Network Rail’s advanced apprenticeship scheme
Category winner
Business impact through learning and development

‘As soon as people came down here and saw what we had to offer... it was like the road to Damascus!” beams Bill Alexander, national professional development manager at Network Rail. “The technical facilities, the environment and equipment, the trainer ratio, the quality of the trainers, the personal development opportunities, the teambuilding, the dorms, the common room, the swimming pool, gym, boxing ring, football pitch, cricket pitch, polo pitch, whatever else pitch, the personal fitness instructors... When people see it, they say: ‘This is exactly what I’d want my son or daughter to do.’”

It’s not a summer camp near the town of Damascus, nor is it a boot camp. It is, believe it or not, a three-year, partly residential apprenticeship scheme, run in partnership with consultancy Flagship Training and the Royal Navy, at the navy training facilities near Portsmouth. “It has the X-factor: it’s not just an apprenticeship scheme, it’s an apprenticeship scheme-plus,” Alexander says. And he’s not wrong – it’s the overall winner of this year’s People Management Award.

Network Rail’s advanced apprenticeship scheme shows just how far the organisation has come in a short time. When Network Rail took over the reins from the defunct Railtrack in 2002, which had in turn taken over from British Rail in 1994, it had an enormous job on its hands. First, since privatisation, a large number of maintenance and engineering functions had been contracted out to a number of suppliers. Simply understanding who did what, and where, was time-consuming enough. When the decision was made to take all these functions back in-house the overview was clearer, but the size of the company more than doubled to 32,000 staff overnight.

With the fallout from the disasters at Hatfield and Potters Bar still fresh in people’s memories, the company also inherited a beleaguered staff. It needed a culture change and decided that a huge investment in training and development was the way forward. Aiming to become a “world class” company, Network Rail rustled up a leadership development centre, a revitalised graduate programme, a foundation degree in railway engineering in partnership with Sheffield Hallam University, and five new training centres.

But something was missing. Plenty was being done to right the wrongs of the past and to change the fortunes of the present, but what of the future? Traditionally, the future in engineering organisations is fuelled by local apprenticeships. But if there was anything Network Rail didn’t want to follow, it was the traditional route. “When we decided to in-source all the contracts, we inherited about 450 apprentices, on about 73 different schemes, at 73 different colleges around the country. Some had good academic development, some had none at all,” says Alexander. “Whatever they were originally promised, we did our best to see that through. But after that we wanted to start with a clean slate.”

The company knew from the off that a large-scale programme was needed if real change was to take place – perhaps 200-300 apprentices a year. Along with Nigel Ward, now Network Rail’s apprentice development manager, Alexander set about visiting colleges. “In terms of economy of scale nothing was quite right,” Ward says. “The administrative responsibilities for apprentices are quite intense, so to have eight colleges [the minimum required to cover all the key regions] and eight different programmes simply wouldn’t work.”

Then came the Damascus moment. “We came across the Flagship option: a centralised training facility, where we could specify the exact course content, with a residential offering, meaning we could put all the apprentices in one location and manage them. And as it’s a military establishment, there’s the culture and structure, the military ethos,” explains Alexander. “And the size of the place meant we could bring in as much railway equipment as was practical for them to work on. Here we had the opportunity to have 200-plus apprentices in one place being trained, but also we’d be able to house them, and work on their teamwork skills, to create a cadre of technicians with strong relationships all over the country.”

It seemed every box was ticked. And it’s no exaggeration to say that the training site is massive – it’s the biggest engineering training facility in Europe. For years under-used by the Royal Navy School of Marine and Aeronautical Engineering at HMS Sultan, it was revitalised after Flagship Training, a joint venture between defence suppliers BAE Systems and VT Group, approached the navy offering a joint investment to bring in external, non-military cash. It was a win-win. With Network Rail on board, it became a win-win-win.

From the initial visit to Flagship’s facilities at HMS Sultan to the first 240 apprentices moving in took only 56 weeks. It cost Network Rail £30 million for a five-year contract, including additional purpose-built facilities, plus £14 million of extra funding from the Learning and Skills Council. While costly by anyone’s standards, it compares well with graduate recruitment and training once apprentices’ lower wages are accounted for.

With such a large budget and impressive turnaround time, there must have been a big team behind it? “Yeah, me and Nigel!” Alexander laughs. “We did work a lot of hours,” confirms Ward. “But we brought the company with us. It was not the Bill and Nigel show, we involved maintenance – the customer – right from the word go. This hasn’t been some sterile project, only going on down here.”

The apprenticeship structure itself is by no means patched together. It offers a Semta framework (Semta is the sector skills council for science, engineering and manufacturing technologies), BTEC level 3 in engineering, NVQ level 2 performing engineering operations, plus key skills level 2, in year one alone. By the final year, apprentices should also leave armed with an Institute of Leadership and Management level 3, NVQ level 3 in rail engineering, and the possibility of continuing to the foundation degree in railway engineering at Sheffield Hallam University.

However, “while the technical aspects of the programme were very good,” Alexander says, “it was the opportunity to include the personal development aspects that was a winner.” And the People Management Award judges certainly agreed. The curfews and drink and drugs policies may seem severe, but it’s about instilling a level of respect and discipline. As Alexander says: “If we’ve got the best engineer in the world but they can’t get out of bed at 3am to sort out a problem, then they’re no use to us.” And, Ward adds: “We don’t want unfit people in our organisation – it’s an active, outdoor job.”

The apprentices, about 10 per cent of whom are female, come from all over the UK and from all walks of life (diversity was especially important to Network Rail). They typically arrive straight from GCSEs or A-levels, with a minimum of five GCSEs at grade A-C. After completing an application form and assessment centre, they are interviewed at a regional depot, which would then undertake to employ them during their apprenticeship.

After their first-year residential programme they return to work for their local depots in their second and third years. They go back to HMS Sultan for four-week blocks every quarter during this time, to continue their training and bolster friendships – formed in no small part by the intense nature of the residential programme. This, it is hoped, will form the foundation of a truly national organisation.  “The people who go through this programme,” Ward says, “will be running the infrastructure of the business in 10, 15 years’ time.”

However, it hasn’t all been plain sailing, Ward says. “We’ve had some issues, of course. The industry isn’t used to developing these young people.” So it has been a steep learning curve for all involved. And such a scheme would not have worked without the buy-in of the wider workforce. “There was a bit of resentment at first, with people seeing these ‘blue-eyed boys’ coming through – but that seems to have evaporated as they’ve seen the quality of these people,” Alexander says. “It gives out positive signals to the workforce that the company’s got a long-term future. And it frees up time and investment in training for everybody else.”

The future of the programme will be reviewed when the initial five-year contract with Flagship comes to an end, by which time around 1,000 apprentices will have been employed by the scheme. However, Alexander is confident that it has a much greater longevity than five years, and that the programme will not only remain but continue to get better. “All the indications are that it’s going successfully,” he says. “It’ll merely be a case of tinkering.”