Aspiration to Achieve

From guiding people into the best apprenticeships to suit them, to helping employers find bright new employees, to seeing some of their apprentices’ graduate in a cap and gown, these are the best bits of HTP Apprenticeship College, as told to Sara Whatley 

For the last 25 years HTP Apprenticeship College in Newport has been delivering education and employment opportunities to people on the Isleof Wight and further afield on the mainland too. When she started the business back in 2000, Founder and Chief Executive Rachael Randall saw a gap in the market and decided to set up on her own. “I got the contract to do apprenticeships and the rest is history!” she said. 

Rachael was born in Kent but moved to the Island when she was young as her father was a teacher at the newly opened Medina High School. Attending the local school herself, Rachael grew up here and is proud to still be here, now with a successful business and career under her belt helping to support Island industry. “You’ve got the perfect combination of countryside and seaside,” she said. “It is a beautiful place to live and work.” 

What Rachael sees of the Island is a place of opportunity and industry, a thriving place where there is plenty for aspirational people of all ages and stages of life to do. “We are still fighting the good fight for apprenticeships,” she said. “Ultimately, if everybody offered an opportunity to a young person we wouldn’t have any problems. I’m always asking the question, what is the silver bullet for us to be able to educate people about what an apprenticeship is and how amazing they are?” 

Today, the team of over 70 at HTP are celebrating with a double whammy of awards. They have just received a King’s Award for Enterprise 2025, in recognition of their Careers for Young People Programme. Rachael went to Windsor Castle for an evening Royal Reception, then back home on the Island Lord Lieutenant Mrs Susie Sheldon will be presenting an award at a ceremony, in which all the staff could participate. 

The second feather in their cap is winning a national award for their Careers for Young People Programme. The HSJ Partnership Award for Best Educational Programme, was in partnership with the NHS, who also nominated them. Winning it means “Recognition for us as a business,” said Rachael. It means businesses, in this case the Hampshire and Isle of Wight Healthcare NHS Foundation Trust, recognising the value of the award and therefore the programme, and making further expansion easier. “We’re looking at rolling our Careers for Young People Programme out to Portsmouth and Hampshire,” continued Rachael.  

This award-winning programme was developed together between HTP Apprenticeship College, as the education provider and the NHS as the employer. “We wanted to offer a pathway to create opportunities within the NHS for things other than clinical,” explained Rachael. “It’s a whole industry in its own right. They need engineers, business admin, health care support, physiotherapists, osteopaths... all this is widening young people’s eyes to the career opportunities within the NHS.” 

The NHS is not the only sector HTP work with however, “We tendto operate in the service sector – hospitality and catering, customer service, business administration, management, learning and development, and health and social care,” said Rachael. As a big up-and- coming apprenticeship, they now offer HR as well, and they have apprentices working in large cornerstone employers such as the Ellen MacArthur Foundation, and Portsmouth City Council, right down to the small SMEs on the Isle of Wight or the mainland. 

There are many different routes into an apprenticeship, and one of the big myths that Rachael is so keen to dispel is that they are only for young people. “People can do an apprenticeship if they are already an existing employee and their employer wants to upskill them,” explained Rachael. 

As an example of their successful apprenticeships for those who have already had a career and want to retrain and upskill, HTP have a large programme with Vestas, an offshore wind company. “We develop them particularly around team leader and management training, where they have then got the skills to run their own teams. We’ve got hugely successful people who are graduating at level 5 and above, who’ve then got the opportunities to go on and complete degrees if they want to, because the level 5 apprenticeship is classed as a foundation degree,” Rachael said. 

Another big misconception about apprenticeships is that they are low paid. The apprenticeship minimum wage is the same as that for 16-18 year olds, coming in at £7.55 per hour. “But a lot of our apprenticeships are on more than £7.55 an hour anyway,” said Rachael, as they get paid the minimum wage for their age. For the employers there are other benefits to employing an apprentice as well as honing an individual into a key part of their team, such as not paying National Insurance for an apprentice under 25, and a £1000 incentive from the government. 

There are a group of young people in the UK today called ‘NEET’. These are those aged 16-24 who are Not in Education, Employment or Training. In January to March 2025, 12.5% of young people in the UK were NEET, which translates to 923,000 individuals. “We need to look at how we can help young people, particularly in Portsmouth and the Isle of Wight, to enable them to access these [job] opportunities and remove the barriers to employment and learning. That’s the biggest thing that we do as a provider, what we believe is most important, and giving them an aspiration to achieve,” said Rachael. So, what is it that apprenticeships offer that the traditional education path does not? 

The apprentice is getting an on-the-job training which they don’t have to pay for (and can cost thousands), they are learning, and getting paid at the same time. And they will have the benefit of real-life work experience therefore making themselves into a more valuable asset for future employers. It’s not an easy option however, as Rachael illustrates: “My son is doing a degree apprenticeship in architecture. He goes to work in an architects practice, he has to do the job and learn as he’s going, then he goes to university one day a week. But he has to do the same work as a full-time student, and a dissertation, whilst he is working as well.”

The culture around their college is clearly a positive one, as Rachael demonstrates with a story about a group of young apprentices who went out one Christmas and when one of their party became ill they all looked after her, accompanied her to the hospital and even brought her Christmas dinner up to her so she didn’t miss out. “We hear so much bad about young people at the moment, we are not hearing enough good. It’s about how we can improve and develop and get sustainable employment for those that are struggling,” advocated Rachael. 

I leave Rachael to get back to matchmaking the next wave of successful apprenticeships, hopefully seeing her best bit – the graduations – and enjoying the recognition received from their recent awards.