The Ghost Of Provisions Past: Why Foundation Apprenticeships Need More Than Good Intentions

For many years I worked on the front line engaging and helping young people who had fallen out of education, training or work. Many of them didn’t trust the system. Some had no qualifications, others were caring for siblings or parents, struggling with mental health, or seemingly invisible to mainstream services. Engaging these learners wasn’t a marketing challenge, it was a long, resource-intensive, and ultimately human process. That experience taught me something vital: programmes that promise access and progression need more than policy to make them successful – they need infrastructure, wraparound support, and trust.

This experience means that when I see the government moving quickly to introduce Foundation Apprenticeships, I instinctively want to support and believe they are necessary and good. There is no question that a pre-employment programme focused on young people is needed right now, with roughly one in eight young people aged 16- 24 currently NEET. The ambition is right. But unless we learn from the hard truths of past initiatives, there’s a real risk that this latest intervention will struggle to deliver the impact our young people deserve.

Lessons from the past: why the risks are real

Often, programmes like these are designed around funding rules and eligibility criteria, not the learner. My own experience showed how fragile engagement can be: a missed bus, a lack of lunch, a chaotic home life can all derail confidence, attendance and ultimately progress. These are not edge cases, these are the reality for many of the young people that programmes like these are intended to serve.

Successive programmes targeting similar cohorts have been launched with good intentions, but too often faltered in delivery. DfE’s evaluation of Traineeships for instance, showed clear benefits for learners who completed them: nearly 30% progressed into apprenticeships, and over 50% moved into further learning. Yet the programme never exceeded 25,000 starts in a single year. Why? A struggle to engage employers, limited placement capacity, and a lack of understanding and investment in the intensive and costly activity for providers in engaging and retaining learners meant the programme couldn’t scale.

The reality on the ground

Policy doesn’t engage NEET learners. Connections and people do, and that takes resource, time and a lot of commitment.

As Fiona Hawkesley, Executive Director at SCL Education Group told us:

“Many young people are still feeling the effects of the pandemic – isolated, lacking confidence, and unsure of their next steps. At SCL Education Group, we know that meaningful progress starts with trust, mentoring, and support that goes beyond the classroom. Foundation Apprenticeships must be built with this reality in mind.”

From my experience of delivering skills programmes, I know that successfully engaging this cohort requires persistent outreach, wraparound pastoral care, and deep collaboration with Jobcentre Plus, third-sector partners and local communities. Providers often spend weeks identifying a single suitable learner, only to see that effort wasted when placements fall through or funding criteria that is too conditional to be viable. This is commercially frustrating for providers and potentially heartbreaking for the intended learner, disengaging them and leaving them further away from the system.

If Foundation Apprenticeships are to reach those who need them, providers must be funded and trusted to do that work. And that means recognising the cost and value of relationship-based engagement.

Getting the foundations right: what really matters

If Foundation Apprenticeships are to succeed, they must be grounded in the realities of delivery not just the hopes of well-meaning policy. That starts with employer engagement. Scaling up meaningful employer involvement has been one of the greatest challenges in similar programmes. From traineeships to Skills Bootcamps, limited awareness, weak incentives, and unclear value propositions left too many employers on the sidelines. Without real investment in national and local engagement, including incentives for participation and support with placements, Foundation Apprenticeships risk facing the same fate.

But quality matters as much as quantity. Learners need placements that are safe, supportive and genuinely developmental, not token gestures. This can’t be left to providers alone. As I saw with programmes like traineeships, securing placements is an exhausting, relationship-based task that too often ends in disappointment without strategic backing. If Foundation Apprenticeships are going to work, government must step in – engaging large employers at a national level, de-risking placement provision, and setting clear standards for quality.

Branding Matters

Branding matters, too. Not just for policy consistency, but for connection. Learners need to see themselves in the programme and believe it was designed with them in mind. That won’t happen if the offer is hidden behind a label already stretched by years of policy churn. Foundation Apprenticeships deserve their own identity, rooted in the aspirations of young people, and trusted by employers as a distinct, purposeful entry route.

And all of this rests on one essential truth: wraparound support is not an optional extra. Engaging NEET and hard to reach learners requires deep, often prolonged relationships. It’s not just about getting them through the door, it’s about helping them stay, succeed, and move forward. That means mentoring, job coaching, personal support, and often, being the steady presence they may not have elsewhere. If we don’t fund and structure for this, we’re setting the programme up to fail no matter how well intended it is.

So: what needs to be learned, and applied, from these lessons

We set out in our report several key recommendations for getting this right. Among them:

• Design for new entrants only, with eligibility rules to prevent employers using Foundation Apprenticeships for those who would otherwise be employed or in training anyway.
• Align with occupations and progression routes where real demand exists and aligns with the target cohort – especially in sectors like construction, care, and hospitality, for example.
• Foundation Apprenticeships to have their own strong and recognisable identity, that speaks to the target audience, their parents, care givers, educators and employers.
• Build in flexibility, allowing durations from three to eight months depending on context and learner need to allow for the tailoring and wraparound support of each individual.
• Embed core and essential skills, not as separate qualifications, but integrated into practical learning – if it hasn’t worked during the schooling years it isn’t going to work here.
• Fund substantial wraparound support especially including pre-enrolment engagement, mentoring, and job coaching.
• Engage devolved authorities and community partners from the outset, not as afterthoughts because they know their community and employer needs best.

Above all, providers must be able to build commercially viable provision that reflects the actual investment needed to engage, retain, and support learners who have some of the most complex and challenging backgrounds to overcome. Our young people deserve that.

By Rebecca Hayes, Senior Consultant at MH&A

Written to accompany a new report for the Gatsby Foundation into Foundation Apprenticeships