Start Up to Outstanding with Paul Drew

Mark Simpkins (00:03.521)
Hello everyone and welcome to today’s episode of FE Gold, your source for real talk and real solutions in the world of further education. As always, I’m your host, Mark Simpkins, and I’m here along with my guests to bring insights to take your provision to the next level. And today I’m delighted to welcome good friend and ex boss of mine, Paul Drew. How you doing, Paul?

Paul Drew (00:28.705)
Hi, you okay?

Mark Simpkins (00:30.399)
Yeah, I’m very good, mate. very good. Paul is co-founder and ex-managing director of Apprentify Group. And those of you who know me or delved a little bit into my past will know that I was at Apprentify for four or so years. And today, I’m delighted to actually finally get Paul onto the show. So it’s great to see you, mate.

Paul Drew (00:55.05)
Hi, Neil. Looking forward to it.

Mark Simpkins (00:57.697)
Good, good, good. So what I wanted to do today, is tell the listeners and have a little bit of a chat really about our journey at Apprentify. To give a little bit of background, Apprentify, an Apprentify group was a startup in, I want to say it was 2018, wasn’t it Paul? 2018. And it led us all the way up to our first

Paul Drew (01:19.038)
I see now.

Mark Simpkins (01:27.553)
full inspection, which was in September 22, I think, Paul, and we achieved, you know, the fantastic badge of print, Osted outstanding at our first full inspection. And what I want to do today, is delve a little bit into how we kind of managed to do that. And, you know, some of your thoughts and decisions along the way and really delve into the detail a little bit. So that’s kind of like the theme of

Paul Drew (01:32.364)
Yep. Yep.

Mark Simpkins (01:57.249)
today’s pod. let’s start right at the beginning, Paul, let’s go back to 2018 or maybe 2017, whenever the brainchild of ApprentiFi came kind of started. So tell us a little bit about, you know, how it came about. And, you know, what were some of the really early decisions that you made?

Paul Drew (02:16.546)
Yeah. Okay. Yeah. yeah, pre pre setting up Apprentify. I’d been managing director of a few training businesses. One was DPG and we were, we did commercial HR, L and D, leadership and management training. And we got into the apprenticeship world when the levy kicked in 2017.

And we’d also been doing, you we’ve been a CIPD centre for many years, but not to the level and the audit and the, you know, the focus that Ofsted and the SFA put on, you know, apprenticeship providers. And we got into apprenticeships. We went from zero to 400 starts in a year. So massive growth, massive growth.

you know, probably looking back on it now, you know, you know, the eligibility side and all that kind of stuff was, was, was a bit. Lack and not as restrictive as it is in today’s world, which quite right. And the way, the way it’s gone, but we, you we, we, we, we’d seen a massive, massive increase in, in, in, in numbers. And, and one of the things that the, the, the business could not get the head around was the quality side.

and the the compliance, you know, we spent a hell of a lot of time provision wise delivery, coaching, training, absolutely outstanding, fantastic. We’re actually getting into apprenticeships at the very start without any experience. And we had to bring knowledge in. I wasn’t experienced in apprenticeships at time, but I could see the great potential. It’s a huge potential in getting it right. You know, just, know, DPG is a business.

It was on a trajectory going down one way and we were sort of taking it down another way with apprenticeships. And it struggled, you know, it struggled, but it still provided really good delivery. And we sold DPG back in 2019, 2018, 2019. So I left that organisation and I knew at that point, you know, there was some really good opportunities in the apprenticeship world.

Paul Drew (04:43.682)
But I didn’t think any provider did it right. know, every provider goes in, you know, and has a good quality provision. And I don’t argue that they don’t provide really good training or coaching because they do. Sorry. However, getting it all right, whole mixing, know, there’s various different

different elements within within apprenticeship will pull, you know, the sales elements, the growth side, and then the operational delivery side. It’s two different areas and they sometimes pull apart from each other. They don’t pull together and roll as a concept. So when I, you know, when I set ApprentiFY up, I knew that we needed to start from the ground up, understanding what the learners wanted, what the employers wanted.

