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The new apprenticeship system provides an “honorable” opportunity for teacher training without a degree, will help bring under-represented groups into the industry and provide schools with much-needed tax funding options.
But backers of the move face an uphill battle to convince skeptics of the route’s quality, with unions warning it must not undermine teachers’ pay and working conditions.
So, could the proposed non-graduate apprenticeships solve the industry’s long-standing recruitment problems? school week have a look…
How will it work?
The government announced last month that a long-awaited teaching apprenticeship route would be launched for non-graduates next year.
The four-year course, where apprentices will gain a degree and become qualified teachers, will be piloted with “up to” 150 trainee maths teachers from September 2025 before being rolled out more widely.
Apprentices will spend approximately 40% of their time studying and the remainder in the classroom. Ministers are particularly keen to see teaching assistants trained through this route.
Skills Minister Robert Halfon said school week The scheme “will help change the school’s culture around apprenticeships”.
He said those who complete the apprenticeship “will receive the same high-quality, subject expert degree and qualified teaching qualifications as any other initial teacher training route, while having the opportunity to earn while learning and avoid student debt”.
There will be an apprenticeship standard but courses for different stages and subjects are separate. Each program will include an apprenticeship and degree leading to qualified teaching status.
The Mathematics Teacher Degree Apprenticeship will be the first to be rolled out, but qualification designers expect it will eventually be rolled out to primary schools and the full range of secondary school subjects.
Who is leading this?
The route was developed by a “trailblazer group” of trusts, teacher trainers, universities and sectoral bodies.
It is run by South Farnham Educational Trust, which runs 10 schools in Surrey and Hampshire. The trust co-designed the existing postgraduate teaching apprenticeship system, which currently accounts for 4% of trainees recruited nationally.
Chief executive Sir Andrew Carter said future teachers now often start as teaching assistants “to gain experience so that when they do move onto apprenticeship schemes they know they want to do this”.
Delta Academy Trust is another trailblazer. Trustee Sean Cavan, who has worked in Sheffield Hallam University’s education department for decades, said apprenticeships would provide “another pathway that is not fundamentally different from the current QTS scheme”.
“It just has a way to provide financial support and incentives for employers to participate,” Kavan said.
How will it be funded?
Apprenticeship training costs are funded through the Apprenticeship Levy. Each organization with a payroll of more than £3 million pays an annual fee of 0.5%. They can then withdraw funds to pay for training.
Smaller organizations bear 5% of training costs, with the government paying the rest. They can also receive grant levy funding from larger organizations.
However, employers – in this case schools, councils and trusts – will be responsible for paying apprentices’ salaries.
Salaries for the current postgraduate route are paid at the rate of unqualified teachers, with some grants available in shortage subjects. But the Department for Education said it was reviewing the approach to the undergraduate route.
Carter expects the new route to be “very attractive” but admits having to pay wages (which is not the case with fee-based teaching routes) is “a drawback”. This means thinking about students “differently”.
“They’re not people who come in, they’re not people who sit on the fringe and we may or may not use them later. We have to invest heavily in them from the beginning when we select them and all the way to the end because it’s It’s going to cost us their salaries.”
Will it boost recruitment?
For trainees, the program is a “glorious” opportunity to gain professional qualifications for free, get paid while learning and “ultimately, you’ll enter a career where you’re welcomed with open arms,” Carter said.
He added that schools should also encourage former students to follow this path.
“If every school in England had two teachers we would have a surplus. At a time when recruitment is difficult we don’t understand why anyone wouldn’t do this.”
But will this increase the number of teachers?
Launched in 2018, the Graduate Apprenticeship Scheme is a 15-month program that requires an existing degree. This year, a total of 962 students started their studies, accounting for 4% of all postgraduate students enrolled.
Last year, the pass rate for Level 6 apprenticeships was 85%, compared with the national average of 65%.
Trailblazers also look to nursing apprenticeships for inspiration. Last year, 1,690 people completed nursing degree apprenticeships, accounting for around 0.5% of England’s workforce.
If similar recruitment were achieved for teaching apprenticeships, it would be equivalent to an additional 2,341 teachers per year (or 7% of the total target for 2024).
Recruitment scope expanded
Pioneers also believe the new route can make the profession more diverse.
Teach First is one of the pioneers and is currently in the process of getting accreditation to offer the route “in a few years’ time”.
Russell Hobby, chief executive of the charity, said school week There are “many teaching assistants” without degrees, and others “for whom the university route is not the right decision.”
“It’s often a diverse source of talent, and it’s often tied to the communities that schools have the hardest time recruiting. So it’s exciting to think about the possibilities there.”
Robyn Johnstone, chief executive of teacher training provider e-Qualitas, said the postgraduate route “allows us to find a diverse group of people who may not have been in teaching before as they are often teaching assistants in schools”.
“They have a degree but they’ve been at school for a long time. They don’t want to go off and do a PGCE – and have to pay for it. They want to work on a salaried route.”
What are the potential pitfalls?
The National Education Union warned that this route would “put standards at risk and bring underqualified and inexperienced teachers into classrooms”.
The NAHT leaders’ union also said it was “very concerned about any proposals to cut degrees and teacher training, as this plan does”.
But South Farnham deputy chief executive Claire Harnden said the course would be more “condensed” than a traditional course, with time in the classroom allowing for more “practical application” of the training.
Claire Donnachie, deputy director of the trust’s Center for Teaching Schools, insisted unqualified teachers would not initially go unsupervised.
As with other routes, apprentices will “work under the supervision of experienced staff appropriate to their stage of development”.
Hobby, himself a former secretary-general of NAHT, said the route must provide “rigorous subject knowledge” as well as “a full honors degree”.
“There’s no reason not to provide that,” he added. “Clearly the government needs to communicate this fact more forcefully.”
Horby said ministers must also consider more broadly the “capacity for in-service training in primary schools”, which is “constrained by budget and infrastructure constraints”.
“We need to think about how this works for them because I don’t want to see them being left out.”
Another pioneer, Joe Guy, chief talent officer at the Academy Enterprise Trust, said excellent teaching is “a skill that is passed down from generation to generation”.
“There are some challenges – such as striking the right balance between academic study and work experience, and ensuring there is sufficient mentoring capacity in the system – but these are not insurmountable.”
“Cannot be a price-cut substitute”
Even unions supporting the principle have expressed concerns amid limited information on how apprentices will be paid.
Mike Short, head of education at Unison, said the route was “an opportunity for teaching assistants without a degree to gain teaching qualifications while avoiding all the financial problems of being a student”.
But he pointed to “real concerns about supervision, release time, insurance and pay when school resources are stretched to the limit”, adding that apprenticeships “cannot be used as a cheap alternative to current jobs”.
School leaders’ union ASCL is part of the Pioneers Group. Its deputy director of policy, Sara Tanton, said it was “vital that the support, training and particularly subject knowledge provided to apprentices is as important as other teaching pathways”.
“Achieving this goal is not easy given the variety of undergraduate degrees that teachers in a given subject may have,” she added.
She called for “clarity on the terms and conditions of the position. We believe these should be included in the pay and conditions document for school teachers.”
What will happen now?
The Institute of Apprenticeship and Technical Education this month launched a consultation on proposed apprenticeship “standards” which set out, among other things, their coverage and entry requirements.
The consultation ends on Monday. The pilot scheme will start running in September 2025, with the Department for Education funding the training of up to 150 mathematics apprentices.
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