All three new Skills England AI Leadership units (AU0009, AU0010, AU0011) delivered as one closed cohort for a single organisation. £2,250 per learner from your levy, no EPA, designed for groups of 8 to 15 senior leaders.
Skills England replaced the withdrawn AU0002 with three modular Level 5 units on 21 April 2026. Each is 30 guided learning hours, £750 from your levy, no end-point assessment.
Where AI creates value, the business case, sequencing investment, and pitching to the board.
Vendor selection, governance frameworks, ethical implementation, risk and compliance.
Change management, workforce upskilling, embedding AI into processes, sustaining adoption.
Strategy is necessary but not sufficient. Most failed AI rollouts didn't fail at the deck stage — they failed at adoption. AU0011 (Delivery & Organisational Transformation) is where the actual ROI is won or lost. We anchor every closed cohort on it for a reason.
No email, no signup, no sales call. Just answer a few honest questions and we'll tell you which units fit, or if a closed-cohort full pathway is the right move.
Seven questions diagnosing where your organisation is in its AI journey. Tells you which units fit the gap and whether a full closed cohort is the right ROI for your leadership team.
Six role-based questions for the individual senior leader. Tells you which unit lines up with your role, where your gap is, and what to take to your line manager.
We run this as a closed cohort for a single organisation — not as a rolling open programme. Here's why that matters and what it looks like in practice.
Each unit is £750 from levy. You can take one, two, or all three — but the levy economics make the full pathway hard to argue against for a leadership team that's actually going to use AI at scale.
A cohort of 12 leaders on the full pathway = £27,000 of leadership development drawn entirely from your levy account. Compare with one Russell-Group exec-MBA module at the same price, for one person.
Quick answers on the things L&D buyers always ask in the first call.
Skills England withdrew AU0002 (the original single AI Leadership unit) on 21 April 2026 and replaced it with three more focused Level 5 units — AU0009, AU0010, AU0011. The change reflected market feedback that one unit couldn't credibly cover Strategy + Governance + Delivery in 30 hours. Read more in our unit split blog post.
A closed single-employer cohort produces three things you can't get from rolling intakes: shared business context (peers from the same org), confidential discussion (same NDAs already in place), and a shared transformation project (cohort applies learning to one specific business problem). Rolling intakes work for individuals; closed cohorts work for leadership teams driving change.
We recommend 8 leaders as the floor — below that the peer-learning effect drops off and the closed-cohort economics don't work. The sweet spot is 10–14. Above 16 we'd typically split into two parallel cohorts.
No. AI Leadership apprenticeship units have no EPA. Each unit is evidenced by portfolio submission against the unit's Knowledge, Skills and Behaviours, signed off by your TESS Leadership Coach. Faster cycle, cleaner sign-off, fewer scheduling dependencies.
Each cohort is led by a TESS Leadership Coach with senior-leader operational experience, not just academic credentials. We pair the lead with module specialists for AU0010 (governance/legal) and AU0011 (transformation/change) where the depth requires it.
Yes. You can run any combination. AU0009 + AU0010 sequence is the most common 2-unit choice (Strategy → Governance). AU0009 + AU0011 also works well for orgs that already have governance solved. Use the employer fit assessment for a tailored read.
Beautifully. The L4 apprentices are practitioners building automations day-to-day; the L5 units are for the leadership above them setting strategy, governing the spend, and driving adoption. Many of our employers run both streams concurrently — leaders and practitioners learning the same vocabulary.
Their AU0002 completion remains valid. The replacement units don't invalidate prior training — but the new modular structure means it's worth picking the most relevant of the three (typically AU0010 or AU0011) as a top-up, not redoing strategy content they've already covered.
Tell us how many leaders, what your AI maturity looks like, and we'll come back within 24 hours with a sensible cohort plan and a levy-cost projection.