More than £1bn of taxpayers’ money has been used to fund thousands of courses for top executives that are equivalent to a master’s degree but badged as apprenticeships, an investigation by The Independent can reveal.
More than 55,000 executives from hundreds of large companies have received 100 per cent funding to take two postgraduate level apprenticeship standards – the accountancy or taxation professional apprenticeship and the senior leader apprenticeship.
The astonishing £1bn figure for these so-called level 7 courses has been extracted from government data by education think tank EDSK and means that the scale of the scandal of young people losing out as firms use the apprenticeship levy to bankroll training for executives is more than three times worse than previously feared.
The apprenticeship levy is a charge that businesses with annual payrolls over £3m must fork out, paying 0.5 per cent of their wage bill which they can use to recruit and train apprentices, but any levy that remains unspent after 24 months has to be returned to the Treasury as a tax.
