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Learner by learner, in one place, with the same rules applied everywhere. That is the whole answer, and it is harder than it sounds when your apprentices are spread across business units that each run their own version of good practice.
The 20% off-the-job rule is gone. Every standard now carries its own fixed minimum hours, and the minimum duration is eight months. For an employer delivering apprenticeships in-house, this changed the shape of the problem. Off-the-job hours used to be a percentage you could reason about at programme level. Now they are a number per standard that has to be true for each individual apprentice, and provable.
Why this lands harder on employer providers
You registered as a provider to develop your own workforce. The regulatory regime that came with that registration was designed for organisations whose entire business is training delivery.
Those organisations have a single delivery function, one set of processes, and people whose job title contains the word compliance. You have apprentices sitting inside operational teams whose primary job is the thing your company actually does, managed by line managers with delivery targets of their own.
That structure is not a weakness. It is usually why the apprenticeships work: the training is close to the real job. But it does mean the same standard can be delivered one way in one location and a slightly different way somewhere else, both in good faith, and neither of them wrong until someone asks for the evidence side by side.
What an inspector or auditor actually asks for
Not a policy. Not an average.
They ask what a named apprentice did, when they did it, who confirmed it, and how it maps to the minimum hours their standard requires. Then they ask the same question about another apprentice in a different part of the business.
"Most of our sites had it right" is not an answer that survives that sequence. Off-the-job hours are proved per apprentice or they are a finding. The first inspections under the new Ofsted framework begin in September, with a five-point grading scale and inclusion judged on its own for the first time, so the year ahead is the wrong one to discover your evidence lives in fourteen different spreadsheets.
There is a second version-tracking problem arriving alongside it. Assessment plans are being reformed standard by standard rather than all at once, across every sector. Around 300 of England's roughly 700 standards have already begun or completed that process, which means apprentices on the same standard can sit under different assessment plan versions depending on when they started. Getting that wrong is a failed end-point assessment waiting to happen.
The levy question underneath the compliance one
For most heads of levy, the compliance risk is not actually the thing that keeps the executive team interested. The money is.
New levy contributions now expire 12 months after they enter your account, down from 24, and co-investment on anything beyond your levy has risen to 25%.[ST1.1] So the question your finance director will ask is no longer just whether the programmes are compliant. It is how much of the pot is committed, how much is at risk of expiring, and what each programme is returning for it.
Those two questions have the same answer. If off-the-job hours, progress and funding sit against every apprentice in one system, levy utilisation is a report you run. If they sit in local spreadsheets, it is a reconstruction exercise someone does at year end, by which point the answer arrives too late to change anything.
What good looks like operationally
One instance across every site, with the same off-the-job tracking, review schedule and evidence rules applied everywhere. Not because standardisation is virtuous, but because it is the only way the multi-site question has a single answer.
MAYTAS runs that way by design. Off-the-job hours, reviews, evidence and assessment plan version sit against each apprentice, in real time, with the same rules in every location. Funding and delivery data live together, so levy utilisation and cohort progress are both reportable rather than assembled. Tribal's dedicated Funding and Compliance team tracks every DfE rule change and builds it into the product, which matters more for an employer provider than for a college: you do not want your L&D team becoming apprenticeship compliance experts as a condition of staying compliant.
On the implementation question, which employer providers ask earlier than anyone else: MAYTAS 6 is fully managed software as a service. No hosting, no patching, no infrastructure for your IT team to own.
The honest test of whether any of this applies to you is one question. Could you produce, this afternoon, the off-the-job hours for every apprentice in every location, against the minimum their standard requires?
If that would take longer than an afternoon, the employers brochure sets out how it becomes a report rather than a project.
Find out more about MAYTAS here.
