You are not doing this alone.
Your apprenticeship is a shared commitment between you, your employer and TLC. Together we plan your learning, support your development and help you use new skills at work. Around that core, our specialist partners add industry knowledge, safeguarding expertise and learning experiences that reach beyond the standard.
One apprenticeship. Three partners.
By law, your training plan carries three signatures: yours, your employer’s and ours. Each partner makes promises to the other two, and yours come balanced with entitlements, never instead of them.
Built around your workplace.
The curriculum is not fixed and handed down. We shape it with employers, around the sector and the workplace, so what you study matches the work you actually do.
Employers keep the learning grounded and relevant. We keep it ambitious, and make sure it meets the apprenticeship standard.
What it takes from all three.
Every apprenticeship that finishes well runs on the same five behaviours, and they bind all three names on your training plan. Here is what each one asks of you, your employer and us.
Six moments, all of them shared.
An apprenticeship is coordinated employment and training, planned around you. Walk the line. The full step-by-step version lives on What happens next.
Before you start
We assess your experience, your goals and your support needs. Honestly, and for free. Nothing begins until the picture is real.
We agree your plan
You, your employer and TLC agree the training and what each of us commits to. Three signatures, and yours goes on last.
You learn and practise
We teach the new learning inside your protected hours. Your employer gives you real work to apply it in the same week.
We review together
Progress, feedback, wellbeing and workplace opportunities, discussed three ways, with your voice first in the room.
We adapt
Your role changes, your pace changes, life changes. The plan moves with you rather than standing in your way.
Your next step
Assessment, achievement, and a straight conversation about where this takes you. The line does not stop at the certificate.
Specialists who make your apprenticeship richer.
These partners strengthen what you learn. They never replace the core responsibilities that you, your employer and TLC hold together. For each one, the question that matters is the same: what gets better for you because they are here?
Marco Pierre White
The first British chef to earn three Michelin stars, and the standard a generation of kitchens measured themselves against. We work with him because excellence is easier to reach when you have seen it up close: the discipline, the consistency, the professional pride that separates cooking from craft.
You train on a curriculum built with his standards inside it, and you learn what excellent actually looks like before anyone asks you to produce it.
The NSPCC
The UK’s leading children’s charity, protecting young people since 1884. Their expertise informs how we teach safeguarding, so you learn to recognise concerns, respond with confidence and understand the people behind every case, to the benchmark of the most trusted name in the field.
When you raise a concern in your workplace one day, you will do it with training shaped by the people who wrote the book on it.
One thing to be clear about: TLC holds its own safeguarding responsibility, always. If you ever have a concern, it comes to us directly and we act on it. The route is on Safeguarding and policies.
Learner Care Excel
Specialists in learning built from real experiences of care. Their story-led approach means you meet the person behind the care plan, so dignity, empathy and person-centred practice become things you feel and remember, never lines you memorise for an assessment.
The residents and clients you support get someone who understands what care feels like from their side of it. That someone is you.
A partnership you can question.
A three-way deal only works if the person in the middle can speak, challenge and be heard. Here is how you do each one.
Shape it as you go
Reviews ask for your honest read on progress, workload and wellbeing, and what gets agreed there gets written down and followed up. Your feedback also changes how we teach the next learner. You say, we do, and we tell you what changed.
Talk to us privately
You can ask for a conversation without your employer present, at any point from before enrolment onwards. Support requests and reasonable adjustments start the same way: one message, handled confidentially. Start at Every learner or email us direct.
Raise it and we act
Workplace concerns, safeguarding worries and complaints each have a clear route, including escalation past us to the Department for Education if we get it wrong. All three routes live on Safeguarding and policies.
Build an apprenticeship that's fit for purpose.
Employers and specialists help us keep learning relevant, ambitious and safe. If you'd like to help shape sector-based learning with TLC, we'd be glad to talk.