Nursery World - Training Today: Apprenticeships

Apprentices are cheap to employ, often enthusiastic and can be
trained to fit an organisation's needs, but there are risks involved
too. So are they really a good investment?

Apprenticeships have never been so popular. Against the high levels of youth unemployment of recent years, apprenticeships have been a political trump card, with all the political parties vying to create more of them in May's election. The coalition doubled the number of apprenticeships in the last parliament and David Cameron has now pledged to create three million new apprenticeships by 2020. For providers, apprentices mean the opportunity to create home-grown talent and their relative cheapness allows a nursery to grow.

But while the political will has been met with a desire by early years providers to take apprentices on, the requirement from September 2014 for applicants to hold a minimum grade C in English and maths has caused a huge drop in the number of eligible candidates.

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