It wasn’t a sales focus, you know, and the investors that put money into into ApprentiFi, know, you know, wanted, you know, proper growth plans and like that. And my argument and strategy of setting ApprentiFi up is we need to do this right from the start. need to get the foundations right from quality, from compliance, from delivery, from curriculum. And once we understood we got all the elements right, what made a really good provision.

you know, with quality and compliance in mind, but actually it’s learner experience, it’s experience and outputs impact. Then we knew we had a product that we could go and sell and we did and it went, you know, we went from, you know, zero to a few hundred starts in a year, not because we had a really amazing sales strategy, because we designed something that employers and apprentices would love.

Mark Simpkins (06:36.575)
Yeah, I remember very much in the early days when we first met, I don’t know if you remember it was in a, I want to say a harvester or something just at the M5. When, yeah, and obviously it was, we had a conversation about starting off on the right foot. And I think, you know, that there are a lot of providers out there that come a cropper with that from the early days, because, you know, a lot of it is about considering

Paul Drew (06:45.9)
Haha, a little low, was it?

Mark Simpkins (07:06.539)
you know, first of all, getting on the register or on APAR, whatever it is, you know, it’s, it’s, kind of like that. That’s a challenge in itself. and then it’s making sure that you have those building blocks. And I remember obviously in part of the early days, there was yourself, there was me, there was Dale Walker is kind of curriculum manager and then Sally Android. So there was, it was almost kind of four of us and we then need to know, you know, where do we need to branch out? Where do we need this important people? And you brought in, you know, obviously

compliance with Akiv and you know, that structure was there in order to really take us forward as that foundation, right?

Paul Drew (07:42.314)
Yeah, yeah, yeah. And was, you know, those first few months when it was just me, you know, sitting in my office at home, you know, I was doing lots of research and there was loads and I was speaking to employers and apprentices and, you know, a few things really came out, you know, and one with talent going into the roles needed to be improved. So we looked at that, we, you know, we disrupted the market by creating a talent assessment process.

Mark Simpkins (07:49.525)
Hahaha

Paul Drew (08:12.126)
which not many providers still do today. And I think it’s mad because the actual finding of the right caliber of, of, of apprentice for the, for the right organisation, you know, got the good communicators, or the analytical, or, you know, do the Excel in certain area and actually fitting that to the, you know, just mind boggles that providers don’t get that right. They still send out an advert, get the CVs.

send, speak to them for five to ten minutes and send them over to an employee to see whether they like them or not. That’s not a cultural fit and a behavioural fit and we did that, we did loads of things we did, loads of things we did and that started with just the talent side.

Mark Simpkins (08:50.315)
Mm.

Mark Simpkins (08:56.361)
Yeah, no, because obviously at the time, you know, we were thinking of those USPs, right? And the assessment center was definitely one of them. The other one really was that we were we were going to do everything online, right? We were going to be a solely online deliverer. And then and then of course, we had the pandemic.

Paul Drew (09:05.771)
Hmm.

Paul Drew (09:10.017)
Mm.

Paul Drew (09:19.542)
Hmm. Yeah, we did,

Mark Simpkins (09:21.289)
Which was obviously, in terms of timing and everything was, we were just starting to gain momentum, I remember, and then obviously, COVID came. I guess, tell us a little bit about your memories of that period, Paul, because I think from memory of where we were, your focus was on just holding us and keeping us together, essentially.

Paul Drew (09:31.606)
Hmm.

Paul Drew (09:49.004)
Yeah.

Mark Simpkins (09:49.043)
and trying to keep us ticking over whilst we survived that period. So take us back to there because we were still very much in our infancy and we were just starting to gain some traction and then it came along. So what are your memories of that time?

Paul Drew (10:04.962)
Yeah, I mean, obviously, it was unprecedented. I don’t think many business owners were in the same position of just starting out and all of a sudden, think on the few days after the lockdowns were announced, I we were something like 69 % of our apprentices were at threat.

Mark Simpkins (10:10.219)
You

Paul Drew (10:33.218)
you know, and we’d, we’d always prided ourselves on having a great sort of retention policy. and we did everything that we, you know, we, would put everything in place to make sure apprentices were, were, were spoken to in the first few days and first few weeks and happy and all that. And to see that numbers slowly go from like zero to 60 % was just like, my gosh, you know what, we know what, what, what’s going on. know, I feel low actually saved.

sector because if the government and the authorities hadn’t allowed apprentices to carry on if they were furloughed on the apprenticeship would still be funded. know we would have been in a different position. We still ended up with about 20 % that were at threat of being losing the jobs and we then made all our efforts laser focused on two things, getting those people that had lost their jobs another job.

