How Non-Levy Payers can thrive with the Apprenticeship Levy
One of the biggest misconceptions of the Apprenticeship Levy is that it is an ‘exclusive club’ for bigger organisations.
To be a levy payer, your organisation must have an annual payroll exceeding £3 million per year…if you do not meet this requirement, whilst you may not be a levy payer…you can still utilise the apprenticeship to upskill your people. In the last few years, almost £3.5 billion of unused levy was reclaimed by the Exchequer…so why not utilise the funding, where others are not?
How it works…
In order to access the apprenticeship levy, you will need to pay 5% of the maximum funding available per apprenticeship for the apprenticeship you are interested in, for example:
Team Leader ILM Level 3 Apprenticeship - The maximum funding available is £4,500.00 per person. You will need to pay just £225.00 (5% of £4,500.00) to enrol an individual onto the apprenticeship.
Operations or Departmental Manager ILM Level 5 Apprenticeship - The maximum funding available is £7,000.00 per person. You will need to pay just £350.00 (5% of £7,000.00) to enrol an individual onto the apprenticeship.
For example, if you wanted to enrol 3 of your people onto the Team Leader ILM level 3 apprenticeship. It would cost you £675.00.
Either way, it’s a 95% discount off a 12 or 15 month management development programme with an ILM certification. This is a great option for smaller organisations and start ups looking to upskill their people when perhaps they do not have the budget or headcount to fund their own bespoke programmes.
Two Pathways for Non-Levy Payers
As a non-levy payer, there are two pathways you can follow depending on the number of people you wanted to put through the apprenticeship:
If you have 10+ candidates - Your programme can be delivered as an in-house programme where we can tailor the content and context so that it is specific to you as long as this falls within the Apprenticeship standard, for example; on both apprenticeships we need to cover coaching fundamentals and one of the most popular models used is the GROW model. If you already utilise the GROW model internally, we can change this for an alternative model to avoid duplication of existing training.
If you have less than 10 candidates your people would be enrolled onto a Mixed Cohort Apprenticeship which would involve the following:
Mixed Cohort - The apprentices on this cohort would be made up of people from different organisations and industries giving apprentices the opportunity to gain insight from how other people in similar positions but different industries manage and develop their team members.
Generic Context - With a range of industries in attendance, we are unable to tailor the content so that it is specific to your individual industry for example; talking about specific processes/practices in the food industry will not translate over for those in the housebuilding industry, although this may occur naturally in our discussions throughout the programme.
Delivered Entirely Virtually - Due to the geographic and logistically challenges of coordinating several organisations within a single cohort, the apprenticeship will be delivered entirely virtually to minimise expenses and impact to day-to-day operations.
To see what other apprenticeships are available, please visit https://www.instituteforapprenticeships.org/
Hopefully you now have a better understanding of what the Apprenticeship Levy is and feel confident to take those first steps to start utilising the fund to upskill your people.
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