The government has just launched a scheme for apprenticeships in the cultural industries to allow non-graduate routes into the sector. Pauline Tambling, managing director of the National Skills Academy for Creative and Cultural Skills (NSA) explains why this is a breakthrough moment

Widening access to the arts for young people and developing new audiences remain two key issues for the sector, and ones that I’ve been committed to addressing throughout my career.

But despite numerous initiatives, as a sector we have never managed to come up with an answer to two questions. What can we say to an enthusiastic young person, who has benefited from an arts education programme and wants to work in the sector, but doesn’t want to go to university? And how can we ensure that the people who work in our cultural organisations reflect the wide diversity of our society?

One reason for this is that there are very few non-graduate entry routes into the cultural sector.

The NSA (a wholly owned subsidiary of Creative & Cultural Industries plc) has secured funding from the Learning & Skills Council (LSC) to put this right. Through the development of an apprenticeship training service we are, for the first time, able to create a structured means of bringing non-graduates into our sector.

This will complement existing recruitment practices, not replace them. Importantly, it will mean that young people, who for one reason or another are not destined for higher education, can find jobs in the cultural sector, and access high quality training as they work, and get a qualification.

Over the next three years we aim to introduce 1,125 apprenticeship opportunities. Any approved apprenticeship pathways that are relevant to the sector will be on offer. Currently there are six recognized pathways in the creative apprenticeship, including live events and promotion, music business, technical theatre, costume and wardrobe, cultural heritage venue operations and community arts, and these will remain.

Now for the first time there will also be less arts-specific pathways in business and administration, finance, marketing and communication, customer service and IT.

One of the challenges in developing this programme is that traditional government funded apprenticeships don’t always fit the needs of the cultural sector. They tend to reflect old ways of taking on apprentices, in sectors like construction, hairdressing, plumbing and carpentry where there’s a predictable number of places every year. As a result funders, like the LSC, tend to work with further education colleges that have yearly contracts with employers and take a fixed number of young people.

This won’t work in our sector. Finding annual apprenticeship opportunities across 70,000 small businesses working in the subsidised, commercial and not-for-profit parts of the advertising, craft, cultural heritage, design, literature, music, performing and visual arts, which align directly with the relevant colleges offering day release courses, isn’t easy for colleges and funders but will be part of what we’ll do.

The National Skills Academy will work with employers in the creative and cultural sectors to identify apprenticeship opportunities on an ongoing basis. Apprenticeships can be shared, if appropriate, across two or three employers. We’ll match employers with one of our 19 NSA founder colleges around the country who will provide flexible training opportunities and organise training funding for each learner with the LSC.

Employers will be required to pay their apprentice the national minimum wage. There’s been some resistance in the sector to paying unqualified young people when there are so many graduates willing to work for free as interns, but as one employer recently said, “We spend around £8000 on advertising in the national press for an administrator, take on a highly qualified graduate and lose them to a better opportunity three months later when we actually want someone from the local community who stay with us for a few years”.

The apprenticeship training service within the NSA will sort out job descriptions, training partners, payroll and qualifications for employers to minimise their workload.

As a result of the programme, we are confident that we will see some of the talented young people becoming employees and the diversity of our local communities better reflected in our staff. We are also confident that we’ll create some really strong relationships with our network of further education colleges throughout England. With equivalent pilot projects starting to happen in Scotland, Northern Ireland and Wales, the approach is set to spread across national borders.

As many people know, our sector is among the fastest growing in the UK economy. To keep pace with this growth we need to be taking steps to ensure that a diverse range of young people can access new job opportunities as they emerge. Apprenticeships will help us do this.