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Inside Reform’s MAGA movement to make apprenticeships great again

“We are literally fighting for our country, aren’t we?” the architect of Reform UK’s apprenticeships policies, Kevin Byrne, told an audience of businesspeople on the first morning of the party’s conference.

“I don’t think there are two that are fighting as strongly as these two are,” he added, gesturing towards Suella Braverman, the party’s provocative education spokesperson, and Lee Anderson, its gruff, straight-talking chairman.

‘Fighting’ seemed an appropriate word, given how divisive British politics has become.

Later, the party’s inner circle was fighting allegations of potentially unlawful foreign funding and Nigel Farage had to fight to be heard on stage over shouting from angry protesters.

Meanwhile, another fight simmers against the ‘leftwing teaching unions’ who Braverman accuses of “driving down standards and failing teachers, parents and children”.

But beneath the battle cries, something more substantial has changed.

Last year’s Reform conference was dominated by its common cause of stopping illegal immigration, with its skills policies largely lost at sea. Twelve months on, the party has begun putting serious flesh on the bones of its plans for government, including a blueprint for its first 100 days in office.

And skills is now firmly part of it.

Lee Anderson, Suella Braverman and Kevin Byrne at a skills fringe session at Reform UK’s conference

‘Our vocational and technical revolution’

When it comes to skills, the vocational education sector is allied to many of Reform’s objectives, if not all its proposed methods.

Braverman talks of almost doubling apprenticeship starts and “seriously raising the cultural, and educational, and social esteem of vocational and technical and trade routes” – something sector lobbyists have tried to persuade successive governments to do since time immemorial.

The incentives proposed to realise Reform’s “skills revolution” include a 30 per cent tax credit on wages for SMEs hiring 16 to 18-year-old apprentices and a £2,000 retention bonus when an apprentice stays with their employer for two years after completing their apprenticeship.

Both were broadly welcomed by business and training provider representatives attending the conference.

To pay for these carrots, Braverman proposes slashing funding from the “bottom set of universities that offer dreadful value for money”, targeting “woke degrees”, “universities that don’t value free speech” and “degrees that don’t benefit the UK economy”.

Recent governments have tinkered with making education more responsive to skills shortages, through local skills improvement plans and Skills England, with limited success.

Reform would go much further, tilting the education system so that filling skills gaps becomes its central purpose. But some of the detail has raised eyebrows.

A protestor being escorted away from the auditorium, while Nigel Farage mocked them for being a university student

Making providers optional

Reform’s proposal to make third-party apprenticeship training providers “optional” for SMEs has prompted scepticism about whether small companies would have the time and resources to train apprentices themselves.

Employers have long complained about having to release apprentices for off-the-job training. But only 0.3 per cent of large employers currently eligible to become employer-providers choose to do so.

Business representatives doubted SMEs would have the time or inclination, with one describing the policy as “naïve” and another as “based on nostalgia rather than data”.

Byrne, who made his fortune founding and later selling the online tradespeople directory Checkatrade, has also voiced support for Tommy Robinson and conspiracy theories, including that governments are using aircraft to spray chemicals, known as ‘chemtrails’, over the population.

He said his apprenticeship ideas were shaped by asking tradespeople in Facebook groups what stopped them taking on apprentices, and the answer was “the hurdles are too high, it’s just too much paperwork”.

How I helped shape Reform’s plan to get England taking on apprentices

Reform’s distance from the education establishment may explain some gaps in its understanding of the apprenticeship system.

It did not seek advice from either the Association of Colleges or Association of Employment and Learning Providers (AELP) when drawing up the policies, although a meeting with an AELP representative has been scheduled.

Braverman claimed there was “£1 billion to £2 billion of unspent levy funds sitting in the government coffers because the red tape and rigidity with the criteria to take on an apprentice has ballooned in the last decade”.

That conflates levy receipts with the apprenticeship budget set by the Treasury.

The levy raised £4.1 billion across the UK in 2024-25. England received a £2.7 billion apprenticeship budget and roughly £500 million was allocated to the devolved nations, leaving an estimated £830 million with the Treasury. But England’s budget was fully spent, so there was no £1 billion to £2 billion pot of unspent apprenticeship funding waiting to be used.

She also said “many businesses are forced to sign up their apprentice to local FE colleges”, some of which were “not so great”. But colleges account for only around 16 per cent of the apprenticeship market and independent training providers are the dominant players.

