Is it time to rethink the term ‘off-the-job training’?

October 2026

Within the apprenticeship arena, few terms are as established, or as problematic, as off-the-job training. Originally intended to protect an apprentice’s entitlement to dedicated learning and development, it has increasingly become associated with counting hours, recording activities, and demonstrating compliance. In doing so, we risk losing sight of the very thing apprenticeships are designed to achieve, occupational competence developed through learning. My argument is simple: we should protect the entitlement to learning. However, we should challenge the assumption that meaningful learning must be separated from the job.

Where, precisely, does the learning happen? In the tutorial about child development? During the professional conversation with the room leader? While observing the child? Or when the apprentice applies their knowledge, evaluates the response and changes their practice? Learning happens across the whole process. Knowledge, application, observation, feedback, and reflection are interconnected. Isolating one element and counting it as learning, while treating another as merely work, risks misunderstanding the nature of vocational pedagogy.

At Kids Planet Training Academy, we see this in the development of professional competence every day. An apprentice may learn safeguarding requirements in a taught session, but competence develops through understanding how those requirements inform professional action: recognising concerns, responding appropriately, recording and reporting, and reflecting with experienced colleagues. Similarly, an apprentice may study special educational needs and disabilities (SEND) in a formal learning session. Their understanding deepens when they recognise barriers to a child’s participation, discuss possible adjustments with a mentor, adapt an activity and evaluate its impact. The workplace is not simply where knowledge is applied after learning has finished. It is an environment in which knowledge is developed, tested and refined.

This does not mean every workplace activity constitutes training. Changing a nappy, preparing an activity or supervising children is not automatically apprenticeship learning. However, when an experienced early years educator deliberately coaches an apprentice to understand dignity, communication, safeguarding, independence and individual care needs, and supports reflection on practice, an everyday activity can become a significant learning opportunity.

These questions may support compliance, but they cannot, by themselves, tell us whether an apprentice has developed the knowledge, judgement and confidence required to practice effectively. This is particularly challenging in early years, where removing apprentices from the nursery creates operational pressures in a workforce already facing recruitment and retention challenges. We must not use those pressures to undermine protected learning. Instead, we should recognise and design the workplace as a powerful learning environment, with clear objectives, skilled mentoring, professional dialogue and meaningful reflection.

I am not advocating the removal of regulation or the right to protected learning time. I am advocating more intelligent assurance: a system that safeguards learning while evaluating its quality and impact, rather than allowing the measurement of inputs to overshadow the development of competence. Policy should retain a clear, enforceable entitlement to protected apprenticeship learning, while enabling structured, supported and evidenced learning through work to be recognised appropriately. Quality assurance should examine what apprentices know, how they apply that knowledge, how their professional judgement develops and what changes in their practice can be demonstrated. This must be underpinned by clear boundaries so that ordinary productive work is not simply relabelled as training.

Perhaps it is time to reconsider the terminology itself. Protected apprenticeship learning would place the emphasis on the entitlement we rightly want to preserve. Learning through work would better describe the distinctive pedagogy of vocational education. Ultimately, the test of an apprenticeship should not be confined to whether prescribed hours have been recorded. It should include whether the apprentice has become more knowledgeable, capable, reflective and professionally competent. In early years education, this matters beyond the individual apprentice. The quality of the adult influences children’s experiences, development and outcomes.

If we want apprenticeships to be respected as a rigorous and effective form of professional education, we must stop confusing the measurement of learning with learning itself. It is time to protect the entitlement, rethink the language and measure what matters.