Apprenticeships: Growing your own – June 2010

Celebrating success: Regional Finals of National Apprenticeship Awards 2010

The Apprenticeship Awards are held annually and hosted by the National Apprenticeship Service, who manage and fund Apprenticeships in England with over 1,300 applications received and assessed this year. The regional finalists have been invited to celebrate their success in a series of regional award ceremonies across the country. There were 5 categories of employer; micro, small, medium, large and macro. Skills for Care sponsored the micro employer of the year. The Eastern region award ceremony was held on the evening of Tuesday 18^th June at Rowley Mile conference centre in Newmarket and I attended along with our regional Chair, Jo Hough, who presented the awards for the micro employer category. The micro employer finalists were from a range of services and the results were:

• Winner: Cutz Both Way, a hairdressing salon, received by Allen Matthews
• Highly commended: Dandelyons, a florist, received by Sarah Cunningham
• Highly commended: Hertfordshire PASS, received by Nigel Fenner, a user driven charity using employment and self directed support to enable disabled people to live independently.

Each finalist provided an inspirational video shown before the winner and highly commended employers were announced for each category. The calibre of apprentices was extremely high and it was a real opportunity to showcase the business benefits of employing apprentices.

Click on the link below for the photographs of each in the micro employer category:

Opportunities for becoming involved in apprenticeships locally without employment responsibility:

Hertfordshire PASS are celebrating their 10 years of operation by employing a further 10 apprentices to join the 6 already employed by the Hertfordshire WorkABILITY project. This is a user driven project managed by the apprentices themselves. They offer Business and Administration apprenticeships and are keen to hear from local employers in Hertfordshire who may want to to become involved by:

• offering their apprentices the opportunity to undertake a project for you or who want to explore the possibility of setting one up.
• Becoming a mentor to work alongside the apprentices they are planning to appoint.

Please click on the link below to find out more about the work of Hertfordshire PASS as well as more detail on these and other opportunities to become involved.

Skills for Care National Innovation Fund and pilot for 2010/11

If you are planning an apprenticeship pilot or would like to add value to your existing work in this area there will soon be an opportunity to apply for additional funding to support innovative approaches to meet national, regional and Department of Health priorities. These are:

1. Working with individuals living and working in rural areas
2. Domiciliary care, for example specific pathways possibly using group training association, (GTA's) or Apprenticeship Training Agencies, (ATA's) as a potential solution to zero hour contracts.
3. Personal assistants again possibly using a similar approach for zero hour contracts.
4. Specific pathways such as learning disabilities or dementia etc
5. Enabling funds to support smaller activities to gain outcomes.

This fund is aimed at developing innovation and new approaches to Apprenticeship delivery. The innovation fund is aimed at employers or groups of employers and is thus external facing and could include the following:

• Development of an employer's organisations internal infrastructure to support Apprenticeships
• Cross cutting pilots such as Pathways and the Sector Route way through utilising joint funding
• Developing new ways of delivering Apprenticeships to support recruitment and retention
• Supporting local authorities in developing Apprenticeships
• Innovative ways of reaching new recruits, particularly young people, through for example drama or volunteer programmes
• Ways of supporting employed staff through for example mentoring

Further details of this fund will be announced shortly on our national website and through e-news but the timescales for invitation to tender (ITT), are as follows:

Public Notice of ITT by 30^th May 2010

Tender Period 30^th May – 30^th June 2010

Decisions Panel 29^th June 2010

Pre Contracting - 1^st July – 24^th July

Contracts Issued - 25^th July – 14^th August 2010

Please feel free to contact me to discuss any questions you have or additional regional support you may need as I am also working on several other projects that could possibly add value to your organisational plans, for details contact me via email or telephone on:

michelle.vinall@skillsforcare.org.uk