Mark Simpkins (11:05.622)
Yeah.

Paul Drew (11:30.21)
Unfortunately, there were some really good employees out there that understood it. And even though they weren’t really taking people on, they actually took apprentices on and did that. And we only lost three in the end. Unfortunately for those, we couldn’t find the final roles. And the other element is, we got the coaches, we had a…

team of really good coaches that were experts in digital marketing and sales and data in content creator. And we went back out to the employers and we said, what support do you need outside of apprenticeship? If we get the apprenticeship, we’ve got these coaches and trainers that have got some time now because we aren’t doing as many face-to-face progress reviews or training sessions.

what do you need? know, we had, you know, remember Charles going out to the museum in Manchester, and he helped them design a website. And he put a booking engine on the website, and he was just a coach trainer that went out, and they were ecstatic. we would, so we were trying to help our clients and our employers to get over their homes, which were, which they were finding issues, you know, and some were in, they were in, you know, dire straits as well.

Mark Simpkins (12:32.522)
Yeah.

Paul Drew (12:52.822)
But we put all the effort in. made sure that the customer service was there, the contacts, you know, we had mental health sessions, we had events online for the apprentices. You know, we tried to make it as fun and as much normality as we could get. We’re also still keeping touch points with other coaches or the apprentices. So they didn’t feel alone because they’d gone from obviously working in their office to nothing.

Mark Simpkins (12:53.633)
Hmm.

Paul Drew (13:23.01)
you know, being at home online and it’s a different world.

Mark Simpkins (13:29.215)
Yeah, well, to some extent, think, you know, our kind of USP of being online actually saved us a little bit in terms of during that period, because we were able to still have those touch points that able to communicate, still be able to put all these new offerings and stuff in place that really kind of saved us and help and supported. And then what was strange, I do also remember about that time is that we were we were due our new provider monitoring visit.

Paul Drew (13:37.462)
Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Mark Simpkins (13:58.529)
you know, and we, we were, we were kind of considering that actually, you know, whilst we’re going through this period of time, we also need to make sure that we’re well prepared because at some point we will come out of it and that call is going to come. Right. and so from a quality perspective, it was about ticking all of those areas over and making sure that, that, that, that, that, that we were fine tuned and we’re prepared.

for when that happened and no doubt, you know, in, wanna say March 21, I think it was just as we were coming out of COVID and Allsted then started doing that, that visits again, we got the call. And so we were, so tell us a bit about your memories of our MPNV.

Paul Drew (14:34.144)
Yeah, it was, yeah.

Paul Drew (14:38.658)
We were one of the first ones, weren’t we?

Paul Drew (14:48.738)
Yeah, I mean, we were very fortunate, say very fortunate, because it’s not fortunate when you plan any strategy around it. mean, your Ostead Readiness Plan, your 48-hour spreadsheet, had probably 50 or 60 action points. So for months, up to the monitoring visit and up to the full inspection.

Mark Simpkins (14:57.803)
Hahaha

Mark Simpkins (15:03.19)
Hmm.

Paul Drew (15:16.064)
You know, we’d sit there and we’d have monthly meetings about, we prepared? Have we got every element ready? And we were prepared, we were very prepared. Apprehensive about the fact that we were delivering online and there was still, even at that point, there was still some trepidation on being fully online versus classroom and face-to-face delivery.

Mark Simpkins (15:41.963)
Yeah.

Paul Drew (15:46.624)
And it just seemed to not be an issue at that point, whether the standards and the wind had changed in terms of their views. And, yeah, it’s a very, very proud moment, frustrating that we didn’t get the top grade. And I still remember walking out of the session going, well, actually, we should have got the, you know

Mark Simpkins (16:09.386)
Yeah

Paul Drew (16:15.714)
the top grade but the evening’s Yeah, yeah, yeah. Said she’d never given it and we’d… And we just, we remained in the middle tier, don’t we? But excellent. You know, and actually we had everything to hand because it’s all about planning, planning, planning.