Braverman acknowledged quality control was “absolutely essential” and said she did not want “a Wild West” in which apprenticeships were awarded without standards being met.

“We need to get to a happy balance whereby we can assure consumers, businesses, young people of the quality, but also make it much more user-friendly,” she added.

Braverman spoke of emulating elements of the apprenticeship systems in Switzerland and Germany. But neither dispenses with an external education provider. Their celebrated ‘dual’ systems are called dual precisely because apprentices learn in two settings: the workplace and a vocational school.

Reform would also integrate a probationary period into apprenticeships, allowing employers to “call it off if that person is not right for the role”. Employers can already put apprentices on probation, as they can other new employees.

Suella Braverman, Reform’s education and skills spokesperson

All being equal

There were plenty of contradictions in Reform leaders’ rhetoric.

Braverman, who served as home secretary during her 11 years as a Conservative MP, decried how Britain had been “destroyed by a Conservative Party that broke this country over 14 years”.

She wants schools and colleges to teach young people greater pride in Britain’s history and “how great this country is”, while telling them the country is “at breaking point because of mass uncontrolled immigration” after 30 years of decline.

Then there is the question of how Reform would police the education system.

Braverman said the party would explore using Ofsted to ensure ‘God Save the King’ is regularly sung in educational institutions up to the age of 18. But Danny Kruger, the party’s head of preparing for government, indicated he would consider scrapping Ofsted and Skills England as part of an “absolute bonfire of the quangos”.

The party also passed a conference motion to tear up the public sector equality duty, which requires public bodies to consider the need to eliminate unlawful discrimination and harassment when making decisions, and replace it with a “public duty of impartiality”.

Such a change would affect the statutory framework within which colleges, the DfE and councils make decisions about areas including SEND, admissions, staffing and curriculum, and could have unintended consequences.

Asked by FE Week whether politicians could enforce Reform’s proposed DEI ban, Kruger said the intention was not for government to interfere with “precisely and exactly” what was said in classrooms.

Instead, he spoke of transforming teacher recruitment.

“We need to have people going into the teaching profession who have common sense values, who share the normal instincts of the public,” he said.

Schools should be “properly accountable to parents and to communities”, rather than being “run by teacher unions and the quangos and the DfE”.

But Reform board member Gawain Towler identified a practical problem: Reform supporters are “not the sort of people who want to become teachers”.

Teaching unions “think we have horns and smell of sulphur”, he said, but teachers should not worry because Reform had “no intention of making life miserable” for them.

The rhetoric from Braverman and Farage was less conciliatory. Farage has accused “left-wing teaching unions” of “poisoning the minds” of young people and pledged to “go to war” with them in government.

The hostility is mutual. The National Education Union has labelled Reform “far-right and racist” and pledged to campaign against its candidates, while the University and College Union has passed motions committing it to campaigns opposing Reform.

A different kind of special measure

Braverman also promised to “bring an end to the special education needs emergency”.

A detailed plan has yet to emerge, but Reform appears to be considering restricting support for less acute needs while expanding specialist provision for those with more complex SEND needs.

Anderson said he wanted “smaller special schools”, because those who “need special attention should be getting that in a specialised school”.

But he also claimed SEND was being overdiagnosed. Referring to his Ashfield constituency, he said 30 per cent of pupils were reported to have SEND and “I don’t believe it for one minute”.

“There’s going to be a few that’s genuine, but there’s far too many being labelled.”

Reform also wants people capable of work who have been unemployed for 12 months or more to undertake public sector and charity placements assigned by councils while searching for permanent employment.

Meanwhile, its London mayoral candidate Laila Cunningham said she feared becoming NEET was gaining “social cachet” among teenagers and suggested a campaign of TikTok videos and posters telling them: “Don’t become NEETs, get a job.”

Discussing employers’ lack of incentives to recruit young people, Cunningham, who has six children, described teenagers as “intrinsically materialistic, lazy, difficult and rude”. They therefore need “something to motivate them”.

Reform conference: Robert Jenrick with Joe Sallam, director of policy at the Centre for Social Justice

The devolution dilemma

Devolution could deliver Reform significant political power, with the party potentially controlling devolved authorities across a substantial part of England by 2028.

Robert Jenrick, the party’s shadow chancellor, wants employment support for disabled people devolved from the Department for Work and Pensions to “local councils or mayors”. But the party remains sceptical of the ideology underpinning devolution.

