Many companies will have seen the various announcements in the apprenticeship area - Trailblazers, the Levy and so on, but will be unclear as to how these issues affect them and what they can and indeed should be doing about it.

There are several areas that need to be considered:

• all existing apprenticeship frameworks will be discontinued in the fairly near future and must be replaced by Trailblazer apprenticeship standards. If you employ apprentices you need to make sure that you can still do so in the future.
• the Levy - a tax for all companies on their payroll costs charged at 0.5% of anything above £3m pa. For a lot of companies this will be a significant cost - how are you going to recoup it?
• SME companies which probably won’t pay the Levy but still employ apprentices - what will the funding system be for your company?

ESCO can help answer all of these and work with you to ensure that your company maximises the benefits of the apprenticeship system. To find out how, contact ESCO at [email protected] or complete the enquiry form here