Mark Simpkins (16:17.211)
We didn’t get significant progress, yeah.

Paul Drew (16:42.634)
and making sure that you’ve got all the elements in place. You know, because if you’ve got the right, you know, three eyes, you know, your intent, implementation and impact across everything from sales to marketing to delivery to everything else, you shouldn’t worry about it.

Mark Simpkins (17:07.499)
Yeah, yeah, it’s having it’s having all that in place and actually from being prepared drives all of those improvement areas because you’re always on it. You’re always expecting it. You’re always trying to try to drive it. And yeah, it was I remember it well those two days. And you’re right, significant progress was was definitely where I thought we were. But I mean, you know, in the end of day, it didn’t impact us particularly. mean, ultimately, we were able to show the impact of some of the things that we were doing. And so it gave us a good platform.

Paul Drew (17:15.5)
Mm.

Paul Drew (17:31.07)
Meh.

Mark Simpkins (17:36.949)
to then go, okay, so, you know, once that was over and that was done, do you remember, you know, what were the next moves for us, Paul? I mean, was like, right, okay, we made a good foundation, you know, for the next, up until full inspection, what was the strategy, do you remember?

Paul Drew (17:58.56)
Well, the strategy shifted and, you we know, maybe we weren’t, you know, fully aware of the the the overall sort of strategies we put in place. But we, you know, we’d had we’d had the initial startup strategy, which we were fully, fully involved in. And then as we then went from the monitoring visit into, you know, growth period, you know, because we’d, you know, we’d had growth when he was pretty.

significant growth. But you know, we were still only 100 odd on program. And after that, we went, you know, we just carried on growing. Now, in apprenticeships, you can’t have aqueous growth, you can’t go for it. It’s not advisable to just go miraculous and just go through, you know, invest and…

sort of build, build it and grow it. It’s got to be steady. It’s got to be, you know, and that’s what the plan, you know, plan was to make sure that we had every, every significant point. We had enough resources and enough strategies, you know, we went from having, you know, monthly meetings in depth and detail, you know, to get we actually now we’ve got it. We’ve now got laser focus on, you know, the reds and ambers rather than all the apprentices, you know.

And, you know, we did sort of shift away from certain things. We actually, because the business grew, you know, we all went from wearing many hats to bringing experts in, you know, within the organsation, your team grew. You know, we brought more people to compliance and curriculum and started to have experts that would grow the business in their little silos.

But it was always with the hat that this had to be the best experience for both the learner and the apprentice. And that comes from quality in curriculum, working together, making sure that that builds up. then all the, every, you know, one of the things we’ve probably not mentioned is that from the very get go, we, you know, we wrote the ApprentiFi DNA and the gross objectives.

Paul Drew (20:18.358)
And we made sure that every employee we brought in through the safer and critical policy that we had was questioned around the DNA pod, you know, and if somebody didn’t have that right behavior, then they weren’t right for ApprentiFi. Probably a really good coach, really good curriculum person, but we were after the right people that had the right DNA that then believed in the journey that we were going on.

And that was really important in those early days as well, know, going from every stage is making sure that every employee knew where we were going, believed in the journey. You know, if they had questions, that’s fine, you know, but we, you know, we had the right staff.

Mark Simpkins (21:06.625)
Yeah, I think that’s becoming increasingly evident and important even today that behaviors are almost more important than competency right now. You know, I see quite a lot of my clients who are moving towards almost like this grow your own model of, you know, bringing people in from sector that have that experience and knowledge and expertise. But as long as they have the behaviors, as long as they

Paul Drew (21:17.996)
Yeah.

Paul Drew (21:25.111)
Mm.

Mark Simpkins (21:32.383)
you know, they want to learn, they want to be in teaching, they have all of these good fundamental core values that actually the rest of it can be taught.

Paul Drew (21:41.184)
Yeah, it can, yeah, it can, you know.