Towler believes “the great experiment is not going to work as well as Mr Burnham would like”, warning it will lead to “duplicating teams at all sorts of levels instead of cutting costs”.

He also admitted Reform was “not providing enough support” to its mayoral teams.

Towler had tried to work with them to produce a statement setting out their achievements after a year in power because the party’s central operation had not done so.

“They’re happy to put them on a platform, but the follow-up is bad,” he said.

And when FE Week asked Jenrick whether Greater Lincolnshire mayor Andrea Jenkyns’ policy of scrapping ESOL provision could become national Reform policy, he said he was “not familiar” with the issue.

“But under our immigration system, you won’t be able to come into the country unless you speak fluent English,” he added.

Reform UK’s leaders finish their conference with a rendition of ‘God Save the King’

Never gonna give you up

It would be a mistake for the FE sector to underestimate Reform, or Farage’s ability to weather the storms surrounding him.

As the party’s donations scandal hit the headlines, Farage’s fans, sparkling in union jack sequins and turquoise attire, remained unwaveringly supportive.

Behind many of the party’s education policies is the diagnosis that too many young people have disengaged because the current system feels irrelevant to them. Its detractors might wonder whether infusing the curriculum with patriotism would make it feel more relevant.

Reform’s proposed apprenticeship incentives and greater emphasis on technical education could find plenty of support within FE.

But its proposed solution extends much further: reshaping what young people are taught, who teaches them, how institutions promote equality and how patriotism is expressed.

While security concerns delayed their leader’s appearance on stage, party members merrily – and very aptly – danced and swayed to Rick Astley’s ‘Never Gonna Give You Up’.

The conference ended with Reform politicians singing ‘God Save the King’ in front of a giant Union Jack image.

Under a Reform government, 16 to 18-year-old students could find themselves regularly expected to do the same.

Ofqual extends on-screen testing to accountancy V Level

On-screen assessment will be allowed for students taking digital and accounting V Levels after Ofqual expanded its digital assessment plans following a consultation.

The regulator had initially proposed limiting on-screen timetabled assessments to just the digital systems and data course.

But following sector input, it will now also permit their use for accounting and finance when the qualifications are launched next September.

The education V Level remains excluded from on-screen timetabled assessment, although digital assessment will be allowed for non-timetabled work across all three subjects.

Ofqual made the decision despite concerns about college readiness, digital inequality and the potential impact on learners with SEND.

Some respondents warned that on-screen tests risked assessing a student’s “digital literacy rather than vocational knowledge and skills”.

Ofqual will consider their use in future V Levels on a “subject-by-subject basis”, informed by the experience of schools, colleges and awarding organisations delivering the first tranche.

Its final regulatory framework also gives greater weight to the application of knowledge, and changes the lowest pass grade from N to P.

Most of Ofqual’s other proposals will go ahead as planned, including the size of the qualifications, their assessment methods and approach to marking.

Chief regulator Sir Ian Bauckham said the framework would ensure “consistency and quality” while allowing flexibility in assessment to reflect the “vocational nature and the demands of individual subjects”.

V Levels are part of Labour’s reforms to level 3 vocational and technical qualifications.

They are intended to provide a “middle way” between technical T Levels and academic A Levels as established vocational qualifications such as BTECs lose public funding.

The first three V Levels that are launched next year – in digital systems and data, education, and accounting and finance – will be two-year qualifications comprising 360 guided learning hours, making them a similar size to A Levels.

Gradual growth of on-screen

A “significant proportion” of respondents, particularly schools and colleges, warned that centres had varying levels of infrastructure and digital capability.

Comments about digital inequality and accessibility also “featured prominently” in responses.

Some respondents said on-screen assessment could create barriers for learners with limited access to, or familiarity with, digital testing.

Several organisations representing learners with SEND argued that paper and on-screen versions should both be available, although others highlighted potential benefits for students with poor handwriting or those who use built-in accessibility features.

Ofqual will allow awarding organisations to offer both formats but will not require them to develop separate specifications or substantially different assessment materials for each.

Most respondents backed a “gradual, phased rollout” informed by the experience of providers delivering the first three V Levels.

A minority called for a more “permissive approach”, pointing to potential benefits for the validity and efficiency of assessments, while a small number opposed on-screen timetabled testing because of deliverability concerns.

