The apprentice-student is changing higher education – from curriculum to culture. It’s time we stopped treating them like traditional undergraduates.
Degree apprenticeships (DAs) are not just reshaping the student experience – they’re redesigning the university itself. As the Office for Students (OfS) emphasises outcomes, progression, and employer engagement, and as Skills England continues to define standards for higher-level technical education, DAs are becoming a proving ground for some of higher education’s most urgent policy challenges.
Yet they are often marginalised in strategic thinking, treated as vocational bolt-ons or niche offerings rather than core to institutional purpose. That’s a mistake. DAs demand that we think differently about curriculum, assessment, and academic infrastructure. Quietly but decisively, they are exposing the limitations of legacy systems, and pointing the way to a more integrated, future-facing university model.
Different learners, different accountability
Degree apprentices are full-time employees and students, legally entitled to spend 20 per cent of their working time on off-the-job learning. This is not simply “study leave” – it encompasses formal teaching, applied projects, reflective practice, and continuous professional development.
This dual status creates a distinctive learner profile, and a distinctive teaching challenge. In designing a level 6 accounting and finance manager degree apprenticeship, we couldn’t simply repackage existing content. We had to co-develop new modules that satisfied two sets of demands: the academic rigour expected by the university and the occupational standards defined by the Institute for Apprenticeships and Technical Education (IfATE). These must also align with professional accounting syllabi from bodies such as CIMA, ACCA and ICAEW.
This triple mapping – to university, regulatory, and professional standards – creates what might be called multi-stakeholder accountability. It requires curriculum teams to work in ways that are more agile, responsive, and externally engaged than many traditional degree programmes.
Rethinking assessment
If OfS regulation is pushing universities toward more transparent, outcomes-focused assessment practices, DAs offer a blueprint for how that can work in practice. Assessment in degree apprenticeships is not an end-of-module activity; it’s a longitudinal, triangulated process involving the learner, the employer, and the academic team. Learners are required to build portfolios of evidence, reflect on their practice, and complete an end-point assessment, which is externally quality-assured.
In our programme, this means apprentices must show how they’ve applied ESG frameworks to real reporting challenges or used digital tools to improve efficiency. These are not hypothetical case studies, they’re deliverables with real organisational impact.
This demands a fundamental shift in how we understand assessment. It moves from a one-directional judgement to a co-produced, real-world demonstration of competence and critical thinking. It also raises practical challenges: how do we ensure equity, consistency, and academic standards in these shared spaces?
Practice must evolve too. Assessment boards and quality teams need confidence in workplace-verified evidence and dialogic tools like professional discussions. Regulations may need adjusting to formally recognise these approaches as valid and rigorous. Co-created assessment models will only work if they’re institutionally supported, not just permitted.
Institutional systems still speak undergraduate
Despite their growth – and repeated nods in policy papers from DfE, OfS, and IfATE (now Skills England) – DAs still struggle to integrate fully into institutional structures designed around traditional undergraduates.
Timetabling, academic calendars, support services, and digital access systems are still largely predicated on a three-year, 18- to 21-year-old, campus-based model. Degree apprentices, who may study in blocks, access learning from workplaces, and require hybrid delivery modes, often fall through the gaps.
This institutional lag risks positioning apprenticeships as peripheral rather than core to university provision, and undermines the very work-based, flexible, lifelong learning that national policy increasingly promotes.
To move beyond legacy assumptions, institutional systems must adapt. Timetabling and delivery planning should treat block teaching as core, not marginal. Learner support must accommodate hybrid work-study lives with flexible pastoral care and digital access. Even workload models and quality assurance processes may need tailoring to reflect co-delivery demands
If we are serious about the Lifelong Learning Entitlement, future modularity, and widening participation, DAs are not just a test case, they are the early evidence base.
Who owns the curriculum?
DAs also reconfigure academic authority. In designing the our degree apprenticeship programme, we co-developed curriculum with employers, professional bodies, and regulators. At its best, this is collaborative innovation. At its most complex, it’s curriculum by committee.
Some employers overestimate their control over content or underestimate their responsibilities around mentoring and assessment. Professional bodies may be supportive in principle, but slow to recognise apprenticeship pathways in formal qualifications. The university becomes a mediator, balancing academic integrity, regulatory compliance, and employer priorities.
This is delicate, sometimes frustrating work. But it also shifts the purpose of curriculum design, from academic transmission to negotiated, contextualised learning and demands that academic teams are supported to work across professional and regulatory boundaries without compromising standards
What universities can learn
DAs are more than a niche. They’re a stress test, revealing how well universities are equipped to deliver flexible, employer-engaged, outcome-driven learning.
They challenge traditional pedagogies, reward authentic assessment, and open up new relationships between knowledge and practice. They also model the kinds of teaching and learning the sector is being increasingly nudged toward by policy: modular, flexible, accountable, and co-created with employers.
This is not an argument for turning every degree into an apprenticeship. But it is a call to stop treating DAs as bolt-ons or exceptions. If we take seriously the structural and pedagogical shifts they demand, we may find in them a pathway to broader institutional transformation.
In a higher education landscape increasingly shaped by regulation, scrutiny, digital disruption and workforce change, the apprentice-student may not just be part of the future – they may be leading it.