Mark Simpkins (21:42.593)
And I think that was really key with the people that we brought in. And I think you made a really good point there in terms of obviously when you’re when you are a startup, you’re wearing so many hats, you’re doing lots of things that are perhaps outside of your job description. And actually, you know, as you begin to grow and cement those, you know, those, those little departments that actually then then you can start to spread your wings and, you know, really focus on the areas that you need to and

That was really cool. remember, you know, we were starting to delve into different sectors a little bit, didn’t we, in terms of different standards and looking at those and the development of the curriculum of them. yeah, I guess tell us a little bit, Paul, that I know that a lot of my clients find this quite difficult in terms of curriculum and the involvement of employer engagement. And, you know, how did ApprentiFi do that, if you remember? Because that was really key.

Paul Drew (22:39.956)
Yeah, I mean, at every stage, we made sure that we were collecting data, you know, so, you know, we made sure that, you know, in a very, I’m going to say cold way of, know, surveys, you know, we do our monthly, you know, reviews of the employer and the candidate surveys, which were gold dust.

to me because we picked up on loads of little comments that could have manifested in 12 months into bigger, bigger issues. But because we were picking up at the very start, you know, we were making changes to curriculum and delivery, compliance ways on boarding, whatever, whatever the the amber flags were being made. We never wanted them getting into red. But, you know, it was making sure that

you know, from the very, very, very start, every employee knew what they were taking on, what off the job was, you know, what the impact on the line manager would be, the time, the, you know, the effort that we need to put into because I still see it today when, you know, you know, when I’ve spoken to many employers that, you know, that we’re going through a practical, you know,

They were just didn’t have a clue what was what they were taking on. You know, it was making sure that both the apprentices and the employers found the foundations of everything was about good communication, being open and honest. Don’t shy away from off the job or functional skills or EPA and whatever it would be. Tell them everything and explain to them all through the steps what what what would happen. And then there was, you know, we had our six week retention policy, which is

Mark Simpkins (24:12.715)
Hmm.

Paul Drew (24:37.622)
Still, you know, I think one of the greatest things we had, you know, the amount of people that we had were drawing was minimal. Minimal, even through COVID, because we’d put all the efforts in from week one to two to five to six to whatever it, and further on to actually, you know, get the apprentices through. And that resulted in not only engagement and retention,

Mark Simpkins (25:03.157)
Yeah, keep him engaged.

Paul Drew (25:07.51)
but excellent results at the end.

Mark Simpkins (25:13.621)
Yeah, which is where I’m going to come on to now because obviously, like I say, you know, we have that period of time in between NPMV and first full inspection where we had to maintain those pillars, maintain our E-force and our values and how we then grew sustainably. And then we moved offices. Obviously, we outgrew, I remember the one where we had our NPMV and went to, you know, went to a new office.

And then we got the phone call, we, in September 2022 it was. tell us about your memories about that week.

Paul Drew (25:55.712)
Yeah, well, for one, weirdly surprisingly good. I want to say surprisingly good. It’s always trepidation, you know, entering that, you you get the call, you think, you know, where, you know, where, where we’re going, where we’re going to be. I mean, we’d had, you know, we prepared quite a lot, you know, the off-stead readiness plan, think, stood us in such a great…

Mark Simpkins (26:04.018)
Haha

Paul Drew (26:25.89)
place because we ticked off 60 odd actions, you know, right from, you know, dealing with, you know, dealing with the inspector when they, when they turn up on the day through to, you know, data and, and apprentice and, you know, a list, list of, you know, of people that we, that we knew we needed to inform, you know, various different things. And it was just prepared very well.

So actually, when they turned up, was as a business leader, I was very confident. Obviously, you know, you’re still at the hands of what an apprentice would say, what an employer would say, what some of your staff will say. But actually, even then, I was thinking, know, you’ll always have issues with some employers or some apprentices. It happens. You know, you can’t be 100 percent, you know, amazing.

Mark Simpkins (27:12.097)
Mm-hmm.

Paul Drew (27:25.666)
You know, and I remember, you know, when you were putting together the nominee presentation, it was like, do we put this last slide in? And the last slide was what we do well, what we need to improve. And we put it in and I remember it’s sort of one of the meetings at the end, they were with like…

what you need to improve was exactly what we found through the deep dives and data and then looking through the data. It wasn’t anything that, so we were very open, very honest and you know, even the things what we needed to improve, we’ll go on to those in a second probably, were quite big things. Were quite big things. But because we knew we needed to improve them and we tracked it all the way through through all the data and reporting and had intervention strategies.