Separate regulations implementing the on-screen policy will be consulted on alongside Ofqual’s approach to digital assessment in GCSEs, AS and A Levels.

A decision on its use for those qualifications is expected later this year, following signals from Bauckham that on-screen exams could be introduced by 2030.

On-screen assessment will also be permitted without subject restrictions for the new level 2 Foundation Certificates and Occupational Certificates.

Respondents said its use could “enhance validity” and better reflect the vocational context of the qualifications, although they also raised concerns about infrastructure, security, invigilation and contingency planning.

More weight for applied learning

The first three V Levels will consist of timetabled assessments worth 40 per cent of the overall marks, with other forms of assessment worth 60 per cent.

All timetabled assessments must be taken at the end of the two-year course during a single May or June assessment series.

But Ofqual stressed these assessments do not have to be written, theoretical exams and should include more applied and practical tasks.

It has also altered its assessment objectives after respondents warned that the original balance risked placing too much emphasis on theoretical knowledge.

The weighting for demonstrating knowledge and understanding has been cut by five percentage points to between 25 and 30 per cent.

Applying that knowledge through tasks and producing work will instead account for between 40 and 45 per cent of marks – also a five percentage point change.

Some respondents warned that the volume of timetabled assessment and moderation would create capacity and delivery problems for colleges.

They called for a longer implementation period to support workforce planning, staff wellbeing, recruitment and retention.

Ofqual acknowledged the reforms would increase workload and costs for awarding organisations in the short term, but said decisions on the implementation timetable were outside its remit.

Making the grade

The regulator will go ahead with a seven-grade scale running from A* to E, followed by P and U.

It had originally proposed using N for the lowest passing grade, which is used to mean “near pass” in some BTECs.

But there was “strong disagreement” with the label amid concerns that its meaning would be unclear and that significant communications activity would be needed to explain it.

The new P grade will represent the lowest grade for a level 3 pass.

Ofqual will keep the additional grade under review and decide whether it remains necessary once V Level cohorts are established.

Of the 82 consultation responses, 64 came from organisations and 18 from individuals. Those included ten teachers or lecturers and two students.

Single-paper T Level retakes

Ofqual has also confirmed that T Level students will be allowed to retake individual core exam papers rather than having to repeat every paper in the component.

Respondents said the change would reduce the burden on students and make retakes more manageable for providers, although awarding organisations warned that system changes would be needed.

An implementation date will be agreed with the Department for Education and T Level awarding organisations.

Watch: Beyond the Podium – preparing for WorldSkills Shanghai

Ahead of WorldSkills Shanghai 2026, FE Week brought together an international panel to examine how the world’s leading skills nations get competition-ready and why participation matters far beyond the medal table.

The discussion, chaired by FE Week editor Shane Chowen, included Dr Hendrik Voß of the German Confederation of Skilled Crafts (ZDH), Ben Blackledge, chair of WorldSkills Europe, Parisa Shirazi, director of standards at WorldSkills UK, and Shaun Smith, deputy director of qualifications at AlphaPlus, part of AQA Global Assessment Services.

The panel explain why WorldSkills’ impact extends from the competition hall to classrooms and teaching workshops all over the world, including here in the UK.

Alongside how national organisations are preparing for Shanghai, the discussion covers how constantly updating international standards can be fed back into local and national education systems, what skills excellence contributes to productivity, economic growth and social mobility, and the employability opportunities that open up for competitors and their peers.

The full recording is available below.

The countdown to Shanghai is now on. Twenty-eight incredible competitors will represent Team UK across 25 skills when the competition opens on 22 September. FE Week, in partnership with AQA, will be covering all the news and developments on Team UK’s performance throughout the week.

Movers & Shakers: Edition 550

Our college is building its own AI tools instead of relying on third parties

Every college I speak to is doing something with AI. Far fewer are building anything of their own.

At City of Portsmouth College (CoPC), we have built our own large language model interface, powered directly by API and connected securely to our digital ecosystem behind two factor authentication. It sits alongside a conviction I have held for a while now, that the most valuable AI work in a college is not a general chatbot bolted onto the intranet. It is a set of narrow, purpose-built tools aimed at the processes that are quietly losing you time and accuracy.

