Who writes your apprenticeship standard — and what happens when it changes

Rules and figures checked: 2026-07-25. Funding, tenancy and tax rules move — verify before relying on them.

There is a document that defines your apprenticeship. It isn't your contract, and it isn't the glossy scheme page you applied through. It's the apprenticeship standard — a public specification, a few pages long, sitting on a government register, that determines the level, the length, the minimum training hours, the funding band, whether a degree is included, and what you have to be able to do at the end.

Almost nobody reads it before applying. Everyone should, because it's the only part of the arrangement that is neither marketing nor negotiable.

Who actually writes them

Standards are written by employers. Specifically, by groups of employers convened for the occupation — originally called Trailblazers — who agree what a competent person in that job knows and does, and draft it up. That structure is the whole design principle of the post-2015 system and where it came from is covered in where degree apprenticeships came from.

The draft then goes through approval. Until 2025 that was the Institute for Apprenticeships and Technical Education. IfATE was abolished by an Act that received Royal Assent in May 2025 and its functions were absorbed into Skills England, fully established that June. Skills England now maintains the register, approves new standards, and decides which ones keep funding.

The practical consequence: if a careers resource tells you to check something with "IfATE", it's out of date. The register lives at skillsengland.education.gov.uk, and every course page on this site is generated from it.

What's in a standard, and what to look for

Six things are worth checking before you apply for anything:

Level. Level 6 is bachelor's-equivalent, Level 7 master's-equivalent. What that does and doesn't imply is in understanding levels, standards and the degree.

Whether a degree is actually included. This is the one that catches people. A Level 6 standard can be integrated (the degree and the apprenticeship assessment are one thing), non-integrated (a degree plus a separate final assessment), or include no degree at all — leading to a professional qualification instead. In our data, 30 of the 113 approved Level 6 standards include no degree. Six of the eight Level 6 standards in the legal, finance and accounting route are in that group. "Level 6" and "BSc" are not synonyms.

Typical duration. Written into the standard. If an advert says three years and the standard says four, ask why.

Minimum hours for compliance. More on this below, because the rule changed recently.

Funding band. The maximum that can be spent on training and assessment. Not money you ever see, but a decent proxy for how substantial the training is.

The knowledge, skills and behaviours. The actual content — a long list of things you'll be assessed against. Reading it is the fastest way to find out whether you want the job, as opposed to whether you want the salary. It's also, incidentally, the best interview preparation available, because the employer's competency questions are derived from it.

The off-the-job hours rule changed in 2025

This one matters and a lot of published guidance is still wrong about it.

The old rule was that apprentices spent at least 20% of their working hours, or a minimum of six hours a week, on off-the-job training. For apprenticeships starting from 1 August 2025, that's been replaced by a total minimum number of hours set for each individual standard, published on the standard's own page.

The figures vary enormously. Across the approved Level 6 and Level 7 standards the requirement runs from 278 hours to 2,040, with a median around 744. Recognition of prior learning can reduce it, but never below 187 hours or eight months.

So "how much study time do I get?" now has a specific, published, standard-by-standard answer, and you can look it up before you apply rather than discovering it in month four. What to do when the hours don't materialise is its own article.

Versions: standards change under you

Standards get revised. A new version might change the content, the duration, the assessment, or the qualification requirements. They carry version numbers for exactly this reason.

The rule that protects you is straightforward: you stay on the version of the standard you started on until a revised version goes live and applies to you. You are not retrospectively moved onto a harder specification halfway through. Your provider should tell you which version you're registered against; it's worth knowing, and it's worth writing down somewhere, because it's the reference point for any argument about what you were promised.

Standards can also be withdrawn from funding entirely. Sixteen are losing funding from 1 September 2026, including two degree-level ones — the Level 6 Chartered Manager (degree) and the Level 6 Improvement Leader. Anyone already on-programme completes; it's new starts that stop. If you're applying to a business or management route, check the standard's funding status on the register before you invest a month in the application. The 2026 funding changes has the full list and the dates.

The assessment reform happening right now

The biggest structural change to standards in a decade is in progress, and it's worth understanding because it will probably affect you mid-programme.

Since 2017 apprenticeships have ended with end-point assessment: a distinct final assessment, after the training is complete, carried out by an independent end-point assessment organisation. That's being replaced by a model where the final assessment is simply called apprenticeship assessment and can be assessed during the programme rather than only at the end — with end-point assessment organisations becoming, more straightforwardly, "assessment organisations". The change is being phased in across 2025 to 2027, with a new Ofqual regulatory framework arriving in 2026.

Two things follow. First, existing apprentices stay on their current standard version until a revised one goes live, so nobody's assessment gets rewritten under them mid-flight. Second, if you're reading anything about EPA — including the resit rules, which are genuinely useful to know — the substance still applies but the vocabulary is moving. Failing a module, resits and splitting a year covers what happens when assessment goes wrong, including the two rules worth memorising: your employer pays for resits, not you, and grades should not be capped after a resit unless there's a justifiable industry reason.

Who's in charge of what, in 2026

The organisational churn in this sector is genuinely hard to follow, so:

If your provider isn't delivering, the escalation path runs through the provider's own complaints process first and then to the DfE, within twelve months — the full route is here.

What I'd actually do

Before applying: open the standard on the Skills England register. Check the level, whether a degree is included, the minimum hours, the typical duration and the funding status. Ten minutes.

Before accepting: ask which version of the standard you'll be registered against, and get the answer in writing along with everything else.

During: if you hear that your standard is being revised, ask your provider one question — does this apply to my cohort or only to new starts? The answer is almost always "new starts", and knowing that saves a fortnight of anxiety.

Throughout: treat the standard as the source of truth. When an employer, a provider and a careers website disagree about what your apprenticeship involves, the standard is the document that settles it.

The one-line version

Your apprenticeship is defined by a public document written by employers and approved by Skills England — it tells you the level, the hours, the funding status and whether you actually get a degree, and it's the one part of the arrangement that isn't a sales pitch.