Don’t rebuild the same programme with a different number on it

The funded management ladder has gone.

Team Leader at Level 3, Operations Manager at Level 5, Chartered Manager at Level 6, Coaching Professional, Improvement Practitioner, Improvement Leader — all withdrawn from funding from September, alongside ten others. Level 7 closed to anyone aged 22 or over at the start back in January. Employers can still buy these standards privately, and some will. Most will not.

So there are a great many providers this autumn with a management offer, a client base that expects one, and no funded route to sell them. The commercial pressure to find a replacement is enormous, and the fastest replacement is always the one you already own. Find a standard that is still funded, map the existing curriculum against its knowledge, skills, and behaviours, adjust the paperwork, and start recruiting.

I want to argue against that, and not on principle. On evidence, from having spent nine years inside this.

What we have been building

I have delivered the Operations Manager standard and its predecessor since 2017 across further education and private provision, with caseloads ranging from twenty to seventy-five learners at any one time. I have facilitated over fifteen hundred workshops. I am a CAVA assessor, a Level 4 internal quality assurer, a Professional Member of EMCC, and an Accredited Practitioner. I am not describing this from the outside.

In that time, I have watched apprentices arrive with no formal management development whatsoever — promoted for competence in a technical role and left to work out the rest — and leave genuinely better at the job. That happens, and it is the reason the standard was worth defending.

I have also watched something else. I have seen learners who disengaged for the best part of eighteen months, who produced little of substance while the programme ran, mount a concentrated effort in the final weeks and pass with distinction.

That is not a criticism of those learners. They responded rationally to what was in front of them. It is not a criticism of assessors or end-point assessment organisations either, who assess what is presented to them against published descriptors, and do it properly.

It is a criticism of what the architecture rewards. When a programme’s outcome rests on a portfolio assembled over time and an assessment event at the end, the thing that gets optimised is evidence production. Providers are measured on achievement, so providers optimise for achievement. Coaches are measured on progress against a plan, so progress against a plan is what gets recorded. Everybody behaves sensibly and the result is still a system that can be satisfied without the underlying capability having moved very far.

The distinction is where this shows most clearly. If the top grade is reachable by a late, concentrated push, then the grade is measuring assessment performance rather than developed competence. And the apprentice who did the work properly across two years receives the same certificate as the one who did not.

There is a second casualty in this, and it is the coaching. Coaching is how apprenticeship delivery actually works — the monthly conversation is where a manager tests an idea against their own situation and decides to do something differently. But when a programme is built around evidence, the coaching conversation drifts towards progress-chasing. What have you uploaded. What is outstanding. Where are we against the plan. It is still called coaching and it is no longer coaching. That the Coaching Professional standard has itself been defunded this September is a coincidence, but not a comfortable one.

I do not think any of this is a secret. Most people who deliver apprenticeships have seen it, and few say so in print.

Why it is about to happen again

Here is the connection I want to make, because I think the next six months will determine a lot.

The last-ditch distinction is what building for compliance produces at the delivery end. Remapping an existing curriculum onto a newly chosen standard is the same failure at the design end, and it is worse, because it is baked in before a single learner enrols.

The mechanics are not complicated. Off-the-job hours delivered against content that does not map to the standard’s knowledge, skills and behaviours are not defensible on audit. A portfolio built from artefacts generated by the old curriculum will not evidence the new standard’s requirements at gateway. And in any standard with a substantial work-based project, the gap becomes visible to someone outside the provider entirely — an independent assessor asking an apprentice to account for work they were never equipped to do.

That last one is unrecoverable. By the time it surfaces, the funding is spent, the two years are gone, and the learners are the ones carrying it.

Service Designer, as an example

Take Service Designer at Level 6. It is not on the defunded list, it carries a £15,000 band, there is no age restriction, and the field of providers delivering it is small. On paper it looks like an answer for displaced management provision, and I want to be clear that in the right circumstances it is one.

I have designed a programme against this standard. For an operations manager, an improvement practitioner or a senior manager who has genuine authority over a service, it is a strong fit — arguably better than a general leadership standard, because the work is real and the redesign is theirs. The improvement standards going is the sharper loss here than Level 7, because improvement work at Level 6 is service redesign under another name.

But the standard only works where the apprentice’s role gives them the mandate, the scope and the access to redesign a service end to end. That is a question about role scope, and it cuts differently from seniority. An operations manager who owns a service passes it. One whose remit is team performance against targets set elsewhere does not, however senior they are. A general senior manager with a broad portfolio and no single service they can point at is one of the weakest profiles for this standard, not one of the strongest — which is the opposite of how most cohorts will be recruited, because providers are offered their clients’ most senior people first.

Get that wrong and no amount of good delivery rescues it. The apprentice cannot produce the project, because they never had a service to redesign.

What doing it properly asks

Three things, none of them exotic.

Recruit against role scope rather than job title, and be willing to turn people away. A tight gate at initial assessment protects the learner first and the achievement rate second.

Build the programme from the standard’s own requirements rather than from a curriculum you already own. Existing content can inform a build. It cannot be remapped onto a different occupation and survive contact with an assessor.

And design the evidence to be generated by the work rather than assembled after it. If a learner can pass by producing a portfolio in the final weeks, the programme has taught them to produce portfolios. If the artefacts are the by-product of doing the job differently, the evidence and the capability arrive together and the late scramble has nothing to scramble for. That also gives the coaching back its purpose, because there is something to coach other than compliance.

None of that is a new idea. It is what the apprenticeship reforms were supposed to deliver in the first place.

The choice in front of providers

The defunding is done and arguing about it is not the useful conversation. The useful conversation is what gets built next, and it is being decided now, under time pressure, by organisations with revenue to protect.

There are still funded routes that genuinely develop managers. Whether they do will depend almost entirely on whether they are built for the standard or built from what was already on the shelf.

We have had nine years to find out what the second option produces. I would rather we did not spend the next nine confirming it.

By Craig Carden a Professional Member of EMCC, an Accredited Practitioner, and a CAVA assessor.