apprenticeships out there – there are nearly 700.
This is where you can start to think about which standard is best suited to the role you’re considering for the apprenticeship. You might want to type in marketing, tattoo artist, engineer, or technician – think about the job role you want, type it in, and see the different standards.
Read up on the different levels of expertise and the job roles that would typically fit with those apprenticeship standards.
One key piece of advice: it’s rare that you get a job role and an apprenticeship standard that’s a 100% fit. It’s more likely that you just need to find a standard that’s the best fit, covering the majority of the job role you want the apprentice to be doing.
Not all training providers offer all 700 standards – in fact, I don’t think any training provider offers all 700. If you’re talking to your local FE college, for example, they’ll often have quite a broad set of standards covering a number of different occupations.
Independent training providers tend to specialise in a niche area – it could be a sector like hospitality or healthcare, or a particular type of industry, such as equine care or animal care. So you need to look at the different types of providers.
Similarly, universities might focus specifically on higher and degree-level apprenticeships. So you can use that tool at the bottom – Find Apprenticeship Training for employers – to look up where the different providers are and who you might like to work with.
What I really like about that tool is that it’s a bit like Trustpilot, where you can read reviews. You can read reviews and ratings from other employers working with that provider, and see feedback from apprentices who have studied with that provider, too.
So it’s quite a good tool for you. If you haven’t already, you’ll need to recruit your apprentice, and your training provider will be able to help you with this too.
There’s a government platform you can use free of charge called Find an Apprenticeship, and that portal is used by thousands of people across the country who are all looking for apprenticeship opportunities.
Your training provider will be able to sort out everything you need in the back end of the system – they’ll help you get everything inputted, and get all the paperwork and agreements in place with you too.
Training providers are really crucial to making this easy for you, so finding the right provider that will really work with your business is key.
Then it will be time to get the training in place. Once you’ve got your apprentice, your training provider will work with you to look through the schedule of training.
For me, when we’ve had apprentices, this is really important – have your say, and make sure you talk to the training provider about where there are opportunities to make it real for your business.
So, for example, if your apprentice is going to be working on creating a marketing plan, you might not want that, based on a fictional company, where it’s not going to be useful. You might think, actually, I need a marketing plan – so why can’t that module link with creating one for me and my business, rather than working on a theoretical or hypothetical example?
Do make sure you get that relationship going with your training provider, because they are crucial.
So just think about the incentives and the investment. First of all, of course, you’ve got the salary costs, as I mentioned.
You’ll also be exempt from paying National Insurance contributions for any apprentice aged under 25. That’s standard for under-21s, but it extends to apprenticeships to any apprentice under the age of 25, and that can save you a fair amount of money each year.
Additionally, the training costs are covered for all apprentices aged 16 to 24. From August this year, the government is paying 100% of training costs, which can be anywhere between £1,500 for some of the lower-level apprenticeships, all the way up to £27,000 for a degree apprenticeship, fully funded by the government.
So I’ll let you do the adding up here: you’ve got around £1,500 in National Insurance contributions, and up to £27,000 of apprenticeship training funding that can be covered.
If your apprentice is over the age of 25, there are two options for you. One is that you can pay co-investment, which means that of the cost of the training, you, as the employer, pay 5%, and the government will pay 95%, which is really significant.
For some of the lower-level apprenticeships, that means you’re paying a couple of hundred pounds – say, if the apprenticeship is £5,000 in funding, the government will pay the rest. If it’s a £27,000 apprenticeship, that’s really significant, isn’t it?
So what you then might want to look at is something called levy transfer. The government introduced an apprenticeship levy on businesses with a payroll bill of more than £3 million per year, and they pay what’s called the apprenticeship levy.
There’s an amount deducted and calculated, and put into a digital account each month for those employers. The only way they can spend it is either to pay for apprenticeship training in their business, or to transfer it to another business – and this is where you can take advantage of the system.
If you’re interested in that, there are brokerage hubs around the country that can support and match you with an employer doing a levy transfer.
The other thing you really need to factor in is your time – it’s an investment, and it will take the time of the line manager, but also the buddy or mentor, and the wider team, to help nurture and develop your apprentice and make sure they’re really settled in their role.
Now I want to very quickly talk to you about the money that’s available. There are different grants – it’s ever so confusing, but I’ll do my best to unpack it all for you.
On the left-hand side, there’s a £1,000 young apprentice incentive if you’re taking on a 16 to 18-year-old, or a 19 to 24-year-old with an education, health and care plan or care leaver status. That’s paid to you as the employer, and your training provider also gets £1,000, recognising the additional costs you’ll often incur taking on a young person, because sometimes they’ll need extra help and support.
If you decide to go down the foundation apprenticeship route – those programmes only for 16 to 21 year olds or 22 to 24 year olds who meet the eligibility criteria – you can access £2,000. You could actually add those two together, so if you offer a foundation apprenticeship and the apprentice is 16 to 18 or 19 to 24 with those conditions, you could get £3,000.
Separately, there’s a non-levy jobs grant. The government is introducing, from October this year, a jobs grant that will give employers £2,000 for taking on a young person aged 16 to 24 onto an apprenticeship.
