Niamh Black left school at 16 and spent four years working in a cafe before applying to become an apprentice dental nurse at Dental22 in Retford, Nottinghamshire.
She is now a year into a course, and will be qualified within another year. She explains that she took the leap from working in hospitality to training as an apprentice because it offered far better career prospects.
“I didn’t know what I wanted to do when I left school, so I just started working at a local cafe,” she recalls.
“It was a good job, don’t get me wrong, but I couldn’t really see it going anywhere. I wanted to get a proper qualification that would lead to a decent career.”
For dentist Margaret Naylor, Black’s experience sums up how apprenticeships empower people of any age to train for a new career. She believes they open up a wider supply of cost-effective talent to employers. It is a point that the National Apprenticeship Service, which supports England’s apprenticeship delivery, is keen to make clear to employers: apprenticeships are not limited to school leavers.
In fact, there is a special provision to keep the cost of recruitment low, so an SME, such as Dental22, which is looking to balance its wage bill, is not required to match the salary an older person may have been earning in another position. Instead, a first-year apprentice is paid the minimum wage of £3.70 per hour, regardless of age, minimising the burden on the employer.
For Naylor, though, the main benefit apprentices offer is flexibility in training people to her high standards, rather than hoping that qualified staff have already been trained well at another practice.
“Apprenticeships are all about flexibility. They allow people to change jobs and qualify in another area, just as much as they help school leavers get professional qualifications while they earn,” she says.
“For us, as a business, the beauty of apprenticeships is that we can mould employees to meet our high standards. Sometimes we find that if we hire dental nurses who have qualified elsewhere, they’re not quite up to our standards.
“It means we can end up having to retrain people, so for us, it just makes a lot more sense to train our own apprentices.”
Andi Martin is an example of a newly qualified dental nurse who has been trained to a high level within Dental22 over the past four years. She finished a level 3 NVQ in dental nursing in January, having joined straight after finishing her A-levels.
It was the cost of university, and the size of the loan she would need to pay, that convinced Martin to become an apprentice.
“I looked in to the cost of university and it would have been in the £30,000 zone,” she says.
“That’s a scary amount of money when you don’t know for sure whether there will be a job at the end of it. So I went for the option of earning while I was learning – where the training is paid for you and you’re not left with a pile of debt.”
Taking the apprenticeship route meant she would be professionally qualified by the time she would have been graduating. She’d also be without debt and already employed.
In Naylor’s experience, training up an apprentice, such as Martin, not only benefits her business but also the wider dentistry and healthcare industry, because many apprentices carry on their studies, meaning the sector has a constant flow of higher-qualified staff.
“A lot of apprentices qualify as dental nurses and then go on to study to become dental therapists,” she says.
“A therapist can do a lot more work than a nurse: they can do restorations, fillings, take impressions and remove children’s teeth. Sometimes, dental nurses go on to become therapists or take other roles within the NHS.
“By becoming apprentices and getting qualified, young people get access to these new career paths, and the industry gets a steady flow of highly qualified staff.”
