Medway Council continues to embrace its responsibilities under the Apprenticeship Levy and has again exceeded the accompanying public sector target.
We're proud to have achieved 131 apprenticeship programme starts between March 2025 and February 2026. Sixty employees completed their apprenticeship, and 73% gained permanent employments with us during this time.
What actions we've taken to achieve this
1. Continuing to resource our Apprenticeship Academy
This means the officers involved can actively promote apprenticeships, wherever and whenever possible. This will generate more awareness and understanding of the opportunities that apprenticeships offer to departments and services.
Apprenticeships can also enable existing staff to progress their professional development and career prospects. We have achieved this by continuing to provide resources and services to our apprentices such as regular monthly forums.
2. Continuing to monitor the new apprenticeship programmes being approved by the IfATE
We will continue promoting these to our many varied teams and departments within the council. This is to raise awareness of the multitude of career development opportunities available to existing staff.
These actions continue to build on the apprenticeship programme successes of previous years. This is a trajectory we hope to replicate once again, in the forthcoming year.
How we're planning to ensure we meet the target in future
We will continue to progress largely in the way that we are currently doing, which is achieving all our organisational aims regarding apprenticeships.
Our strategy to widely promote apprenticeships locally, is enticing young people to consider us as an apprenticeship employer of choice within the region - which is our aspiration. We offer a diverse range of apprentice roles, at all levels, enabling us to grow our own workforce and help us future-proof our organisation.
Our project to engage with our leaving care young people continues, with some successes and, as the corporate parent, we intend to continue prioritising this initiative, and accelerate support to our young people in the coming year.
Supporting existing staff with career progressing, learning and development pathways, via apprenticeship programmes, has helped us to meet individual professional development aspirations and retain a more motivated and engaged workforce. We will continue to work with our teams and service managers to identify the apprenticeship programmes which will continue to ensure our employees feel valued by this investment in them.
We have plans for National Apprenticeship Week to celebrate our apprentices’ successes over the year, and encourage more interactions across the organisation to promote apprenticeships.
Even with the removal of the target we will continue to meet our own organisational targets, and we are forecasting that we will continue to use all our apprenticeship levy monies next year.