In my last role I commissioned and built 20 bespoke agents doing exactly that, each one aimed at a workflow where productivity was slipping or error rates were creeping up. Now I am in post at CoPC, we will be exploring automation and AI solutions for similar workflows over the coming months. It is worth setting out plainly what this actually means, because “AI agents” has become one of those phrases that gets nodded at in meetings without anyone quite agreeing what it refers to.

An AI agent, in the sense I mean it, is not a general-purpose tool like the one staff might use for drafting an email. It is a piece of AI configured to do one job, with access to only the data it needs for that job, sitting inside a workflow that a human still checks. Think less “ask it anything” and more “it handles this one process, and someone reviews what it produces before anything happens as a result.” The agent does not replace the member of staff who owns that process. It removes the repetitive part of their job so they can spend more time on the part that actually needs a person.

The workflows worth targeting are rarely glamorous. They are the ones eating up disproportionate staff time relative to their complexity. Routine data queries, checks that used to mean chasing three different systems, processes where a small error early on causes a much bigger headache further down the line. None of this makes for an exciting demo, and that is rather the point.

The case for building rather than buying comes down to control, cost and trust. Building our own secure AI platform, rather than relying on a third-party interface, means we pay only for what we actually use. We decide exactly what data the model can see, and we design human checkpoints into every workflow ourselves.

Sitting behind our own authentication means we are not trusting someone else’s assumptions about data governance, and we are not locked into whatever roadmap a vendor chooses next. For a sector already nervous about GDPR and the Data (Use and Access) Act 2025 – not to mention intellectual property (IP), that combination of being affordable, safe and secure matters more than any feature list.

None of this is straightforward though. Building agents well requires technical capability that most colleges do not currently have, so either recruiting someone or finding a commercial partner is essential and a cost.

There is a genuine risk of a widening gap between colleges with the digital maturity to do this and those without it, which is exactly why I advocate for sharing experience, knowledge and resources rather than every college reinventing the wheel alone.

Staff also need to trust these tools, which means involving them in the design rather than presenting them with a finished product. An agent built without staff input, however well engineered, tends to get quietly ignored.

My honest advice to any leadership team considering this path is to resist the urge to start with the technology. Start with the process that frustrates your staff the most, the problem that you are trying to solve, understand it properly, and only then ask whether an agent could help.

Building bespoke AI solutions is not about chasing a trend. It is about deciding that your organisation’s understanding of its own problems is worth more than a vendor’s generic solution to a problem you have not actually defined yet.

No need to dilute T Level placements – just fund them properly

The government’s recent solution to the T Level placement shortage was to let learners complete all 315 hours from home, across unlimited employers.

I understand the logic. But I also think it treats the wrong problem, and I say that as an employer who hosts placements and wants T Levels to succeed. The barrier in most places is not that in-person placements are too demanding. It is that hosting one costs money small businesses don’t have. Loosen the definition of a placement and you protect the take-up figures while quietly hollowing out the thing that made T Levels worth building: real experience of a real workplace.

We host four business T Level students from East Sussex College, now 150 hours in, and it has been genuinely excellent. We’re a marketing agency, in an industry where only 35 per cent of working professionals pass a basic skills test, according to a 2026 Ipsos study.

Our own experience of hiring graduates and even mid-weights is that salary expectations arrive fully formed and the skills don’t. It takes six months to get someone to billable work, at which point a network agency with deeper pockets hires them away. My assessment as someone who lectures on MBA programmes at some of the country’s leading business schools is that our T Level students are already outperforming those graduates. They will finish with real experience, skills to match, no debt, and without leaving their hometown for London. Better still, we will be able to hire them.

This is the pipeline the whole sector says it wants. Two things stop it scaling, and neither is the placement model. First, almost nobody knows T Levels exist. Not one local parent or young person I speak to has heard of them, or knows they’re an option. That is an awareness failure, and a fixable one – we’re working with our college on it for the next intake.

Second is the way the money is deployed. Government support does exist: the employer support fund covers costs like equipment, insurance, software and student travel.

But it is capped at a recommended £800 per student, against a real hosting cost closer to £3,000 a year. And it is paid in arrears, against receipts, from a discretionary pot the college controls, with no guarantee of an award. So the money arrives months after a small business has already spent it, in a form that assumes cash reserves those businesses do not have.

To claim for monthly software subscriptions, for instance, an employer would have to switch the whole company to annual billing just to generate a qualifying receipt – paying twelve months upfront to reclaim a fraction, later. A large employer absorbs all this without noticing.

