Simon Jones: If at first you don’t succeed

In the darkest moments of the Covid-19 pandemic, I found myself sometimes yearning to write about something else. Anything else, in fact. Even the divisive topic of a proposed optometry apprenticeship, was a preferable subject matter at the time.

As the pandemic took hold, talk of the apprenticeship naturally faded and I thought we had reached a point where it might not return. After all, everyone has their hands full at the moment and we are still in the College’s amber phase guidance.

So I was as surprised as the Association of Optometrists to learn that an application had been submitted to the Institute for Apprenticeships and Technical Education (IfATE) by the trailblazer group of employers. If you cast your mind back to January 2020, it was fairly clear where people stood on the subject of optometry apprenticeships. The sector’s two most influential institutions, the AOP and the College, had both voiced serious concerns about what they felt were the shortcomings of the proposed scheme. It was beginning to look like a non-starter.