The Education and Training Foundation through their Outstanding Teaching Learning and Assessment programme funded a number of practitioner led research projects on Exploring Delivery in Apprenticeship Standards in late 2018 early 2019.

The programme gave practitioners the space they needed to explore particular changes to their practice, and establish what outstanding looks like in Apprenticeship delivery.

Ten grant-funded collaborative projects were commissioned, focusing on the following areas of practice:

1. Collaborative approaches to teaching/training, learning and assessment between providers and employers
2. Curriculum development based on the new standards
3. Monitoring and assessing the progress of the apprentice
4. Outstanding technical pedagogy in apprenticeship delivery

While much of the practice relates to provision in further education, Sheffield Hallam University in collaboration with FE partners led one of the projects researching effective workplace assessment to replace the NVQ in the delivery of engineering Standards and the University of Derby were a collaborative partner with Derbyshire Adult Community Education Service looking into mentoring best practice.

A toolkit has been produced by the Strategic Development Network who managed the projects end-to-end. It has been created through the collaborative research of those practitioner colleagues from across the projects.

Located on the ETF’s Excellence Gateway, the toolkit contributes to defining and understanding what the sector means by “outstanding” teaching, learning and assessment for apprenticeship standards. There are materials, case studies, videos and infographics that will lend themselves to all levels of provision in Apprenticeships.

We recommend that you sign-up to access not only the toolkit but ETF’s wider portfolio of materials on the Excellence Gateway to support practitioners and strategic leaders in Apprenticeship delivery and decision making.