The Level 5 AI leadership apprenticeship is here, and we were invited to be among the first training providers to deliver it. We said no.
That’s an odd thing for a training provider to write, so this post explains the thinking. The short version: the content is good, the shape doesn’t work for the businesses we serve, and we’ve built something that does.
What the Level 5 gets right
Credit where it’s due. The outline of what a leader needs to learn is sound. It covers the right ground, and it exists because the people behind it recognised that AI adoption fails at leadership level far more often than it fails at tool level. They also listened to feedback that 90 hours of learning in one block was too much for working leaders, and split the standard into three units of 30 hours each.
Why we said no
When the DfE asked how many leaders we expected to put through it, I said none. We then had a meeting about why, and to their credit they listened, walked me through how they’d arrived at the hours and the three-unit split, and took the feedback on board.
The problem is the shape, not the content. Each unit mandates 30 hours of classroom learning time per person. Three units means 90 hours of a leader’s time in taught sessions, and the SME leaders we work with don’t have 90 spare hours. Most of them struggle to protect three.
We’re not guessing about that. We’ve delivered funded leadership training like this before, through Skills Bootcamps built on two-hour sessions and 60 hours of guided learning in total. It was well funded and it was exactly what the businesses involved told us they needed. Cost was never the issue. Time was. We lost count of the SME leaders who wanted that training and couldn’t commit to being out of the business for it. If 60 hours was too much, 90 was never going to happen.
It also isn’t how we train. We don’t do taught, classroom-style sessions where a trainer talks and a room listens. Our model is facilitated peer learning. You pick up a concept, do something active with it alongside your peers, talk about what you did, then take it back to work. You apply it in your own business, come back to the group, and reflect on what happened. The group learns from your experience and you learn from people doing the same thing in slightly different businesses. Almost everything we deliver is built on that loop, because it’s what makes training stick.
The funding attached to the Level 5 doesn’t stretch to delivering it any other way. Run the numbers and the government-funded route really only works for a large organisation, usually in the public sector, that can release dozens of leaders at once and count the training itself as the result. For a growing business with one or two leaders who need this, it’s a non-starter.
So we had a choice: deliver something we don’t believe in the shape of, or build the thing we think leaders actually need.
What we built instead
Our AI for Leaders course does the job the Level 5 sets out to do, in a shape a working leader can actually commit to: six sessions of three hours.
It isn’t built from a syllabus. It’s built from research. I led the R&D with Skills England to create the UK’s Level 4 AI and Automation apprenticeship, which meant interviewing dozens of high-growth SMEs about their ambitions, their projects, and what was blocking them. Add the Innovate UK-commissioned research with the Alan Turing Institute, drawing on hundreds more SMEs, and more than a decade of helping businesses raise the technical capability of their teams, and you get a clear picture of what leaders actually need to make AI adoption happen.
Every session is anchored to your business. Not theory, not generic case studies. You work on your own adoption challenges, with a small group of peers doing the same, and you leave each session with something moved forward in your own organisation.
Businesses don’t need certifications. They need outcomes.
The measure of leadership training isn’t a qualification on a wall, it’s whether AI adoption in your business actually progresses. That’s what we’ve built the course around, and it’s why we’ve priced it as low as we can rather than shaping it to fit a funding envelope.
AI for Leaders
Our six-session live course for owners, directors and heads of department who want to lead AI adoption, not watch it happen around them.
It’s a new government-funded apprenticeship standard for leaders responsible for AI adoption in their organisations. It’s delivered as three units of 30 hours of mandated classroom learning time, 90 hours in total.
The 90-hour classroom requirement doesn’t fit how SME leaders work or how we train. We’ve run funded leadership training before at 60 guided hours and even that was more time than most SME leaders could commit. We deliver through facilitated peer learning applied directly in your business, and the funding attached to the Level 5 doesn’t support that model.
Our AI for Leaders course: six three-hour sessions built from our research with Skills England and hundreds of UK SMEs. It’s designed around progress in your own business rather than a qualification.
Founders, directors, and senior managers in SMEs who are responsible for making AI adoption happen and want practical progress in their own organisation, without a coding background and without giving up 90 hours.
