Apprenticeship has a long and international history, both as a means of learning in the workplace and as a feature of young people’s transitions into adulthood, changing over time to suit the technological needs of the age (Fuller and Unwin, 2009).  Yet, writing at the end of the nineteenth century, Sidney and Beatrice Webb described apprenticeship in England as excluding the great majority of young workers from its ranks, something they asserted as one of its “darkest features”.  In the same publication they stated that apprenticeship was “Undemocratic… unscientific… and fundamentally unsound in its financial aspects” and was therefore unlikely “to be deliberately revived by a modern democracy” (Webb and Webb, 1897:480-1; Liepmann, 1960:196-7). 

Yet by the end of the twentieth century, this ‘unlikely revival’ had indeed occurred when a series of Government policies revitalised apprenticeship and so began apprenticeship’s own ‘journey’ from the periphery of society to the core of the UK’s vocational skills policies and strategies (Lave and Wenger, 1991).  Modern Apprenticeships, introduced by the Conservative Government in 1994, evolved under New Labour’s thirteen years in Government to the extent that a National Apprenticeship Service (NAS) was created in 2009 with the aim of “delivering the high ambitions the Government has set for Apprenticeships” (NAS, 2009:2).  In 2010, apprenticeships in England featured “at the heart” of the Coalition Government’s ‘skills strategy’ (BIS, 2010, p16).  The same policy document stated that “those using the system are in the driving seat” (BIS, 2010, p16).  Following soon after their election to power, the Coalition Government announced that apprenticeships were to receive an extra £150 million of funding redirected from the ‘Train to Gain’ budget to facilitate an additional 50,000 Apprenticeship places (Skills Funding Agency, Update 8, 26 May 2010).  Driven by Government, expansion and progression have become central tenets of the contemporary apprenticeship system in England; all a far cry from the doomed prophecy of the Webbs.

In this paper, I develop the idea of the dual ‘apprenticeship triquetras’ (Laurie, 2010) in which the ‘actors’ of Government, employers and training providers and the ‘factors’ of governance, employment and education, interact with each other and coalesce around the central points of apprentices and apprenticeship respectively.  Through a focus on two sectors – retail, and creative and cultural – the research explores the relationship between policy and practice in the apprenticeship system and the barriers and benefits the two sectors experience.  Drawing on concepts of Activity Theory (Engeström, 2001), Actor Network Theory (Law and Hassard, 1999; Latour, 2005) and Working as Learning Framework (Felstead et al, 2009), this paper aims to show how the organisations involved in the apprenticeship system can be arranged both hierarchically, in that they utilise Government policies; and as interrelated entities, using their social status and position within the triquetra to feed back to Government their perspectives and experiences.  Finally, this paper explores how apprenticeship has become a site for complex negotiations of Government policy. 

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