Apprenticeships
Early Insights 2024-2025
Teaching and learning
Assessors and tutors foster strong, productive relationships with their apprentices and deliver well-planned and structured sessions. As a result, most learners develop and apply a wide range of relevant practical and theoretical skills and make at least sound progress in their apprenticeship programmes.
What’s going well
- Most learners are motivated and enthusiastic about their programmes and develop strong practical skills and theory knowledge.
- Assessors develop positive, productive relationships with their learners.
- Most learners interact confidently with their assessors, tutors and employers and work well together in pairs or groups.
- The positive impact and productivity that employers say their learners add to their organisation.
- Learners generally complete their apprenticeships at rates broadly in line with or above national sector averages.
- Learners with additional support needs (ASN) make sound progress from their individual starting points.
- Learners develop their digital skills well.
What needs to improve
- Around half of learners still take longer to complete their programmes than expected, this is often due to assessments not being planned well enough at the start of the programme and assessors not always setting challenging targets for the completion of work.
- A minority of learners rely too heavily on their assessors to guide their progress.
Well-being, care, support and guidance
Assessors and tutors provide their learners with effective pastoral and personal support, including those with an identified ASN. As a result, many learners improve their self-confidence and self-esteem during their time on their apprenticeship programme.
What’s going well
- Nearly all assessors foster friendly and productive working relationships with learners, making regular checks on their well-being in a sensitive and supportive way.
- Providers have improved their effectiveness in the way in which they identify and support learners with ASN.
- Learners benefited from strong pastoral and personal support that helps them to settle into their programmes and make sound progress.
- Learners access a broad range of well-being resources, including counselling, mental health support, financial assistance, and flexible learning options.
- Providers gather learner feedback through surveys and focus groups and use this intelligence well to refine support services.
What needs to improve
- Learners’ understanding of extremism and radicalisation remains at a basic level.
Leading and improving
The leadership and management of apprenticeship provision is strong across all providers, underpinned by clear strategic direction, a collaborative culture, professional development and a sustained focus on quality improvement.
What’s going well
- Senior and middle leaders generally have a clear understanding of their strengths and areas for improvement through a robust cycle of self-assessment and improvement planning.
- Most staff are engaged and motivated to deliver the best outcomes for their learners and benefit from a wide range of professional development opportunities.
- Providers have effective, long-standing relationships with a range of key employers and delivery partners, which enable them to meet the emerging skills needs of the local and regional economy.
- Providers demonstrated a strong commitment to professional learning, often tailored to the work-based context with a growing emphasis on upskilling staff to better support learners with ASN and embed Welsh language and culture across programmes.
What needs to improve
- Employer involvement in learner progress reviews is limited.
- In a few cases, predominantly in the health and social care sector, learners cannot attend off-the-job training during working hours and providers do not challenge employers well enough to enable this to happen.
Overview of recommendations from inspections
There were three inspections in the work-based learning: apprenticeships sector.
- One provider was given a recommendation to ensure that employers provide the necessary support for their learners, including allocating time to attend off-the-job activities and being actively involved in planning and reviewing learner progress.
- Three providers were given a recommendation in related to teaching and learning, focused on completion within expected end dates, improving attainment rates for underperforming subject areas, strengthening the level of challenge and target-setting to ensure that all learners make the progress they are capable of.
- One provider was given a recommendation related to well-being, care, support and guidance, to ensure that all learners routinely develop their knowledge and understanding of extremism and radicalisation.
- One provider was given a recommendation about leading and improving, to ensure that employers provide the necessary support for their learners, including allocating time to attend off-the-job activities and being actively involved in planning and reviewing learner progress.