Futuristic Specsavers' manufacturing facility in Kidderminster shines in National Apprenticeship Week as skills minister admits popular management apprenticeships to be axed

Baroness Jacqui Smith, Minister for Skills, was given a guided tour of the high tech operation in Stourport Road - Kidderminster’s biggest employer with just under 1,000 workers - as part of National Apprenticeship Week.

However, the minister also confirmed some popular management apprenticeships may be off the table for employers going forwards unless they stump up extra cash.

Baroness Smith, who was Home Secretary from 2007 to 2009 and Redditch MP for 13 years until 2010, spoke to the Express & Star following a visit to Home to Lens Online, Vision Labs and IGS (International Glazing Services) near Stourport 

The site, one of Specsavers’ biggest manufacturing and distribution facilities, handles lens manufacturing, assembly and distribution for more than 900 Specsavers practices across the UK -  with IGS producing more than 80,000 pairs of glasses every week and Lens Online dispatching 44,000 orders every day.

Rather like an Amazon fulfilment centre, robots are leading the way inside the giant facility.

Apprentice Klaudia Filpowicz, a warehouse operative, was part of the team that inspired and developed the innovative automated packing operation. She said: “We brought the robots to consolidate the dispatch from three different sites - IGS, Lens Online and Vision Labs.

“It was really exciting to be part of this and I’m really happy to be doing an apprenticeship.”

Klaudia was among the workers Baroness Smith chatted to during her visit on Friday February 13, during National Apprenticeship Week, to see how Specsavers is providing opportunities, skills and training to apprentices locally.

Dan Preston, operations manager at Lens Online - the company’s contact lens operation, who is studying for a Level 6 supply chain management apprenticeship, told how the apprenticeship route has been helping him to develop new skills and progress in his career.

He said: “In management you can become a bit static. The apprenticeship offers opportunities to learn as it makes you look at different concepts. I’ve since been involved in putting in a £2 million investment into Lens Online, working with a sizable team and developing them.”

A total of 972 employees work across the three sites - 45 of whom are apprentices (up from just two some four years ago) - and HR business partner Jayne Cole told how it’s “very much a growing business”.

A number of Specsavers stores no longer have local labs for the glazing of glass lenses, with much of the work instead being carried out at this futuristic facility which has seen the team increase from 120 in January 2024 to 340 today.

She added that there’s no shortage of further opportunities on the horizon for young people looking for technical and non-technical apprenticeships with the company, which is among the top 100 apprenticeship employers in the UK.

Speaking to the Express & Star following her visit to the 77,000 sq ft IGS and Lens Online facilities, Baroness Jacqui Smith, who lives in Worcestershire, said: “This National Apprenticeship Week has been brilliant. I've been able to visit all sorts of different places and celebrate apprentices and the employers who give them that opportunity to get an apprenticeship. 

“What’s important about the people I've met, particularly the apprentices, is the way they've talked with enormous enthusiasm about what apprenticeships offer them but also the way in which doing an apprenticeship helps them develop their skills. 

"It’s a 'win win' because then they bring back those skills into the business and they’re able to help to develop the business as well."

She said apprenticeships are "absolutely crucial" to the government's growth strategy and she added: "We cannot build the extra homes we need rebuild the NHS, build the infrastructure, develop clean energy, get the defence spending that we’re doing translating into British jobs unless we get the skills system right. 

"Apprenticeships are a really important part of that skills system, which is why we have focused not just on celebrating them but on finding ways we can get more, particularly young, people to be able to benefit from apprenticeships because what we've seen over recent years, at the end of the last government, was a reduction in numbers of young people who were starting apprenticeships.

"When we have a situation in this country where nearly a million young people are not earning or learning - we need to be much better at getting young people into work, but into work that's going upskill them and provide them with a sustained career in the future."

However, she also revealed popular leadership and management apprenticeships may no longer be among the suite of apprenticeships available to businesses as part of the Growth and Skills Levy (formerly Apprenticeship Levy) which they pay into.

She said: "What were doing at the moment, to ensure we keep and expand opportunities, particularly for young people, we've looked at what we spend the Apprenticeship Levy on and we want to make it more flexible so we’ll be introducing new short course from April which is what employers have asked us for.

"And we will also be looking at - there are over 700 apprenticeship standards…they’ve just grown without really there being any planning in how they've developed - so we are looking at streamlining some apprenticeships - a relatively small number compared to the overall number and we are looking at some of those that relate to leadership and management.

"First of all, quite often, you don't need an apprenticeship to do that and, secondly, it's the type of investment that businesses themselves should probably be doing."

But she stressed "the sorts of things" she heard about and saw during her visit to the Specsavers operation at Kidderminster "are exactly the apprenticeships that we want to be able to continue".

Baroness Smith was also at RAF Cosford in Shropshire on Wednesday to hear more about apprenticeships offered in the armed forces, the country's number one apprenticeships employer. During that visit she announced a new deal with the Jobcentre and the MOD to connect Jobcentre Plus directly to military training and careers as part of plans to boost recruitment.

The Chartered Management Institute (CMI) launched a petition last month to highlight concerns around plans to defund leadership and management apprenticeships and to date it has been signed by more than 5,000 people.