Stockport Borough Council
Stephen Dawson, Senior Service Manager and Senior People Professional Apprentice
THE BENEFITS OF DEGREE APPRENTICESHIPS TO LOCAL AUTHORITIES
Meet Stephen, Senior Service Manager at Stockport Borough Council, who shared with us how degree apprenticeships can benefit local authorities, supporting them in providing development and career progression opportunities to their employees. Having seen the positive impacts our programme brought to his workplace, Stephen decided to also enrol in one of our apprenticeships and became a Senior People Professional Apprentice.
HELPING TO IMPROVE SERVICE DELIVERY
Here at Stockport Borough Council, we have many examples of projects that have been undertaken and, at a minimum, have been done differently, and often more effectively because of the learning and research that our degree apprentices are bringing back to the workplace.
The projects that degree apprentices complete have reformed our service delivery in Public Health, Social Care, Place Management and corporate services.
This makes our service delivery far more evidence-based, whether that be around vaccination rollouts, deployment and monitoring of resources, or implementation of hybrid working.
As a local authority, our resources are limited, and the knowledge and skills that the degree apprentices are bringing back to their work has made us more effective and more efficient.
FILLING GAPS AND RETAINING STAFF
A prime example of a degree apprenticeship that ticks every box for us as an employer, as it’s helping us with a recruitment issue, with retention of valued staff members, and with up-skilling and filling a skills gap, is the Social Work Degree Apprenticeship.
Up to now, all our Social Work degree apprentices have been existing staff working in unqualified social care roles (although it’s been so successful that we are now recruiting our first ever external candidates for the degree apprenticeship). Without the apprenticeship levy, we never could have sponsored staff with a multi-year professional qualification.
Degree apprenticeships have given us a framework to offer development and career progression that simply didn’t exist before.
Our Council vision is around creating opportunities for everyone, and this gives us a real ability to do that and to generate excitement and a positive learning culture.
We’re not just training for training’s sake or development for development’s sake; it is about development in the roles that we know we need as an organisation as well as for the individual employee.
The suite of degree apprenticeships we offer gives us the ability to match the development of the individual with the skills gap we have and with the need for productivity and retention within the authority.