Funding of apprenticeship and the levy in England

This chapter compares the apprenticeship levy in England with other levy models around the world. It argues that the apprenticeship levy may have incentive effects, particularly on larger levy-paying employers, encouraging them to fund more apprenticeships. This raises two strategic challenges. The first is ensuring that the newly introduced apprentice standards, alongside other reforms, represent high quality, so that they fully deserve to be incentivised at the expense of other forms of training and skills development. The second linked challenge is to ensure that the funding rules, and other sources of public expenditure, provide effective funding for the apprenticeship system taken as a whole, so as to underpin the quality of individual apprenticeships.