An SME (which make up 99.9 per cent of UK businesses, where most young people will actually build their careers) instead quietly declines to offer a placement. That is why successive schemes have gone millions of pounds unspent. Not for lack of need but because the support was never sized to what hosting costs, or timed to when the costs fall.

The National Audit Office can record the underspend; it cannot record the placements that never happened because a business owner did the sums and said no. The fix is not expensive, and it is not a dilution. Pay a modest monthly hosting contribution in advance, rather than reimbursing in arrears. Keep the upfront set-up payment that already works. Publicise the qualification properly.

Do that, and you unlock placement capacity in exactly the small businesses where the jobs are – without ever having to pretend that a placement completed from a bedroom is the same as one completed in a workplace. The timing could hardly be better for small employers. Employer national insurance has risen and the threshold has dropped; the minimum wage has climbed again; the cost of taking someone on has rarely been higher.

Plenty of SMEs have responded by simply not hiring – carrying the extra work rather than the extra salary.

A well-run T Level placement is a genuine answer to that squeeze: real, supervised capacity from a motivated young person, at a stage when the business could not otherwise afford to grow its team.

Host well and you are not doing a favour to the education system; you are getting help you need, while training a future hire you already know is good. That is the argument the sector keeps underselling.

Growing T Level is not a cost to be managed down until enough employers reluctantly comply. It is a supply of skilled young people flowing into the 99.9 per cent of businesses that are small, at exactly the moment those businesses are being priced out of hiring any other way.

Fund the placements properly and you are not propping up a struggling qualification; you are wiring the country’s future workforce into the firms that will actually employ them.

How I helped shape Reform’s plan to get England taking on apprentices

Tell consumers there are 65,000 restaurant tables available, but they’re not much use if the restaurants aren’t willing to cook the food. It’s the same with apprenticeships.

For most of my working life, I’ve been involved with small businesses and tradespeople. I founded and built what became one of Britain’s most recognised platforms for bringing consumers and tradespeople together, so I’ve spent a large part of my life listening to small businesses and trying to understand what makes them tick.

I learnt very early on to ask people what was wrong, rather than simply telling them what I thought was right. What frustrates you? What’s stopping you? What would make this work better for you?

If you listen properly to the answers and keep removing those frustrations, you have a much better chance of changing behaviour. Government needs to approach apprenticeships in exactly the same way.

We have a million young people in Britain not in education, employment or training. At the same time, businesses are crying out for skilled people. We’ve educated a generation where there can be huge competition for graduate-level jobs, while young people can leave university with £50,000 of student loan debt. How have we ended up with both problems at the same time? Something has gone seriously wrong.

We have looked at apprenticeships from the wrong end. Government talks about creating apprenticeships. But before you can create an apprentice, you need an employer willing to take one on. So instead of starting in Westminster and designing another scheme, start by asking small businesses: “What is stopping you from taking on an apprentice?”

I’ve been asking tradespeople exactly that, and the same answers keep coming back. Cost. Bureaucracy. Insurance. Time. Finding the right young person. The risk of taking somebody on who doesn’t work out. And then the big one: spending years training somebody, only for them to leave once you’ve turned them into a valuable employee. Sometimes they then end up quoting against the very business that trained them.

The issue is the size of the hurdles. If they’re too high, small businesses simply won’t jump them.

One tradesman told me his insurance company wanted around £6,000 a year to insure a 19 or 20-year-old apprentice to drive his van. He said if we could solve that problem, he’d advertise for ten apprentices tomorrow. Government may not be able to solve every individual problem, but many of these hurdles could be reduced or removed.

Reform’s recently announced 30 per cent Apprenticeship Wage Credit tackles one of them directly. In the early stages, an employer is paying somebody who may initially produce very little, while another employee gives up productive time to train them. If they’re on minimum wage, 30 per cent is going to help hugely.

But cost isn’t everything. Employers worry about what happens if they choose the wrong person. I’d like to see a sensible assessment period at the beginning, giving both employer and apprentice a genuine opportunity to decide whether they are right for each other.

Then the apprenticeship is successfully completed. What happens now?

Reform has announced a £2,000 tax-free bonus for an apprentice who remains with the business for two years after qualifying. I like the principle enormously. Retention was one of the ideas I put forward when discussing this work with Reform. The more confidence employers have that their investment won’t simply walk out of the door, the more likely they are to make that investment.

