“Apprenticeship units” and the LLE

For all Keir Starmer’s rhetoric about a new “gold standard” at Labour conference, there wasn’t actually all that much about apprenticeships in the post-16 white paper (not a single mention of degree apprenticeships, for example).

But we did learn that the short courses that employers will be able to use growth and skills levy funds on from April 2026 on will henceforth be known as “apprenticeship units”:

We also want employers to be able to use the levy on short, flexible training courses, starting from April 2026. The first wave of these courses will be called apprenticeship units and they will be available in critical skills areas.

This levy flexibility was a big part of Labour’s skills plans in opposition, and then rather fizzled out on contact with the reality of an apprenticeships budget which has little room for further spending (unlike a few years ago when the policy was thought up) and as the fall in starts under the Conservatives has come into focus as a much clearer attack line.

The white paper clearly acknowledges this (my bolding):

Decisions will be informed by the work of Skills England to ensure the offer aligns with employer needs and wider national priorities, so that it is affordable alongside the wider apprenticeship offer.

June’s industrial strategy had already announced that the initial offer would be in the areas of digital, AI (i.e. more digital), and engineering. The white paper notes aspirations for future expansion – but given the lack of headroom in DfE’s budget and the political importance of ensuring that apprenticeship starts in 2029 are higher than they were in 2024, these may remain aspirations for quite some time.

We also get a little more information on how these courses will be put together:

Apprenticeship units will complement existing apprenticeships and be based on employer-designed occupational standards using quality-assured knowledge and skills, giving employers confidence around their legitimacy, content and quality of training.

“Complement” can mean many things – there’s certainly no evidence that there are big plans for stackability here – but in design philosophy we’re not a million miles away from modules of higher technical qualifications.

You’ll also notice there’s nothing about qualification level here – there’s at times been a working assumption that the short course approach to the levy, which was strongly backed by the large employers of the sort the CBI represents, would apply at higher levels and serve as some kind of compensation for the loss of level 7 apprenticeships and the fact that lots of big companies don’t really want to spend their massive levy pot on hiring new staff in entry-level roles, for all that Labour might love them to do so.

We could also observe that, in spirit, these employer-designed and apprenticeship-aligned “units” are at a substantial remove from the side of the LLE that universities are being asked to do work in, namely the “level 4, 5 and 6 modules from full level 6 parent qualifications.”

There was some hope that the white paper would be the moment where ministers spelled out how they think the LLE and the growth and skills levy would interact – despite it being patently clear that they ought to have done so before the election (Jacqui Smith then told a Labour conference fringe in September 2024 that this interaction was much too fiddly a question for a government that had only just come to power).

Or if they weren’t going to map out how the two different kinds of short courses would find a harmonious home in a landscape that currently is dominated by completely different ones, such as CPD and non-accredited online learning, then at least there might be an announcement of a programme of work by which the twain could meet. This is what Universities UK and the Association of Colleges called for in their recent Delivering a joined-up post-16 skills system report.

But what we actually get is limited to the white paper saying that short modular courses funded by the LLE

will be alongside the short courses (apprenticeship units) introduced in the Growth and Skills Levy mentioned above.

That’s it. “Alongside” is doing some serious heavy lifting there. The UUK-AoC framework would allow for pathways between the two kinds of short course – essentially making it one system – as well as the prospect of co-funding and development informed by local priorities.

Keeping the two wholly distinct, and now split across different government departments, means that each will have to suffer on its own – apprenticeship units because the government is unlikely to want to allow too much of the levy to be spent on them, and LLE-funded modular courses because there is no obvious prospect of much student demand. Each of those is a serious issue by itself – rolling them out simply “alongside” one another will also add to employer and learner confusion.

Against that backdrop, universities and colleges could hardly be blamed for not jumping feet first into either area with the investment necessary to make a success of it, despite the white paper’s exhortations that they take the government’s word – on this as well as much else – that this is what the future looks like.