Degree Apprenticeship in Optometry: Our response

Following feedback from members we have finalised our response to the consultation on an optometrist apprenticeship standard, and our open letter to the Trailblazer Group.

We have challenged many aspects of the proposal, and are calling for a pause to any further development until these challenges can be fully reviewed and addressed.  

Downloads

Degree Apprenticeships: Open letter from the College
Degree Apprenticeships: College consultation response

Introduction

1. With the current development of an optometrist degree apprenticeship in England, the College is concerned to ensure that the initiative upholds the quality of optometry education and professional practice, and therefore ensures patient safety.

2. Optometry workforce development and capacity-building is key to responding to increasing demands on eye health services across the UK. Apprenticeships can help to meet these workforce development needs and strengthen career development opportunities, providing they offer high-quality learning experiences and outcomes and uphold patient safety.

3. While a UK-wide agenda, apprenticeship policy, processes and requirements are different in each of the four countries. This statement focuses on developments in England, given these are the most live in relation to optometry (as in most of healthcare care and within higher-level apprenticeships as a whole). The explanatory notes appended to this statement provide brief background information.

4. The College will keep its position and the need to update this statement under review, including from a four-country perspective.

Optometrist degree apprenticeship

5. An optometrist degree apprenticeship in England could enable employers to invest in developing the profession, providing that its development and implementation uphold the quality of optometry education and professional practice and therefore ensure patient safety. Through direct involvement, including via the optometrist degree apprenticeship trailblazer group, the College can seek to address these imperatives.

6. An optometrist degree apprenticeship must do the following:

  • Uphold high standards of learning and development for entry to the optometry profession, including in ways that protect patient safety and public interest
  • Provide the depth, breadth, level and quality of professional learning required to become an optometrist
  • Prepare apprentices/future optometrists for safe, effective optometry practice across the sectors and settings in which the profession practises
  • Contribute to optometry’s responsiveness to changing population, patient, service delivery, workforce and professional development needs
  • Align with strategic developments in optometry workforce development, including by helping to realise the profession’s potential for meeting increasing population and patient demand for safe, timely, accessible high-quality eye health services
  • Align with plans for regulatory changes relating to optometry education, including new threshold requirements for full registration as an optometrist with the General Optical Council
  • Contribute to widening participation, social mobility and entry to the profession from all parts of society.

The College's role

7. The College’s engagement in the apprenticeship’s development is essential. It fits with our role as a professional body in doing the following:

  • Upholding educational and professional standards
  • Encouraging and informing development and innovation in optometry education and workforce development
  • Taking the optometry profession forward and optimising its position in rapidly changing contexts
  • Ensuring the profession’s responsiveness to changing population, patient, service delivery and employer needs.

8. The College therefore needs to assert our expectations of professional learning and development and to seek to ensure that the degree apprenticeship provides a high-quality learning opportunity for future optometrists. Conversely, we actively need to guard against apprenticeship developments compromising patient safety, risking the reputation and credibility of optometry education and the profession, or destabilising established optometry education provision and future workforce supply.

9. Through direct engagement, the College is seeking to ensure that the optometrist degree apprenticeship does the following:

  • Reflects the most appropriate model for its design and delivery at the most appropriate academic level or levels (with the logic being that the apprenticeship could be delivered at either level 6 or 7, in line with other degree apprenticeships that provide entry routes into regulated healthcare professions)
  • Achieves parity with other entry routes into the profession
  • Achieves sufficient tariff funding to sustain its delivery
  • Upholds safe and effective patient care, provides high-quality learning experience and outcomes, and complies with all legal requirements relating to the delivery of eye care services
  • Optimises the benefits of the degree apprenticeship model for skills development and widening participation into the optometry profession.

Apprenticeships to support broader workforce development

10. We see apprenticeships at all levels as having a potential role to play in increasing opportunities for job role/career development in line with changing patient needs, models of care, and workforce needs. Apprenticeships could increase learning and development opportunities and progression routes across the UK. This includes for the wider optical workforce and for the post-registration development of optometrists.

11. We see a particular value of the advanced clinical practitioner (ACP) apprenticeship in England (underpinned by a Master’s degree) enabling employer investment in optometrists’ professional development to meet service needs. There are opportunities for developing routes through the apprenticeship that meet eye health needs. This can valuably be done by integrating the College’s higher qualifications into the apprenticeship’s delivery, while continuing to enable optometrists to access the higher qualifications as free-standing modules.

12. We also see the potential value of a non-medical consultant apprenticeship (currently at an early stage of development) for enabling employers to invest in the profession’s development at the highest levels of clinical practice.

Published: November 2019

a) Degree-level apprenticeships are a significant part of the reformed apprenticeship agenda, progressed in line with the Enterprise Act (2016). Since April 2017, all employers across the UK with a pay bill of more than £3m per year pay 0.5% of this bill into the apprenticeship levy. All employers, regardless of whether they are levy payers, can draw down on the levy to invest in their workforce development through engaging in apprenticeship delivery.

b) While a UK-wide agenda, apprenticeship policy and processes are implemented differently in each of the four countries. This information has an England focus. This is because apprenticeship developments at higher levels and in healthcare are currently live in England.

c) Apprenticeship standards define the knowledge, skills and behaviours (KSBs) required for distinct occupational roles. They provide the national framework for the delivery of apprenticeships for particular occupations or professions. For regulated professions, the apprenticeship standard must reflect regulatory and professional requirements, as well as fulfilling the requirements of academic awards at the defined academic level.

d) Apprentices’ fulfilment of the KSBs defined by an apprenticeship standard are tested through a nationally-set, independently-implemented end-point assessment (EPA). Apprenticeship proposals, standards and EPAs have to be approved by the Institute for Apprenticeships and Technical Education (IfATE).

e) Degree apprenticeships, with university involvement, enable employer investment in high-skills workforce development. This includes both entry to the professions and development within the professions. A list of healthcare-related apprenticeships in England and their status is provided via the following: Status of Standards being facilitated by Skills for Health .

f) A proposal for an optometrist degree apprenticeship has received sign-off from the IfATE. This enables the standard and end-point assessment (EPA) for the degree apprenticeship to be developed. The standard is now out to consultation. The EPA is under development. The tariff attached to the apprenticeship (the amount of levy funding made available for its delivery) will also need to be determined, informed by detailed costings for delivery supplied by at least three universities.

g) The College submitted a response to the IfATE consultation on the proposal for the optometrist degree apprenticeship. We will also respond to the consultation on the draft standard and have been invited to be involved in the trailblazer group for the further development of the apprenticeship.

h) The College believes that it is essential to be actively involved in the apprenticeship’s development to seek to assure patient safety, the quality of optometry education and the relevance of optometry workforce development across all sectors and settings.