But I think there is an even bigger hurdle: employment law.

A tradesman said to me: “I’m a tradesman, not an HR department. I’d love to give a youngster a chance, but I need to know that if it doesn’t work for either of us, we can shake hands and move on.”

Most tradesmen aren’t employment lawyers, nor should we expect them to be. They may not know every detail of the Employment Rights Act, but they understand how the growing burden and perceived risk of employment affects their decision to take somebody on. If government continually increases that perceived risk, we shouldn’t be surprised when a one-man business decides to remain a one-man business. I’m delighted Reform has announced it will scrap the act.

We are not short of entrepreneurs or great skilled trades willing to pass their skills to the next generation. What we need is a government that recognises the hurdles have to be lowered or removed if we expect them to take apprentices on.

My philosophy is simple. Listen to businesses. Ask what’s stopping them. Remove the hurdles. Give them the tools and encouragement to take the next step, then get out of their way.

If we can make Britain’s businesses want apprentices, we won’t have to spend quite so much time asking how to create more apprenticeships.

Rural colleges are the missing piece of the industrial strategy

There is a particular kind of silence in rural education policy.

It is the silence between a young person wanting to study and the bus that never arrives. Between an employer with vacancies and the skilled worker who cannot afford to live nearby. Between a college ready to deliver a strategically important course and the industry specialist who can earn far more by staying on the tools.

Too often, debates about skills focus on shortages, pipelines and productivity. Those issues matter, but they overlook a more fundamental question: does our skills system properly understand place?

A rural college is not simply a smaller urban college with better scenery. It operates in a different economy, with different constraints and a different civic role.

At Kendal College, learners routinely travel long distances because the right course is unavailable closer to home. Employers want to expand but struggle to recruit locally. Apprenticeships must fit around dispersed workplaces, seasonal demand and small businesses. Transport, housing and access are not peripheral issues; they determine whether education is possible at all.

The challenge is equally acute when recruiting staff.

To deliver high-quality technical education, colleges need professionals with current industry expertise. Yet those are exactly the people rural employers are also trying to recruit. Construction, engineering, hospitality, health, digital and clean energy all face the same dilemma.

In rural areas, smaller labour markets, high housing costs and long commutes make that competition even tougher. A curriculum may be strategically important, but if it depends on one specialist who is difficult to replace, opportunities for learners quickly become fragile.

Cumbria’s local skills improvement plan illustrates the scale of the challenge. Cumbria Tourism found 73 per cent of visitor economy businesses struggled to recruit staff, while 66 per cent reported skills shortages, particularly among chefs, front-of-house staff and managers.

This is not simply a hospitality problem. It is a place-based skills challenge affecting employers, learners and colleges alike.

The recent Milburn review reinforces why early intervention matters. Around 65 per cent of young people who are NEET for less than a year return to education or work. For those out of education or employment for longer than a year, that falls to just 25 per cent.

In rural areas, seemingly small barriers such as unreliable transport, unaffordable travel or the lack of an appropriate local course can become the first step towards long-term disengagement.

The review also found 44 per cent of NEET young people reported a work-limiting health condition, while a similar proportion were not claiming out-of-work benefits. Many remain largely invisible to the systems designed to support them.

Colleges are often the first to spot those warning signs. We see attendance slipping because transport has failed. We see apprentices whose employers want to support them but cannot release staff. We see adults unable to retrain because traditional timetables simply do not fit their lives.

We also see what happens when the right support exists. Learners build confidence, discover careers they had never considered and progress into apprenticeships, higher education and skilled employment.

Skills England has highlighted another important challenge. Young people develop valuable skills through caring responsibilities, volunteering and part-time work, yet these are often overlooked by employers focused solely on qualifications and previous experience.

At the same time, artificial intelligence and automation are changing the labour market. Technical skills will remain essential, but employers increasingly value judgement, resilience, communication and problem-solving alongside them.

This is where further education excels. Good vocational education develops not only technical competence but professional behaviours, teamwork and responsibility. Those qualities will become more valuable as technology reshapes work.

To deliver that across rural communities, colleges need greater flexibility. Industry specialists should be able to move more easily between employment and teaching through secondments, guest teaching and dual-professional roles. Employer partnerships must become genuine delivery partnerships rather than simply advisory relationships.

