We’ve worked with the NHSE national AHP support workforce programme team, as well as a number of other organisations to develop the level 3 senior health care support worker apprenticeship programme (for therapies) and level 5 assistant practitioner apprenticeship programme, which is specific to dietetics. This is a really significant moment in the standardisation of the programmes and availability of courses for potential recruits to our industry.
The L3 apprenticeship will have its first intake in early September and the dietetic-specific L5 apprenticeship is due to come onboard within the next 3-12 months.
Work began back in 2021 with a demand scoping exercise with employers for these roles. This informed a national procurement exercise to get training providers to develop these programmes. The training providers who were successful in their bids and who participated in the implementation group phase of activity, developed the skills frameworks for the delivery of each of these programmes.
The NHSE national team has acknowledged the immense amount of work carried out by all, and thanks the training providers, professional bodies, support workers, employers, and regional colleagues in collaborating to develop these programmes to bring us to the position of being ready with programme starts in September 2023.
We are extremely pleased that the L3 apprenticeships are ready to recruit and we will continue to support the development of the L5 apprenticeships. These will help ease the pressure on the workforce, support with meeting the growing demands of service users and with meeting NHS workforce targets. It will also help to diversify the workforce, giving more routes into the profession and supporting people to build what we know will be rewarding life-long careers.
The NHSE regional teams and apprenticeship relationship managers will continue to work with employers and training providers to recruit candidates onto these programmes to ensure programme commencement and sustainability with viable cohorts.
This table sets out the regional providers for the L3 and L5 and you will see from the table that there are 4 providers looking to deliver the L5 dietetics apprenticeships from 2024-2027.
