For candidates →Levy planning & spend optimisation
Multi-year levy spend plan against your apprenticeship and school-leaver pipeline, mapped to IfATE-recognised standards. Usually recovers 20%+ of historical underspend in year one.
Solutions · Hire
30 to 40% of L3 apprentices don’t complete.
Each one costs the employer between £15,000 and £25,000 in lost productivity, replacement cost, and the apprenticeship levy spend that doesn’t come back. The sector-wide annual UK levy underspend is over £200 million. Most apprentice programmes were designed for retention as a by-product, not a primary outcome. Apprenticeship Recruitment is the solution where retention is the outcome that actually pays for the platform — and includes school-leaver routeway design throughout.
The retention math
Apprentice attrition is the most expensive early-careers metric you’re probably not tracking.
Apprentice attrition is asymmetric. A graduate who leaves at month 9 cost you the assessment, the onboarding and the team time. An L3 apprentice who leaves at month 18 cost you all of that plus the levy spend, the EPA preparation, and the employer-loaded training cost. The unit cost of attrition in apprenticeships is roughly 2× that of graduate hires, and the rate of attrition is higher.
Most apprentice programmes still report on completion rate at EPA — a year out from entry. By that point the cost has landed. We design the pipeline backwards from chartership and EPA pass-rate, and instrument 6, 12 and 24-month retention as primary outcomes.
L3 apprentice attrition (UK avg)
30–40%
UK Department for Education data on Level 3 apprenticeship non-completion.
Schneider TTP retention
89%
24-month retention on the Schneider Electric L3-to-L6 routeway. Industry benchmark: 67%.
Annual levy underspend
£200M+
Aggregate UK employer apprenticeship levy underspend — money that doesn’t come back.
Microsoft cohort growth
3×
Microsoft UK apprentice scheme: 80 to 240 hires/year over three intakes, no quality drop.
If you don't fix this
You spend the levy twice — once on the apprentice who leaves, once on their replacement.
Most apprentice programmes are run as discrete recruitment events: the cohort goes in, the EPA happens 18 months later, the survivors graduate. The retention conversation happens after the fact, usually with a head-of-resourcing whose KPIs are about cohort fill, not about cohort survival. Meanwhile, the cost of replacing a Level 3 apprentice halfway through is roughly the same as the cost of finding them in the first place — the levy spend, the wage commitment, the team time, all repeated.
An apprentice who leaves at month 18 costs you the levy twice.
Apprenticeship Recruitment is designed against the retention outcome from day one. The L2-to-L6 routeway is built backwards from chartership and EPA pass-rate. School-leaver and apprentice routes are integrated — we don’t separate them, because the operational reality is that they share pipelines, providers and onboarding. Levy spend is planned across the multi-year cycle. Provider matching is rigorous and ongoing, not a one-off. Retention is tracked at 6, 12 and 24 months and reported as a programme outcome, not a footnote.
How we deliver this
Six things that make apprentice retention the outcome.
We don’t separate apprenticeship recruitment from school-leaver recruitment, and we don’t separate either from L4–L6 progression. The work that produces a chartered engineer in year 7 starts at year 0 and has to be designed as one programme.
Featured · Schneider Electric
Case study · L3-to-L6 engineering routeway
Schneider: 89% retention vs 67% industry benchmark.
Schneider Electric runs a Level 3-to-Level 6 engineering apprenticeship routeway across nine UK sites. After two intake cycles on the Talent People platform, 24-month apprentice retention sits at 89% — against an industry benchmark of 67%. The programme was a finalist at the 2025 ISE Awards. Co-designed with the Schneider apprenticeship team, the IET, and the TTP schools team. The 22-percentage-point retention difference is worth roughly £1.2M per cohort in avoided replacement cost.
89%
Retention 24mo
L3→L6
Routeway
£1.2M
Saved per cohort
What this connects to
Where this fits across the lifecycle.
Apprenticeship Recruitment is a programme-management solution, not a single tool. It draws on the Schools Engagement network upstream (which builds the L2 entry pipeline), the Assessment Platform at L3 selection, and the Onboarding solution downstream (which handles first-90-days through to EPA preparation).
Most engagements are multi-year. We don’t recommend deploying for a single cohort — the retention outcomes only show up at 24 months, and the levy planning only optimises across multiple years.
Platform
TalentHub
Programme-management hub. Levy, provider, retention dashboards in one place.
Upstream
Schools Engagement
Where the L2 entry pipeline starts — year 9 onwards.
Downstream
Onboarding
The first-90-days programme that holds 24-month retention.
Sector depth
Eng · Util · Tech
Heaviest deployment in engineering, utilities and tech apprentice routes.
Apprenticeship deployments at
Schneider Electric
Microsoft
Rolls-Royce
BAE
National Grid
Network Rail
DHL
Severn Trent
Talk to the apprenticeship team
Got an EPA pass-rate that won’t hold?
Most clients start with a 60-minute retention audit: we plug your last three cohorts’ data into our retention model, walk through where attrition is happening (entry quality, provider mismatch, onboarding gap, EPA prep), and tell you which of those is most fixable. Walk away with a numbered list and a sense of cost-of-attrition for your specific programme.