TLT celebrates National Apprenticeship Week 2025

This week, TLT has celebrated National Apprenticeship Week (NAW). Taking place from 10 to 15 February, NAW is an opportunity to recognise the transformative impact of apprenticeships for individuals and for businesses. It aims to inform and inspire the next generation of apprentices and employers to ensure individuals and employers understand their value as a route to opportunity and economic success.

Apprenticeships at TLT

2024 was a milestone year for TLT’s apprenticeship programme during which it saw a record number of young professionals join the scheme, reflecting the growing popularity of this route into law.

TLT currently offers two apprenticeship pathways: the Legal Solicitor Apprenticeship (LSA) and the Graduate Solicitor Apprenticeship (GSA). The schemes offer aspiring young solicitors the opportunity to achieve an apprenticeship which allows them to work on live projects, develop relationships and build valuable skills essential to work in the legal sector. The LSA was introduced to give future talent an alternative to university. This is a six-year degree apprenticeship, which also includes a Paralegal qualification, the SQE examinations and QWE, meaning that once completed the apprentices are fully qualified solicitors. The GSA was introduced to provide a route to qualification for some of the firm’s internal talent. Both programmes are “earn-while-you-learn” schemes which sees the apprentices continue their work at TLT for four days a week and have a study day once a week with BPP.

The programme has gone from strength-to-strength since it was first introduced in 2022 with a number of milestones achieved. Some of these have included:   

• Introducing the LSA and GSA programmes to offer an alternative route into law  
• Andrew Webber became Early Careers Sponsor, and we stablished a dedicated team to support
• Appointing the firm’s first Apprenticeship Principals – Sarah Hale as Lead Principal and location-based Principals Sian Davies, Ranjeev Kumar, Liz Delaney and more recently the addition of Birmingham Partners John Williams and Mathew Harvey
• Going from 0 apprentices to 48 apprentices currently on programme
• Hosting regular apprenticeship open evening for students and parents, guardians and carers  
• Launching Springpod – the firm’s virtual work experience programme which has enrolled over 7,180 students since its introduction in 2023
• Launching a new gamified apprentice experience with All About Law which enables candidates to test their decision-making with scenarios that a real-life apprentice could encounter. They can choose from three apprentice personas and follow their story. 

National Apprenticeship Week – what happened

Throughout National Apprenticeship Week TLT has taken part in a variety of activities aimed at raising awareness of the firm’s apprenticeships scheme.

These have included hosting some external outreach events including our TLT virtual opening evening, participating in a Springpod Grand Tour kick off where we got to speak to teachers and advisors about our approach to apprenticeships, a Springpod live webinar where students got to meet some of our apprentices and some of our apprentices also took part in Young Professional’s ‘Get into Law’ event.

Mid-week the Early Careers team organised an apprentice get-together to celebrate their achievements to date, sadly some of our Graduate Solicitor Apprentices couldn’t join us as they are currently sitting SQE2 but we look forward to celebrating our first cohort of graduate apprentices qualifying in May 2025.

Visit our early careers page if you would like to learn more about apprenticeships at TLT.