The following is a contributed narrative by Rebecca Hodgson.
So long, Level 7 APA… but what legacy do you leave us with?
From January 2026, government funding for Level 7 apprenticeships will no longer be available to most learners aged 22 and above. NB. Any apprentice who started a level 7 apprenticeship before 1 January 2026 will continue to be funded through to completion.
Source: DfE Update: 28 May 2025
As the Level 7 Academic Professional Apprenticeship (APA) slowly shuffles off the stage, many of those who have lived and breathed it are left with mixed feelings. This short piece is an attempt to reflect and work out what, if anything, we gained from the experience.
Let’s start with the obvious: at times (most of the time?) operating the APA model felt a Sisyphean task. The standard itself is a classic case of policy enthusiasm overtaking effective educational design, showing all the signs of ‘design by committee’. I remember doing my first mapping exercise of all the KSVBs and realising that some of what was expected would be a challenge for an academic of many years standing, let alone an early career colleague. Forty-plus Knowledge, Skills, Values and Behaviours (KSVBs) to evidence, mapped to UKPSF, mapped to institutional frameworks, mapped to local workload models – a kind of meta-assessment bingo in which every box had to be ticked. Colleagues were faced with reverse-engineering the curriculum and the pedagogical work being buried under layers of admin and platforms like APTEM.
The 20% off-the-job requirement – a core apprenticeship funding rule – became a running joke: written proudly into contracts and tripartite paperwork, and then quietly eroded by cover needs, recruitment gaps and “just one more” module to pick up. Apprentices and academic leads alike reported heavy workload, difficulty protecting development time, and a sense that ‘APA time’ was the first thing to be cut when pressure hit.
The complex nature of professional identity also played its part. As reported by Mountford-Zimdars & Hayes (2024), and experienced by programme leaders across the sector, many academics didn’t recognise themselves in the language of “apprentice”; some were openly cynical, reading the whole move as a way for universities to claw back their levy rather than to enhance development. For people who had just completed a PhD and were leading substantial teaching and research, being re-badged as an apprentice could feel, at best, counter-intuitive and, at worst, insulting. I also recall feeling strongly that telling colleagues they needed to downplay their strengths on an initial ‘skills scan’ wasn’t how I generally liked to set the tone at the start of a programme.
And yet something valuable happened amid all that bureaucracy.
Evidence from the earliest adopters showed that apprentices consistently valued cross-disciplinary learning, structured reflection on practice, and the sense of belonging to a community of newer academics – although these positives existed already as part of PgCert / PgCAP provision. However, the requirement for a mentor – on PgCert course leader wish lists for a long time, but impossible to implement consistently – meant that the employer had to step up. The employer–programme relationship was strengthened as a result; tripartite meetings and gateway sessions gave programme teams a clearer window into the diverse roles now populating higher education – NHS practitioners, coaches, ‘third space’ colleagues, as well as ‘traditional’ lecturers. The new regular tripartite review meetings – although challenging to schedule – often turned into rich developmental conversations that helped people make sense of their teaching, their students and their emerging academic identities (Mountford-Zimdars & Hayes, 2024). The professional conversation at the end – the “eureka” moment where people joined up learning across the whole programme – was often cited as a genuine highlight.
A perhaps unexpected bonus was that the APA also turned into CPD for more senior staff. The requirement for structured, termly conversations nudged teaching out of the shadows of corridor chat and into a more intentional, supported space. Academic Leads found themselves talking about teaching more often, engaging with new ideas and sometimes quietly borrowing their apprentice’s innovations.
So, as levy funding shifts and many institutions move back towards ‘plain’ PgCert/PgCAP models, what should we keep?
- The human network, not the framework. The best of the APA lay in the relationships: mentoring, structured conversations, cross-disciplinary cohorts, peer observation and scholarly cafés. We don’t need an apprenticeship standard to justify those – we just need to design them in deliberately.
- PgCert as entry point, not end point. The APA reminded us that early-career development is part of a wider ecosystem, not a box to tick on probation. That mindset can – and should – survive any policy change.
- Authentic assessment, not scavenger hunts. We can discard the atomised KSVB mapping while keeping the spirit: asking participants to design learning, evaluate evidence, improve practice and show impact in ways that feel like real academic work, not like assembling an evidence museum or a collection of de-contextualised artefacts.
- Protected time as a non-negotiable. Whether or not a funding rule insists on 20%, the underlying principle remains: if we’re serious about excellent teaching, we must ring-fence proper time for people to learn how to do it well. Otherwise, we’re just writing aspirational fiction into workload models.
As we design the next generation of PgCerts and PgCAPs, our task is to keep the courage, the community and the conversations – and quietly leave the bureaucratic burden behind.
Along with my personal reflections, this piece draws on the insights and inspiration from colleagues’ contributions to the Padlet Forum series [edta.info.yorku.ca] and from Mountford-Zimdars & Hayes (2024). My acknowledgements and thanks to all.
Reference
Mountford-Zimdars, A., & Hayes, L. (2024) Changing a postgraduate certificate in academic practice to a postgraduate apprenticeship at one English university: impacts for academic identities and staff development practices, Perspectives: Policy and Practice in Higher Education, DOI: 10.1080/13603108.2024.2375297
Rebecca Hodgson, Professor, former PGCert THE / APA programme lead and current EPA independent assessor.