Mark Simpkins (28:07.787)
No

Mark Simpkins (28:12.789)
Yeah.

Paul Drew (28:21.602)
throughout it was was was went swimmingly even though there some you know some very tough conversations in there.

Mark Simpkins (28:29.216)
Yeah.

Mark Simpkins (28:34.037)
Yeah, yeah, there was. And you’re right. mean, that ultimately the preparation was key in terms of insuring. And you’re right. The readiness plan, making sure that we have X, Y, and Z. We knew. the great thing, guess, for me as nominee was that we had, you it wasn’t just me. Yeah, I was kind of trying to organise and coordinate everything, but I had teams of people. I had people who I knew, that person’s responsible for that and will do it. And this person is responsible for that.

Paul Drew (28:57.569)
Hmm.

Mark Simpkins (29:03.069)
And that was fundamental in the success of those few days was, you know, always those people that were willing to also, you know, the inspector would like this and I would go to somebody and say, can you get that for me? Yep, I’m on it. I’ll do it for you. I’ll do that. And so, you know, as nominee to have that team around you as that support is exactly what it is that you need. And, you know, I remember it as well, the nominee presentation as we were going through that is, yeah, should we add that in? Shall we be, and, you know,

Paul Drew (29:31.212)
Mm-hmm.

Mark Simpkins (29:32.307)
And what was refreshing, like you said, was that actually the things that we highlighted that we needed to improve, they knew that we were on it. And they say, okay, they’ve identified that there’s a plan for that. You know, we, yes, we can see, but we will, we’re confident that they’re going to address it. And I think it was just a buildup of confidence, wasn’t it? So

Paul Drew (29:40.982)
Mm.

Paul Drew (29:50.058)
Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Yeah, it says it was, you know, and we could prove and that’s one thing that I say to everybody. You’ve got to be open, honest. If you’ve got problems, highlight them, highlight them and make sure you’ve got plans in place. know, if you look at our functional skills, you know, at the time, was in bits. But we could prove for the two years as we had people on here, we didn’t have many on the first year.

Mark Simpkins (30:15.776)
Yeah.

Paul Drew (30:23.446)
But, you know, there’s two years through, we were looking at the data, we were looking and we didn’t really need to look at the data because we could see the issues. But we were looking at the data, we’d add in all the intervention plans and we tried different strategies, we tried different learning techniques, different platforms, even to the point where we, know, the functional skills tutors, we changed and we brought new ones in because it was like, right, can you then?

Mark Simpkins (30:32.639)
Yeah.

Paul Drew (30:53.3)
And and they would like because we were plan we we we dad we’d looked at you know the intense lamentation the impact and even then they couldn’t see the impact of some of the later changes because it was still going through the mix. They were happy. know, and even I was like when I was going through the functional skills of our second this could be go with one or two ways, but they came out they like, do you know what?

you’ve got your finger on the issue at every stage. And they weren’t bothered whether we were late or whether we were sort of behind the curve on it. And we hadn’t had any results on some of it. I think it was maths, wasn’t it? They were happy because we were open. He was in the nominations presentation. It was all throughout the data. We had intervention strategies and…

Mark Simpkins (31:37.311)
Yeah, it was.

Yeah.

Paul Drew (31:50.786)
and actions all the way through and we could signpost every single one, look at the data and they were fine with it. So even if you’ve got problems, know, ApprentiFi did. You know, we had, you know, it was actually 95 % amazingness and outstanding and 5%, you know, issues. That 5 % we were on top of.

Mark Simpkins (32:17.461)
Yeah, you don’t have to be perfect to be outstanding, right? I feel that. No, I think.

Paul Drew (32:20.45)
No, you don’t, don’t, you don’t and the print if I wasn’t perfect, you know, it wasn’t perfect. It was perfect in a lot of ways, but actually, you know, there was areas that needed improving and they were happy.

Mark Simpkins (32:36.063)
Yeah, and I think the core message out of what you just said there, is that strength in leadership and management. And, you know, I go out and see clients who have big decisions to make, things like that, platform’s not working for us, for example. And, but they sit on it because they think, instead are going to come in the next few months or however it may be. And we haven’t got the time to be able to.

