Most apprenticeship programmes start with a standard and work out how to make it fit. We do it the other way round. We start with your organisation — what you are trying to achieve, where the capability gaps actually are, and what good would look like in practice. We design a programme around that. Then we work out which qualification framework fits best and use it as the funding mechanism.
The way apprenticeship standards are written — broad and generic, or overly prescriptive — means that most providers face a choice: deliver the standard as cheaply as possible, or layer a thin veneer of customisation on top of content that was never designed for your organisation.
The result is a programme that meets the qualification criteria but does not necessarily address what your organisation most needs. People complete it. Whether anything changes is less certain.
We have been running LaDIA, our L&D Improvement Analyst programme, for three years on a different basis. We spent months talking to L&D professionals about what they actually needed, designed the programme around that, and then chose the Business Analyst Level 4 standard because it fitted what we had built — not the other way round.
Fifty-three participants later, across organisations including Barnardo's, NEXT, Ralph Lauren, and the National Audit Office, the model works. The logical next step is applying that same approach to a programme built entirely for your organisation.
An academy does not have to mean a leadership programme. The starting point is always the same — what does your organisation need people to be able to do differently — and the capability areas that follow depend on the answer.
For organisations that need their managers to lead rather than just manage: making better decisions, handling performance conversations, delegating effectively, leading change, and building team capability. This is the most urgent area for many organisations right now, with sixteen management and leadership apprenticeship standards being defunded from September 2026. The programme replaces what is being lost with something that was designed for your organisation, not retrofitted to a qualification.
For organisations that have deployed AI tools but not yet built the capability to use them well. The access-training gap — our research found 65 per cent of employees have access to AI tools and only 28 per cent have been trained — is not closed by generic awareness sessions. It requires role-specific capability development, built around how people in your organisation actually work.
For L&D teams that want to move from activity-based practice to evidence-based practice. Understanding evaluation, business analysis, data, and research methods in the context of real L&D work. This is the foundation of LaDIA, which remains available as an open cohort programme for L&D professionals.
For organisations going through significant change — structural, technological, commercial — where the capability gap is in understanding how work actually happens, diagnosing what needs to change, and leading improvement that sticks. Change management maps naturally to the Business Analyst framework and tends to be underserved by traditional leadership programmes.
These areas are not mutually exclusive. Many of the organisations we work with need a programme that develops leadership capability and AI fluency simultaneously, because that is how modern leadership work actually happens.
We start by understanding your organisation — strategy, culture, the specific challenges you are trying to solve, and where the capability gaps actually sit. This is a conversation, not a questionnaire.
Before we design anything, we want to understand where your people actually are. Not where job descriptions say they should be, but what they can currently do and where the gap between current and required capability sits. We build bespoke diagnostic tools where useful.
We design the programme around what we have found. The content, the examples, the application tasks, and the evidence work are all shaped around your organisation. This takes longer than pulling an existing programme off the shelf. The outcome is different.
Once the programme is designed, we identify the qualification framework that fits best and use it as the structure for delivery and assessment. Participants do not need to engage with the qualification language — we handle the mapping. They engage with the work.
We agree upfront on the outcomes the programme should move — not attendance records or completion rates, but the capabilities and performance indicators that actually matter to the organisation. Measurement is not an afterthought. It is how we know whether the programme is working.
The levy is not just a funding mechanism for a qualification. Once a programme is designed and running, there is often scope to use the same investment to do considerably more for the organisation.
The Business Analyst Level 4 carries an £18,000 funding band per participant. A cohort of twenty draws down a substantial sum from existing levy. After the end-point assessment and compliance costs — roughly 30 per cent — there is a meaningful budget to deliver the programme itself. That budget can also fund workshops for people who are not on the formal programme, a learning needs analysis across a wider population, KPI definition and measurement planning, and the diagnostic work that informs the whole design.
The new 12-month levy expiry rule means unspent levy is no longer available indefinitely. Putting it toward a programme that advances your organisation's strategy is a better outcome than losing it.
If your organisation does not have sufficient levy, gifting from other employers is available. Several organisations in our network have indicated they would gift levy to the right partner. This is worth discussing.
From September 2026, sixteen management and leadership apprenticeship standards lose government funding. For organisations that have relied on ILM, CMI, or coaching apprenticeships for leadership development, the window to design and launch a credible alternative is now. A bespoke programme using the Level 4 framework is unaffected by the September changes and can be running before the deadline.
