Nursery World - Nursery Management: Apprenticeship Roundup

The deadlock over GCSEs at Level 3 has set early years apprenticeships back years. Following the Government U-turn and the sacking of the trailblazer group, what now? asks Hannah Crown

The apprenticeship levy, which comes in next month, is supposed to herald a new dawn for apprenticeships: three million are to be created by 2020, with the new funding system intended to make this possible. But for the early years sector, things aren’t looking so rosy, despite the Government’s insistence on GCSEs for Early Years Educator qualifications at Level 3 finally collapsing early this month.

At the forefront of the movement to re-instate functional skills, which spawned a campaign group called ‘Save Our Early Years’, were the trailblazers. Yet the trailblazer group has won the war but lost the battle, having been sacked in February over the ‘very slow progress’. The DfE says the trailblazer group published only one out of nine standards in three years.

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