How to recover
Your apprenticeship blueprint will describe all the key elements of your apprenticeship programme and enable you to recover your levy and, additionally, to benefit from government co-funding. This means it will tell you how many apprentices you need (both existing staff and new recruits), plus the types of apprenticeship you need over what time period and trained by which training providers.
You require this level of detail because you can only use formally-recognised apprenticeship ‘standards’ and ‘frameworks’. Each will allow you to recover a different amount of your levy, and training providers vary in quality, expertise and price.
That’s the kind of information we detail in your blueprint for you.
Types of apprenticeship
There are hundreds of different apprenticeships available – here’s some examples. The bigger you are as an organisation the more likely it is that you’ll need to use a wide variety of apprenticeships. Our blueprints look at all this for you.
Depending on the kind of business or organisation yours is, there are several options. You might just look at the specialist ones that relate to your core businesses – retail sales, manufacturing, facilities management, digital media and marketing etc. But you’ll also be able to support your back office services with office administration, team leadership and management, business improvement and customer service apprenticeships.
The range is growing every day and we keep on top of all that!
The range is growing every day and we keep on top of all that!
Recovery values
Every apprenticeship, be it a ‘framework’ or a ‘standard’, has been assigned to a funding band by the Department for Education. The band has an upper limit and a lower limit. This means two things: first that each apprenticeship you create will recover a certain amount of your levy and this will be different for different types of apprenticeship; secondly, training providers are capped in terms of how much they can charge for the training they deliver.
So planning for these parameters from the outset makes a big difference because there are 15 different bands – the lowest of which is £1,500 and the highest £28,000.
How much of your levy will be recovered by your existing apprenticeships? We can find out for you.
Apprenticeship training
To qualify for ‘levy recovery’ your training has to be delivered by a registered and recognised provider.
You’ll be able to access a list of these easily enough yourself through your Digital Apprenticeship Service account – that’s not tricky. But you’ll want the best and you’ll need to manage what they do and pay them directly from your levy account.
That’s where it all gets a lot more complicated.
Fortunately, we can manage your apprenticeship training providers for you.