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Apprenticeships within West Sussex County Council

As one of the largest employers in the county, the County Council has an important role to play in leading by example to demonstrate the benefits of apprenticeships to a range of stakeholders.
Apprenticeships are really helping us to develop our business, Apprentices bring fresh ideas and help us experience new technology to the organisation. 
Apprenticeships logo

The National Apprenticeship Service is part of the Education and Skills Funding Agency


We offer a diverse range of Apprenticeships in Legal, Care, Premises, Creative Venue Technican, and Engineering 
View our WSCC Apprenticeship pages where you can find out information and view all the latest West Sussex Apprenticeship vacancies. 
Watch our video 'County Council apprentices find gateway to work'
  • Digital Technology Solutions
  • Business Administration
  • Senior Leaders (MBA)
  • Children’s & Young Peoples Workforce
  • Chartered Manager 
  • Adult Care Worker 
  • Associate Project Manager 
  • Commercial Procurement Officer
  • Data Analyst

March 2021 performance

We have been working with our providers to enrol 27 new apprentices across West Sussex County Council, with 11 of these new starts being in schools. This is a great achievement in the current climate, with the ongoing pandemic, and an improvement on the numbers for Quarter 3. Throughout the last quarter apprenticeships were delivered mostly via online methods, in line with local and national restrictions.
 
National Apprenticeship Week in February provided a great opportunity to promote apprenticeships across the organisation. There was a themed approach to the week and an opportunity to share many of the positive experiences of our apprentices through case studies and videos. This resulted in increased awareness and interest in the opportunities apprenticeships provide and contributed to a higher number of new starts compared with the previous quarter.
In support of our work on the People Framework and ensuring we have competent and confident leaders and managers who live and behave in line with our values we have focused on management development apprenticeships;  selecting providers to deliver the Level 3 Team Leader/Supervisor Apprenticeship, the Level 5 Operations/Departmental Manager Apprenticeship, and the new Level 5 Coaching Professional Apprenticeship.
We are planning new ways of engaging schools through collaboration with the School Effectiveness Team to increase take up from the schools’ workforce once restrictions are lifted.
Our public sector target for the year 19/20 is 129 apprentices across our Corporate, Adult and Children’s services and 196 across our School provision. 

FY20-21 overall figures and our Q4 figures as per the table below:
End of year figures for 2020-21

Actions 

We continue to work with our services and providers to increase the number of apprenticeship starts and have a good number of applicants hoping to start their apprenticeships in the coming months, these include a significant increase in numbers within the Fire and Rescue Service and taking advantage of new apprenticeships coming on-stream. 
 We are starting to see an increase in uptake of management apprenticeships council wide, suggesting that our efforts across the past two quarters are paying off, specifically with the Level 3 Team Leader/Supervisor Apprenticeship and Level 5 Operations/Departmental Manager Apprenticeship. 
Looking forward to this next year, we remain fully committed to continuing to develop a quality offer and establish more apprentices across the council and its schools.  
We are monitoring what impact the current Covid-19 Pandemic will have on the programme and have already experienced some delay to apprenticeship starts. 
We are building capacity in our team to focus on the apprenticeship programme and our dedicated L&D Partnerships Officer will be encouraging local businesses to take up the 25% levy transfer offer and implement apprenticeship training in priority areas such as social care.
This year we have made significant progress in improving apprenticeship starts, supporting both our existing workforce and newly recruited apprentices to develop their skills and professional qualifications across a wide range of subjects and vocational areas. The higher and degree level standards are now supporting us to develop social workers, occupational therapists and other hard to recruit roles.
Our Learning & Development Commissioners support services to identify relevant published apprenticeship standards for our staff, address queries around qualification structure and content, and develop proposals for Care Leavers.
We are also implementing an apprenticeship marketing strategy and promoting apprenticeships to existing staff through a range of channels. 
To support schools in making the best use of the Levy the Council funds a dedicated role to help schools to understand how apprenticeships would benefit them and how to access the funding. This role, alongside a project plan and rolling promotional communications is proving extremely successful as the number of apprenticeship starts in schools has now overtaken the starts in the council.
We have an Apprenticeship Governance Board which helps ensure ownership of the apprenticeship agenda amongst the senior leadership team and have grown the board to include Champions to further promote the agenda and look at new opportunities. 
Looking forward, as well as continuing to focus efforts on developing our staff, we will be engaging with the newly approved Social Work and Occupational Therapy degree apprenticeships, supporting our Fire Service to transfer their Fire Fighter training over to the new apprenticeship standard and working with organisations across the county to take up the 25% levy transfer offer and implement apprenticeship training in priority areas such as social care.
As the County Council’s workforce size shrinks and our service provision is outsourced, the impact of the County Council’s apprenticeship programme reduces. It is therefore important, as we commission services, to realistically build apprenticeships and employment and skills initiatives into contractual requirements in order we can maintain the benefit apprenticeships can bring to the local economy.