Opportunity from the ashes of management apprenticeships

The Chartered Manager Degree Apprenticeship (CMDA) loses government funding on 1 September 2026, one of sixteen standards withdrawn in March. The Senior Leader Apprenticeship (SLA) survives only on paper. Since 1 January 2026 it has been funded only for apprentices aged 16 to 21, compared with 99% of its previous starters being over 25. Both standards were popular. The SLA recorded 7,140 starts in 2023/24, almost a third of all Level 7 provision, then 9,624 in the five months to January 2026 as employers rushed to beat the deadline. The CMDA was the largest Level 6 standard in 2024/25 with around 3,000 starts, just over 2,000 of them through a university. Chartered ABS research shows both were consistent vehicles for social mobility.

The SLA drew the accusation that senior managers were using levy funds to buy themselves MBAs. Less was said about the price. A Level 7 leadership apprenticeship is banded at £14,000, so is the Level 3 standard for hair, wigs, make-up and prosthetics technicians. Little consideration seems to have been given to the practical and economic benefit of well-trained managers and leaders compared to short-term political messaging.

A different kind of apprentice

In most subjects the apprenticeship is the threshold qualification. If you want to be a paramedic, a nurse or a police officer, the relevant apprenticeship programme qualifies you to do the job. That is what apprenticeships were conceived for, getting new people into new jobs. Management apprenticeships worked differently. They attracted people already doing the job, promoted out of a specialism they were good at into a role nobody had trained them for. Engineers, medics, teachers promoted away from their technical competence, a classic Peter Principal situation. These people are still out there. They still need training. They can no longer get funded training.

This matters beyond the business school. An unprepared manager in a hospital, a school or an engineering firm does damage that shows up as turnover, sickness and failed projects long before anyone traces it back to a lack of skills and training. The apprenticeship was an imperfect answer to that problem, but it was the only one attached to funded development opportunities.

Short courses are not the dead end they look

Business schools are now holding management teaching capacity they cannot fill. Some of it will move to other standards, Project Manager or People Professional. Moving capacity from one Level 6 standard to another leaves the original problem untouched.

Continuing professional development (CPD) is the obvious answer, free of apprenticeship bureaucracy and cheaper to run. The objection has always been that it is unfunded. That is no longer quite right. Apprenticeship units arrived in April 2026: 30 to 140 hours over one to sixteen weeks available to employed learners aged 19 and over, funded through the apprenticeship levy. Seventeen universities are already delivering three Level 5 units in artificial intelligence combined with organizational change and governance. This is a path to limited management education for people already managing, funded, at a fraction of the compliance cost of an apprenticeship.

Opportunity in the ashes

The less obvious route uses the same capacity somewhere else entirely. Every provider chooses how to deliver the knowledge, skills and behaviours in a standard, and as education professionals we have the same autonomy over everything else we teach. We can put management education into other disciplines: into the programmes that produce the engineers, nurses, lawyers and scientists who will be running teams within five years of graduating. Modules on how to be managed, how to coach and mentor, how to coordinate and lead a team. Students want to know how their working lives change once they qualify, and for many of them the change comes quickly. A university with a business school can teach this in a way no independent training provider can, because the expertise is already down the corridor.

In practice this is modular. A module in a nursing programme on leading a ward team. An engineering final year that includes managing a project budget and the people spending it. A law programme that treats supervision as a skill rather than something picked up on the job. Business schools already own that material; it sits in modules we have run for years. The work is negotiation with colleagues in other faculties rather than curriculum design, and it costs less than validating a new standard.

This should have been happening already. The apprenticeship made it easy not to bother, because management education had a funded home and stayed in it. The funding has gone and the capacity has not. Too many managers find themselves in positions they are not prepared for. We have a duty, and now the room, to prepare them. Doing it well will need schools to compare notes rather than each solving it alone.