Education does matter: nursing apprenticeships in the workforce

摘要

Apprenticeships have been in existence across most professional and occupational groups for many years, but since 2015 the Government has planned to introduce a new approach to the management and funding of such apprenticeships from spring 2017 with the ambition to achieve 100000 apprenticeships in the NHS by 2020 (Department of Health (DH), 2016).The great urgency to develop new apprenticeship models is driven by the Government's decision to introduce a levy imposed on all large organisations with a staff bill of ￡b million or above by 6 April 2017. In April 2017 all large organisations will have a levy imposed of 0.5% of their total staff bill, which will present a significant drain on their resources unless they use them to maximum benefit for their organisation. The levy amount can only be used to pay for the apprenticeship programmes for their staff to develop their existing workforce and not to back-fill their role in the organisation. Apprentices must be employed by the organisation and the programme itself must be employer led. It may be delivered by the organisation itself, or, for nursing and other professional groups where university preparation is a requirement, delivered in collaboration with a university-accredited programme.