Paul Drew (32:50.988)
Mm-hmm.

Mark Simpkins (33:04.193)
change and implement a new platform. And what we’d rather do is just sit on the one that we’ve got. We know it’s not really fit for purpose or good enough, but we don’t want to have to do that shift. And actually, from a leadership and management perspective, if you take those decisions and you go, right, no, it doesn’t matter about Ostead because Ostead isn’t the be all and end all, it’s the learners. If the right decision is to make that fundamental change, make it. Do it. Don’t sit on it.

Paul Drew (33:29.644)
Yeah, yeah, yeah, you’ve got to be agile. And that’s one of things we did when you you Dale, Scott, Keb, Salliam, you know, when we set up, we made ApprentiFy agile enough and broad shoulders enough of going, it doesn’t work, it’s not worked, change it. And, you know, and if you explain to the staff and the people affected, the issue and…

you what you’ve got, you know, to improve and you bring them along the journey in terms of how do we make this better? Everyone believes in it, you rather than going, right, we’ve got a problem, you said to me and also, no, hold on, I you think sometimes about this, you know, this doesn’t work. You know, you’ve got to bring, you’ve got to bring the staff along.

Mark Simpkins (34:22.027)
Yeah, absolutely. Right, Paul, well, I’m just looking at the clock and how long I’m sure we could talk about this for a lot longer, but I’m going to bring this to a close. Paul, so, you know, as you move on with your career and you’re obviously, you know, in terms of new roles and things, just out of your experience at Apprentify, what would be the top kind of, I guess, two or three things that you take from that experience and you move forward with, you know, and you’d recommend to other providers that they do?

Paul Drew (34:28.16)
Yeah, bravo.

Paul Drew (34:52.902)
well, start off listening to the employees and the apprentices. I’ll say, when you start up, it’s harder. but as long as whatever you’re doing impacts their business, know, impacts their future, their talent, the development of their staff, you know, that’s, that’s the crux of it.

You’ve got to make sure that this just isn’t being done to draw down funding at the lowest cost, you know, without anything else being done. It’s being done with the right intent. And then plan, plan, plan every single stage. And it’s hard in apprenticeships. It’s hard in any funded learning because you’ve got offset ESFA, you’ve got…

combined authorities, you’ve got your own business, know, you’ve got you’ve got general sort of, you know, HR and IT things all going on. But every element needs to be planned for. But out of all that, the most important thing is, is make sure that the staff and the people in the business are the right staff. And that they believe in the journey, if they believe in the journey, believe the way that you would go and you’re going.

then people will roll in and do everything that there’s not only being asked of do more than what they’re being asked of you know you know i was always amazed like you said as yeah the team of people that you could just trust you knew what they were going to do because they’ve been brought along with the right dna the right strategies they knew what they were doing their their roles they knew every the journey were all going on and that you know and once you’ve planned it all

It just happens. After that, the probably most important bit is then the reporting data, making sure you’ve got a finger on the pulse of everything that’s happened in the past. So then you can go back and look at it go, what do we need to improve for the future?

Mark Simpkins (37:00.383)
Yeah, make sure you capture everything you’re doing. You can evidence it. Great. That’s great. Thanks, Paul. So I’m going to bring that to a close there. think, you know, we’ve hit our time limit. It’s lovely to speak to you again, mate, and see you. yeah, I look back on that journey very fondly, which by the sounds of it, obviously, you do too. So thanks, thanks ever so much for your time. So that’s a wrap on today’s.

Paul Drew (37:03.158)
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Paul Drew (37:17.687)
Yeah.

Paul Drew (37:24.598)
Yeah, yeah, it was brilliant. Okay, thank you,

Mark Simpkins (37:30.197)
Today’s edition of FE Gold. I hope you gain some valuable tips and inspiration that will hopefully continuously improve your FE position. I just want to say, obviously, if you’ve enjoyed the show, tell your connections, please. Tell your friends. Tell your colleagues. It helps the show grow. And as always, if you’re looking for any personalised quality solutions,

then do get in touch with me. I’m at www.sympkinsfequalityconsulting.co.uk and of course you can find me on LinkedIn. So this has been Effie Gold with me, your host, Mark Simpkins and Paul Drew. And thanks for stopping by.