Catherine's Business Taskforce Early Childhood invest in 600 apprenticeships.

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Co-op Group helps lead investment in 600 early years apprenticeships - Co-operative News (thenews.coop)

Excellent. More of this sort of thing.

This is brilliant.

This, along with the positive results of the new Alarm Distress Baby Scale tool, which is going from trial to nationwide implementation, is so encouraging and will have a really positive impact on the country and future generations.

Pitiful. Try paying young people (and indeed shop workers) fairly instead.

This is great - investment and training where it's needed.

Apprenticeships are definitely becoming more widespread, not least because it's a way to earn as you study, qualifying without debt.

This is a good initiative. The government's ambitions for thousands more nurseries won't work without enough qualified staff. This won't be the complete answer to the question of finding enough qualified staff, but it's a large step forwards.

Coop, being (as the name suggests) a workers' co-operative, is pretty good on staff T&Cs. Was the criticism of pay of shop workers aimed at one of the other companies funding the scheme?
"Alongside the [Coop] Group, the taskforce members are Aviva, Deloitte, Iceland Foods, Ikea UK and Ireland, The Lego Group, NatWest Group and Unilever UK"

That's an unusual group to get round one table and on to one project - convening power at work, I suppose

I agree that this is a good initiative and it would seem like there is potential for it to gain momentum and become quite meaningful

This sounds very positive. Can someone explain how it's going to work? The article says:
The initiative will also help deliver the workforce required to staff the creation of 3,000 nurseries across England, says the Group.

Does it mean the money will be spent in England only?

They propose "delivering the workforce", is this for initial training costs (like an apprenticeship) or for future, non-apprentice wages?

Where will the money to build the new 3,000 nurseries come from?

I appreciate this is a starting sum but 1 million over 600 apprenticeships gives £1,667 per apprentice. A pledge for £5 million over the next 5 years gives the same amount per apprentice per yearnfor the next 5 years.

From my dealings with the childcare sector the issue in the UK is not so much the lack of entry-level staff as the mismatch between low staff pay and high costs for the user; low pay leads to poor staff retention and poor training; people leave because literally any other job is better paid so many employees don't stay long enough to be well trained.

This issue has been discussed endlessly on MN and as positive as private business pledges are, nothing barring huge long-term government funding will solve it. It looks as if the royals are doing as much as they can without being seen to be politically interfering.

looks as if the royals are doing as much as they can without being seen to be politically interfering.
Imo this is why the Royals should avoid doing ' campaigns' on things like early years and homelessness. Complex problems need huge amounts of government investment, not token gestures for good PR. The apprenticeship levy is a mandatory levy on businesses over a certain turnover. If it is not used it goes back to the government. What this is is businesses using a small part of their levy ( apprenticeships cost far more than £1.6k per apprentice- many are 10x that) to fund someone else's apprenticeship. Great that this is being done, but why £1.6k over 600 apprentices? Why aren't the CoOp using up all of their apprenticeship levy training young people in retail, management, finance etc? Or sponsoring a young person in full to do a childcare apprenticeship. That is far too low to make a difference to anything but headlines for the PoW. They should stick to things that they can actually make a difference with, which frankly is handshaking and waving at charity visits.