Funding bands are always a source of potential confusion, so we thought we’d dedicate a bit of time to discussing them.
What are funding bands, you might ask? Good question. Apprenticeship standards have been redesigned from the ground up by employers in various sectors. Regulated qualifications, to employers, were unsatisfactory, and the new approach more closely meets the needs of the employers since they themselves have designed them. More than 500 standards have now been developed in a wide range of sectors, including Healthcare, Hair and Beauty, and Retail.
The delivery of training and assessment of these standards will be mostly funded by the government (with some exceptions). For organisations that pay the Apprenticeship Levy, and for all other organisations after 2018, the government will be funding apprenticeship training and assessment for all Apprentices. You can learn more about the Apprenticeship Levy here.
The maximum amount of money allocated to each standard falls into one of 30 bands, ranging from £1,500 to £27,000. Here is a graph of which bands correspond to which level of funding: