National provider network the Association of Employment & Learning Providers has announced a new set of annual awards to recognise the achievements of training providers. AELP CEO Mark Dawe explains their thinking:
‘Celebrating success is a vital part of our year. AELP has felt for a long while that apprenticeship providers are not recognised enough for their dedication and effort. Rightly, we celebrate the success of the apprentice..but behind every apprentice there is an employer and provider. So we have teamed up with FE Week to start apprenticeship awards for providers. Working with the local provider networks there will be four regional awards (North, Midlands, South, London and East) announced during apprenticeship week – again an opportunity to celebrate the provider as well as the apprentice. Then a couple of weeks later a national winner will be selected from the regional winners, and celebrated at the Annual Apprenticeship Conference in March 2018. We have selected a small number of sectors and other categories and we hope to build on the idea year on year. I hope everyone will embrace the idea and celebrate what is great about our sector, because of course provider success is demonstrated by learner success – so it is still all about the learner in the end!!’
SCTP will make more information available when we have it.