IT Apprenticeships in Education: How a School Trust Built a Stronger Team with Baltic

School trusts and educational organisations often face the twin pressures of increasing demands and tight budgets, making it vital to maximise the value of every investment. With funding spread across departments and resources often stretched, strategic decisions – particularly around recruitment – must deliver a strong return on investment.

For many multi-academy trusts, apprenticeships offer a way to address staffing gaps, develop future-ready teams, and make full use of their apprenticeship levy funding.

This is exactly what the IT team at Prospere Learning Trust did to overcome some of the challenges they were facing. Prospere – a trust of schools comprising 10 schools and a central office base in Manchester – partnered up with Baltic in 2024, with three apprentices on our IT Support Technician programme joining their team as Apprentice Engineers. The results have been impressive.

The case study below shows how apprenticeships helped the Trust deliver cost-effective recruitment, IT team development, and strong retention results.

Overcoming Recruitment Challenges

The education sector – and school trusts in particular – has faced significant challenges with recruiting and retaining IT support staff in recent years. These ongoing issues drove Paul and the team at Prospere Learning Trust to explore apprenticeships as a way to attract new talent and support their wider trust goals:

“We wanted to develop individuals within our Trust to become successful IT engineers. We recruit to retain, so our vision was to support the apprentices through their courses, giving them the relevant training and skills needed to succeed as an engineer – ensuring that we had a number of qualified experienced individuals that we could then retain, overcoming the challenges of recruitment and retention.”

With the IT department playing a crucial role in the delivery of education across all of Prospere’s schools, their new apprentices were stepping into a key part of the business, working to strict KPIs (Key Performance Indicators) and SLAs (Service Level Agreements). The IT team is critical in ensuring systems are fully functional across the Trust, so Paul and the team needed individuals who could develop quickly and support their wider function within the organisation. This is when they turned to Baltic.

Finding the Right Apprentice

Baltic are vastly experienced at creating expert IT support apprentices for schools and other public sector organisations. We find enthusiastic learners looking to progress their career, provide them with live, hands-on training, and turn them into key members of the team.

This made us a perfect fit for what Paul and the team at Prospere were looking for:

“Our apprentices have helped us overcome the challenges of recruitment, providing us with keen individuals with a willingness and desire to learn.

“We wanted to end up with skilled, qualified engineers by the end of the scheme. On-the-job training is one thing, but we wanted more, and the additional support from Baltic in training the apprentices meant we were able to upskill them rapidly and integrate them into our support matrix much quicker than we would training in house.”

At Baltic, we don’t just deliver apprenticeship training – we also have a dedicated in-house recruitment team who specialise in sourcing, screening, and placing aspiring apprentices with the right employer. This end-to-end support was something Paul found particularly valuable:

“The process was exceptionally simple, and Baltic took care of everything. Their recommended candidates matched our requirements from the start – they clearly understood our needs and delivered accordingly.”

For Prospere, this was Alex, Bethany and Mohammed.

Since enrolling on Baltic’s IT Support Technician programme in 2024, they have progressed rapidly, producing quality work and showing an understanding of the key concepts that make a good IT engineer. As they have grown with the Trust, they have grown in confidence, taking on additional responsibilities and volunteering to be part of further project work. As Paul explains, they have been able to show great potential in a very short period of time:

“Already we are considering them for future, more senior posts. They have not only become strong in their knowledge, but in their confidence and ability to make key decisions, seeking support when they need it and showing initiative and creative thinking within their roles.”

Talented Apprentices Making an Impact

Alex, Bethany and Mohammed have not just demonstrated potential – they have already made a direct impact on the IT department at Prospere and their ability to meet the Trust’s requirements:

“The apprentices have directly helped us uphold our support matrix for all our schools and meet the high expectations they have for the IT team. They have studied hard, adapted quickly to the school setting, and now serve as skilled IT engineers as part of our team, meaning we have full teams across all our schools and can elevate work that we simply had no resources to complete.”

Not only have their apprentices eased the workload of a previously stretched team, they have also played a direct role in large-scale projects, including a restructuring process that has changed the way that the IT team operates across the Trust:

“In September we restructured our school clusters to ensure a spread of skills across all our sites. The apprentices instantly supported the changes and helped us make sure they worked in the way we had projected, helping to drive everything through our dedicated helpdesk so we have records and data for all our support calls. This allows us to produce accurate data to measure the service we deliver and improve on it.

“Our apprentices joined us at a time when we are implementing some major system upgrades. They have supported with installing new infrastructure across schools on a large scale, including switches and servers, and we provided the opportunity for them to actively engage with these projects. Our apprentices always put themselves forward for additional project work even on a large scale like this.”

As Paul underlines, all of this has meant that the apprentices have already provided a significant return on investment:

“The process has saved us so much time in terms of trying to recruit and train staff. Our resources are stretched, meaning that without the support of Baltic as a training provider we would have had to invest so much more into training. So far we have a 100% retention rate from Baltic apprentices.”

What Makes a Successful Apprentice Provider?

So, what has made this partnership so successful so far? For Paul and the team at Prospere, this comes down to the structured, organised and comprehensive delivery of our training programme, in addition to the constant communication and understanding that our wider team has been able to maintain with the Trust:

“I have worked with a number of providers in my time and Baltic are by far the most structured, organised and supportive.

“They understand the needs of our multi-academy trust and the realities of delivering IT support in a school environment, and have upheld communication throughout the programme, having everything organised and prepared. We were immediately provided with all the study dates and times from day one, and everything has run smoothly and to the time frames they proposed.

“The calibre of apprentices they produce is testimony to their professional and structured programmes. They have been a delight to work with.”

Prospere’s experience demonstrates the direct impact that well-trained, talented apprentices can have on a school trust’s IT function in a short space of time. Apprenticeships helped them overcome recruitment bottlenecks, maximise levy funding, and build a sustainable talent pipeline.

Finding a partner who understood the needs of the organisation and the nature of working in a school environment, sourced the right candidates, and provided them with the training they needed to progress rapidly, has allowed them to develop talented IT engineers who have the potential to make a lasting impact on the organisation for years to come.

Key Takeaways: How School Trusts Can Use IT Apprenticeships Effectively

• Apprenticeships offer a cost-effective way to recruit and retain skilled IT staff in schools.

• The apprenticeship levy can be used to develop talent across multi-academy trusts.

• Prospere Learning Trust partnered with Baltic to source, train, and retain three high-performing IT apprentices.

• The results included reduced recruitment costs, increased team capacity, and high retention rates.