Most importantly, we should stop treating FE workforce recruitment as merely an HR issue. It is an industrial strategy issue. Employers need skilled workers, and colleges need skilled professionals to train them. Those challenges cannot be separated.

We also need to acknowledge that rural delivery costs more. It costs more to sustain specialist provision across large geographical areas, to recruit industry experts and to build partnerships with dispersed employers.

The alternative costs far more: unfilled vacancies, weaker local economies and talented young people quietly drifting away from education and work.

If government is serious about productivity and growth, rural delivery cannot remain an afterthought.

Rural colleges are not simply providers of qualifications. They connect learners to opportunity, employers to skills and communities to economic growth. Their success extends far beyond the classroom.

Ultimately, opportunity is shaped as much by geography as by qualifications. Unless national policy recognises that reality, too many talented young people will continue to find that the biggest barrier to their future is not their ability, but where they happen to live.

Foundation apprenticeships can bridge the gap too many young people fall through

Cutting youth unemployment takes more than just scattering random, disconnected schemes around. What we actually need is a flexible pathway that meets young people where they are, rather than expecting them to fit into a pre-made box.

Youth unemployment has surged to an 11-year high. We’ve got fresh leadership promising a shake-up to education, but while politicians debate the future, young people are left waiting. A generation is going to lose out while we wait for action. Right now, independent providers and businesses are left trying to handle an economy that feels incredibly flat.

At Swarm Training CIC, we are proud to be partnering with Skilled Futures to support our foundation apprenticeship programme. Filling that gap between standard study programmes and full apprenticeships – a gap far too many young people fall through. Filling that space with something useful, relevant, and valued by learners and employers alike is vital.

My perspective comes from decades spent inside classrooms, serving as a secondary school governor, and working with groups like London’s Violence Reduction Unit to catch young people before they completely drop off the radar. When you spend years working with vulnerable teenagers, you see the anxiety of a young person trying to bridge the chasm between a chaotic home life and the rigid expectations of a workplace. For plenty of these kids, leaping straight into a standard full-time job is just too far in one go.

Often ability isn’t the problem, readiness and confidence are. A young person can leave school with amazing technical potential but have never caught a bus to work on their own, managed money, or known how to talk to a manager. That isn’t a qualifications gap, it’s a transition gap.

Headteachers tell me regularly how desperate they are for employability training for their students, but the funding simply isn’t there. Meanwhile, at every business event I attend, leaders voice the exact same frustration: young people are leaving education totally unprepared for the world of work.

Foundation apprenticeships won’t solve this problem entirely, but they are a massive step in the right direction.

The best programmes treat learners as individuals. Some need heavy employability support, mentoring, and confidence-building before they’re ready for a workplace. Not every learner needs eight months, employability training or more technical knowledge bolted on.

We also need to make sure pastoral support sits right next to technical training. Getting a young person through their first few months at work usually comes down to the unglamorous, everyday stuff: helping them budget until that first payday, figuring out a bus route, or just being on the other end of the phone when everything feels like too much. None of that shows up in achievement data, but it is often the exact difference between someone sticking with a job or walking out the door.

The best employers I know aren’t looking for someone who knows everything on day one. It is all about attitude – the rest can be taught. Foundation apprenticeships give employers a structured way to shape a young person into their business, with proper support for both sides.

But none of this works if a foundation apprenticeship sits in a silo. It has to lead somewhere. Every learner needs to know from day one what job they are working towards and what comes next. It is one step on a journey, but if you can’t see where you’re going, you are just as likely to walk into a wall or off a cliff rather than into a long-term, productive, and rewarding career.

There is also a tougher conversation we need to have. Plenty of independent training providers genuinely want to work with the young people who need this most. But there’s an understandable nervousness about the risk because we are judged on rigid achievement rates, progression, and an increasingly tough inspection framework. Have we accidentally built a system where providers avoid the learners who need the most help simply because taking them on puts official performance figures at risk?

Our funding and accountability systems need to catch up to reality. Inclusion will only ever work if it is embedded at all levels. Taking on a vulnerable learner shouldn’t leave a provider worse off than one who plays it safe.

We want to work with employers to shape programmes that flex around the individual, not the scheme. If we get this right, foundation apprenticeships stop being just another government programme and become the start of a truly sustainable route into work that changes lives, strengthens businesses, and tackles one of the country’s most stubborn problems head-on.