The £26,000 apprentice is still the cheapest engineer an MSP will hire

Louise Campton, founder of the Future Ready Foundation and founder and owner of Primary Goal, an apprenticeship training provider, has a number every MSP owner will recognize. In an interview with IT Channel Oxygen published on 23 September, she said the apprentice minimum wage has risen from £4.81 an hour in 2022 to £8 in 2026, which by her own arithmetic puts the salary and on-costs of an IT apprentice at about £26,000 a year. Smaller MSPs, the ones below the £3m pay bill at which the apprenticeship levy starts, have responded by not hiring them.

Campton told Oxygen that those firms would rather take on someone with 18 months at Sainsbury’s and teach them the technical side, and that the squeeze falls on small firms rather than on a Softcat. She tied that to the youth employment problem in one line: “in effect, we’ve outpriced our young people”. Her remedy is for the channel to sponsor young people through her foundation, whose first cohort is 20 young people in Birmingham, and to help write IT into the West Midlands Baccalaureate, where the foundation is charity partner.

Campton sells apprenticeship training for a living – Primary Goal says it has trained more than 1,000 apprentices – so she has an interest in the channel hiring more of them. That does not make her wrong. Her wage figures check out against the government’s own tables, and I agree that the sub-£3m MSP has quietly stopped taking on school-leavers.

Where I disagree is the conclusion. Read £26,000 the other way: a trained technician in year two for £26,000 is the cheapest engineer an MSP will ever hire, the state is about to pay smaller firms up to £2,000 a head to take one on, and the reason so many owners believe otherwise is that they never built the supervision that makes an apprentice useful by month three.

The arithmetic holds up

The gov.uk minimum wage tables put the apprentice rate at £4.81 from April 2022 and £8 from April 2026, a 66% rise that takes a first-year apprentice on a 37.5-hour week from £9,380 to £15,600. The apprentice rate applies only to under-19s and to older apprentices in their first year; after that they move to the rate for their age, £12.71 from 21, so a 21-year-old in year two costs £24,800 in wages before on-costs. Campton’s £26,000 is her own figure, but it sits close to a second-year apprentice on the adult rate, and year two is the right year to argue about, because that is when an apprentice starts earning their keep.

The employer rates and thresholds for 2026–27 set employer’s national insurance for apprentices under 25 at 0% on earnings up to £50,270. The levy guidance confirms a firm with a pay bill under £3m pays no levy, and gov.uk’s funding page says the government pays 100% of the cost of training and assessing an apprentice aged 16 to 24. For a small MSP, £26,000 is wages and pension, with no training invoice and no national insurance on top.

Year two is the number that matters

Try recruiting a qualified second-line engineer for £26,000 all-in and see who applies. A second-year apprentice who has spent 12 months on your service desk and in front of your customers is a trained technician at a price no agency will quote you. The Sainsbury’s hire is not cheaper either: anyone over 21 is on £12.71 from day one, which is £24,800 a year, with no funded training, no hiring payment and the same 12 months of learning your stack. The difference is how the owner books them: the apprentice’s first year as cost, the career-changer’s as headcount. That is a cash-flow and confidence problem, not an affordability one.

The state is now paying you to hire

On 28 July the Department for Work and Pensions and the Department for Education announced a youth package that fully funds apprenticeship training for all eligible under-25s from 1 August and gives smaller firms a £2,000 hiring bonus for taking on under-25 apprentices from October 2026. Gov.uk’s employer guidance adds a £1,000 workplace support payment for a 16-to-18-year-old. Hire a 17-year-old in October on the £8 rate and the first year costs £15,600 in wages, of which up to £3,000 comes back from the Treasury. Whatever stopped the small MSP hiring, from October it will not be the money.

Month three is where apprenticeships die

The real cost of an apprentice was never the wage but the senior engineer’s time. The usual pattern is to sit the apprentice next to the busiest person on the desk and hope. By month three the apprentice is still asking, the senior is behind on tickets and the owner concludes that apprentices do not work here. Levy-payers have a learning and development team; the sub-£3m firm has nobody, which is why the same policy produces apprentices at Softcat and none at the 40-seat MSP down the road.

Building that supervision costs little, but it has to be deliberate. Name one engineer as the apprentice’s owner and cut that engineer’s ticket target by a fifth for six months. Write down what the apprentice will own and by when: password resets and onboarding by week four, first-line closure on one ticket category by month three, a share of the patching run by month six. If a firm cannot name the person who owns the apprentice’s first 90 days, it should not hire one, and it should say so instead of blaming the wage floor.

Campton wants the channel to sponsor young people through her foundation. But sponsorship is charity, and the channel does not have a charity problem. The bigger and cheaper act is to hire an apprentice in October, pay the £26,000, bank the £2,000 and put a named engineer in charge of the first 90 days. The channel has not outpriced its young people. It has outsourced the job of training them and then complained about the bill.