That’s for smaller businesses, or those that don’t pay the apprenticeship levy – so less than £3 million. You could add that into the mix as well.
And then there’s something called the youth jobs grant, a separate pot of money from the DWP designed to support young people aged 18 to 24 who have been claiming Universal Credit for six months or more.
So all of that, combined with the National Insurance contributions and the fully funded programmes for under-25s, is a really good package – this is better than we’ve ever seen for small businesses.
Additionally, there’s something called the care leaver bursary – a payment of £3,000 that goes directly to the individual in instalments, specifically for young people who are in or leaving care, as long as they meet the eligibility criteria.
And that’s not all. On the right-hand side, you’ll see organisations like TUI Academy have come up with an employer subsidy scheme.
For employers based in Luton, Liverpool, or South Yorkshire, they’re offering up to 70% salary subsidy, which can be combined with the grants on the left-hand side of the screen.
So if you’re an employer in any of those three areas – Luton, Liverpool, or South Yorkshire – and want to get in touch with the team, do scan the QR code or reach out to them, because they’ll be able to talk you through what they can do to help.
So there’s a lot of support out there. We’ve got a couple of minutes now for questions – I can see there’s been all sorts going on in the chat, but I’ve tried to stay focused on the presentation.
Caitriona, I think you’re going to pick up on some of them for me now, aren’t you?
Caitriona: Yes. Thank you so much for your presentation, Anna. Let’s look at the chat.
We had a question from Simon, and Simon is asking: can an apprentice work on a hybrid basis – for example, part-time from home and part-time from an office – or would they need to be monitored all the time? He says: ‘I work from home running a business, but use a hybrid office when needed.’
Anna: Yeah, it’s a great question – you can. And we do see this with apprentices, particularly post-pandemic; this is now quite a typical way of working, isn’t it?
I think what your training provider would be keen to do is talk to you about how that could be structured, so that your apprentice is really getting enough support – not just in terms of the work they’re doing, but also expectations of you as a business, and how you communicate and want them to be working.
But yes, I’ve met apprentices working in that hybrid way, and it’s now quite an established model, I’d say, particularly for some industries. So yes, you can – thank you.
Caitriona: Brilliant. Thanks, Simon. If anyone has any questions, please do pop them in the chat.
We have another question from Lou here: ‘Hi, I’m Lou Robertson, a fractional CMO. I advocate to start up some model of fractional plus apprentice or intern.’
‘This was really useful to understand how the system works. When searching online, you get lost in the admin. I still don’t understand the levy system – is there a minimum amount of mentorship monthly for an apprentice?’
Anna: Okay, so the levy is different to the minimum mentorship, so I’ll take them separately. The apprenticeship levy – I appreciate it’s still quite confusing even though we’ve had it for over 10 years now.
The apprenticeship levy is for businesses with a pay bill in excess of £3 million per year, so not many smaller businesses fall into that. However, some do.
What happens is that each month, the government deducts a certain percentage based on the PAYE that goes through and is reported back through HMRC, and that money goes into a digital account.
At the moment, when it goes into that digital account, employers paying the levy have 24 months to use that money, or they lose it – it basically goes back into the Treasury. However, from August this year, the 24 months will drop to 12 months.
So what we know is that bigger businesses are going to be even keener to maximise their levy, as we call it. They’ll be looking at their own workforce, but also thinking about their supply chain, their local community, and smaller businesses in their local area – how can we use it before we lose it?
And that’s where levy transfer can come in, to cover 100% of the cost of the training. That’s for apprentices over the age of 25, where I was talking about you’ve either got the 5% co-investment model, or you’d get 100% funding, but this time from another business instead of the government.
So hopefully that helps. On the off-the-job, the other bit, the minimum mentorship – government doesn’t set any minimum requirements around the mentoring of apprentices.
They just set requirements on off-the-job learning hours, which have to be completed in full before the apprentice can be signed off and deemed competent to do that role.
Caitriona: Thank you. We’re just coming to the end of the session now, but we do have time for a final question: how can businesses ensure they provide a positive and successful apprenticeship experience?
Anna: Oh, that’s a brilliant question – we could do a whole other webinar on this. Look, we know how important it is as a small business that you bring the right talent and then nurture it in a way where your apprentice really feels part of the team.
I think some of the most successful programmes are the ones where the apprentice gets to work with different team members, and everyone’s on board with the success of that apprentice – everyone has their role to play in that.
We often use the phrase, it takes a village to raise a child, don’t we, and I think the same is true for apprenticeships – you’ll really feel that in a small business.
So be open to getting everyone involved, be really clear about setting expectations at the beginning, and be clear, as you would with any member of staff.
Spot when things are going really well, recognise it, reward it, and champion them. Put them forward for opportunities, help them come out of their comfort zone, and grow personally and professionally.
Caitriona: Love that. Thank you, Anna, and thank you so much for your presentation today. Thanks, everyone, for joining us – we’ll be sharing the recording and further resources in a follow-up email this afternoon. Thank you.
Anna: Thanks, Caitriona. Thanks, everyone.
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