The University of Warwick has been awarded around a quarter of a million pounds from its new Higher Education Funding Council for England (HEFCE) administered Degree Apprenticeships Development Fund.

CLL is particularly pleased that along with Civil Engineering, one of the first two curriculum areas to be identified for development is Social Work. There is a long history of social work education within CLL and the wider university, and the hugely successful and well-regarded MA in Social Work will now be augmented with an Integrated Degree Apprenticeship, with a planned first intake of apprentices in September 2018.

The HEFCE funding has enabled focused time to develop a steering group of employers and experts by people who have themselves experienced social work services to ensure that the proposed curriculum is contemporary, and reflective of the needs of the sector.

Apprentices will be based within their workplaces for four days of the working week, and will attend university on the other day. However, crucially, their academic learning will be closely aligned with their practical work, enabling critical analysis and reflection.

They will spend three years on the programme, and will need to complete an ‘end-point Assessment’ within the final six months, to demonstrate competence in nine key areas of work, established nationally by a working group of employers and universities.

The mission of CLL chimes closely with many of the perceived advantages of the government’s Apprenticeship policy – non-traditional students may be more likely to apply for this pathway, which will be flexible, routed in workplaces where candidates are already employed, and will be funded through employer levy, and thus not subject to tuition fees in the orthodox sense.

Options for the attainment of Maths and English GCSE qualification will also be developed in parallel with the wider aims of CLL.