Some organisations have already done the work of defining what capability looks like for their people — leadership enablers, core skills frameworks, values-based competencies. What they do not have is a programme that actually develops those capabilities in the language of the organisation, rather than mapping a generic curriculum to them after the fact. This model is designed to close that gap.
Charities tend to have substantial levy budgets, distinctive cultures, and leadership challenges that are genuinely different from the commercial sector: constrained resources, mission-driven workforces, and the constant need to demonstrate impact. Generic leadership programmes rarely reflect that context. A programme designed around it does.
Float preparation, acquisition, restructuring, or large-scale digital transformation all create specific leadership and capability demands. A programme designed around that context — what leaders need to be able to do to lead the organisation through this particular period — is more valuable than a general development programme timed to coincide with it.
Andrew Langdale and I design and deliver every programme ourselves.
Andrew has extensive commercial experience across finance, operations, and executive leadership. I am a business psychologist with over 40 years of experience across L&D, measurement, and organisational performance. We were at university together 40 years ago and have been working together for several years.
We work with a small number of organisations at a time, in real depth. That is a deliberate choice. The bespoke design work, the diagnostic conversations, the ongoing programme delivery — none of that is possible at scale. We are not running a volume operation. We are building something specific for each organisation we work with.
Most providers start with a qualification standard and design delivery around it. We start with your organisation, design the programme around what you actually need, and then fit it to a standard. The standard is the funding mechanism. The programme is designed for you.
We primarily use the Business Analyst Level 4 apprenticeship standard, which has a broad enough scope to support leadership development, AI and data capability, change management, and L&D improvement. It was the standard we chose for LaDIA after designing that programme from scratch, and it has proven flexible enough to accommodate a wide range of organisational needs. Other frameworks may be appropriate depending on what the programme needs to cover.
No. Leadership is the most common starting point, particularly given the defunding of management apprenticeships from September 2026, but the model applies to any capability area where a programme can be designed around real organisational need. AI and data capability, L&D improvement, and change management are all areas where this approach works well.
Yes. Several organisations we work with have existing provision that covers the basics. A bespoke academy can be designed to go deeper, to focus on the specific gaps the existing programme does not address, or to reach a different population. The design conversation determines what would actually add value.
Once the design conversation has happened and scope is agreed, a programme can typically be designed and ready to launch within six to eight weeks. The discovery and diagnostic phase takes as long as it needs to in order to be useful — rushing it produces a weaker programme.
The AI-Enabled Leader is a structured leadership programme with a defined curriculum, delivered to cohorts from multiple organisations or a single organisation's cohort. Your Academy is a programme designed entirely from scratch for your organisation — different content, different framing, different outcomes. The AI-Enabled Leader is a good fit when the need is clear and the timeline is short. Your Academy is the right choice when you want something that genuinely belongs to your organisation.
Yes. Charities with levy funding can use it in exactly the same way as commercial organisations. For smaller charities without sufficient levy, gifting arrangements with other employers in our network are available. We are particularly interested in working with charities because the organisational context — mission-driven workforce, constrained resources, need to demonstrate impact — is one where a bespoke programme produces substantially better outcomes than a generic one.
Sixteen management and leadership apprenticeship standards are losing government funding from September 2026, including the Level 5 Operations Manager, Level 6 Chartered Manager, Level 7 Senior Leader, and Coaching Professional. The Business Analyst Level 4 standard used for this programme is unaffected. A cohort that begins before September will run to completion under the current rules.
Yes. The programme is fully levy funded in England through the Business Analyst Level 4 standard. The new 12-month expiry rule means unspent levy no longer accumulates indefinitely — a programme that advances your organisation's strategy is a better use of those funds than losing them.
If your organisation does not have sufficient levy to fund a full cohort, levy gifting from other employers is available. Several organisations in our network have expressed willingness to gift levy to organisations they consider a good fit. This is worth discussing in the discovery conversation.
Before any programme is designed, we run a structured diagnostic conversation with a sample of the people who would be in the cohort. This produces a baseline picture of where each person actually is — not where the job description says they should be — and informs the programme design. For AI and data capability, we use a structured individual diagnostic tool. For leadership capability, the diagnostic is conversation-based and structured around the specific challenges your organisation faces. A diagnostic baseline is also what makes it possible to measure whether the programme has worked.
Most providers operate on a volume model — standardised delivery, efficient processes, predictable margins. Some offer customisation, usually meaning the application tasks are contextualised to your organisation while the curriculum remains the same. We design the curriculum from scratch for each organisation we work with. That takes more time and limits the number of organisations we can work with at any one time. It produces a different outcome.