Apprenticeship Levy Making an Impact: Supporting Our Regional Key Workers to Develop Their Careers

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The West of England’s Combined Authority’s Apprenticeship ‘Share to Support’ scheme has been making an impact with the region’s key workers, enabling them to further their professional development and their careers.

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Care Futures are a social care provider supporting adults with learning difficulties and physical disabilities, many of whom have profound or complex needs. Care Futures operates four residential homes offering a variety of services, including short and long term residential and respite care. We spoke to Registered Manager, Claire Watts and Training Coordinator, Karen Wade to find out how Care Futures and their staff are benefiting from the Share to Support scheme and the generous apprenticeship funding gift from regional NHS trusts (BNSSG).

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How has accessing apprenticeship funding support helped your business?

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Claire: The funding enhances the business by allowing us to offer development to our staff. Accessing support with funding apprenticeships means we can offer more as an employer when developing our team.

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How are apprenticeships helping develop your team?

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Claire: Apprenticeships cover all the core subjects we need to develop our staffing - studying really does enhance their ability in the workplace.  Being able to demonstrate their skills in a hands on way helps them develop in their roles.

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Karen: We currently have 4 members of staff undertaking apprenticeships. We are keen to utilise more of our Share to Support funding award to support requests for staff development we receive from our teams.

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A generous gift of £7,000 in apprenticeship funds from NHS BNSSG CCG has helped Jessica improve her professional development and longer -term career prospects by embarking on a Level 5 Leader in Adult Care apprenticeship.

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"My apprenticeship is helping me develop in many ways, including: keeping me up-to-date with current health & social care legislation and implementing it in the workplace, managing the staff team better. Apprenticeships are a great way to develop your skills."

Jessica, Residential Home Team Leader and Level 5 Adult Care Apprentice

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How did you find out about the Share to Support Scheme?

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Karen: Our training provider T2 made us aware of a scheme where we could apply for levy funding from the NHS. We were successful in our application for a levy transfer to fund 10 additional apprenticeships within our organisation. Having access to Share to Support funding allows us to upskill more people than we otherwise could using apprenticeships.

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The Share to Support scheme allows large employers to ‘gift’ their apprenticeship funding to smaller businesses to pay for the apprentice’s training costs. Typically, a small business would pay 5% towards the apprentice’s training. Run by the West of England Combined Authority and Western Training Provider Network, the scheme aims to keep training funds local and support the growth and recovery of small businesses in the West of England.  

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The Share to Support Fund is coordinated by the Western Training Provider Network and supported by the West of England Combined Authority as part of the Workforce for the Future programme.

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Workforce for the Future is an £8m programme – co-funded by the West of England Combined Authority and the European Social Fund (ESF) – the free service works with small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs). Through one to one support the programme is helping businesses to identify ways to stabilise, grow, adapt and understand the skills and training needs required to meet their business goals.

Find out more information about Workforce for the Future here.