Plus, concerns over protection of student civil rights escalateView in browser [link removed]

**Weekly Update**

**A newsletter from The Hechinger Report**

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**In this week's edition:** As apprenticeship advocates in the United States embark on their own effort to expand the programs, some are pointing to England as a leader to follow [link removed]. Under the Trump administration, there's been a potentially lasting shift in how the Justice Department handles issues that affect public school students [link removed], including millions who have disabilities. Plus, immigration enforcement is driving away early childhood educators [link removed].

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Students work in a microbiology lab at Manchester Metropolitan University, in England. Credit: Kelly Field for The Hechinger Report

**The US wants more apprenticeships. The UK figured out how to make them coveted roles**

Ishan Goshawk, an apprentice with global pharmaceutical company AstraZeneca, donned a lab coat and safety glasses and entered a room filled with robots. 

His first stop was a machine programmed to fill dozens of tiny vials with a compound he needed for an experiment. Everything seemed in order, so Goshawk went to check on a second robot, a gleaming apparatus that, he noted, cost half a million pounds (about $620,000). When the first robot finished filling the vials, Goshawk would bring them here, to test how efficiently drug compounds can be purified using different solvents.

Most students here and in the United States wouldn’t get access to expensive equipment like this until graduate school. Goshawk — a 21-year-old undergraduate student and one of 149 “degree apprentices” employed by AstraZeneca across the U.K. — started using them his second week in.

“It shows the trust we’ve been given,” said Goshawk, who is working nearly full time while studying toward a degree in chemical science at Manchester Metropolitan University that his employer is paying for. By the time he graduates next spring, he will have earned roughly 100,000 pounds (approximately $130,000) in wages, on top of the tuition-free education.

Degree apprenticeships like Goshawk’s have exploded across England since their introduction a decade ago. More than 60,000 apprentices began programs leading to the U.K. equivalent of bachelor’s and master’s degrees in the 2024-25 academic year, in fields as varied as engineering, digital technology, health care, law and business. 

Close to 90 universities in England and Wales now participate, including elite institutions like the University of Cambridge. Major British and multinational companies — Deloitte, Rolls-Royce, Unilever, JP Morgan and Microsoft among them — have signed on. 

The programs are so popular that it’s become harder to get some coveted apprenticeship slots than it is to get into elite colleges like Oxford or Cambridge.

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**Under Trump, protecting students’ civil rights looks very different**

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The 10-year-old was dragged down a school hallway by two school staffers. A camera captured him being forced into a small, empty room with a single paper-covered window. 

The staffers shut the door in his face. Alone, the boy curled into a ball on the floor. When school employees returned more than 10 minutes later, blood from his face smeared the floor.

Maryland state lawmakers were shown this video in 2017 by Leslie Seid Margolis, a lawyer with the advocacy group Disability Rights Maryland. She’d spent 15 years advocating for a ban on the practice known as seclusion, in which children, typically those with disabilities, are involuntarily isolated and confined, often after emotional outbursts. 

Even after seeing the video, no legislators were willing to go as far as a ban. Nor were they when Margolis tried again a few years later.

In 2021, however, the federal Justice Department concluded an investigation into a Maryland school district and found more than 7,000 cases of unnecessary restraint and seclusion in a two-and-a-half-year period. 

Four months later, Maryland lawmakers passed a bill prohibiting seclusion in the state’s public schools, with nearly unanimous support.

“I can’t really overstate the impact that Justice can have,” said Margolis. “They have this authority that is really helpful to those of us who are on the ground doing this work.”

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**Immigration enforcement is driving away early childhood educators**

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Aggressive federal actions may have broader effects across the labor market

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America has long relied on immigrants to fill hard-to-staff caregiving positions and enable parents to work. Across the country, around 1 in 5 child care workers is an immigrant. [link removed]

****Reading list****

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In a year that shook the foundations of education research, these 10 stories resonated in 2025 [link removed]

Special education, reading instruction, cellphones and … AI [link removed]

Nursing apprenticeships are starting to fix a broken career ladder, amid national shortage [link removed]
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Many healthcare workers are stuck in low-wage jobs, while the nation has a severe nursing shortage. A growing apprenticeship effort aims to address both problems

OPINION: Colleges too often drop the ball on student-athlete mental health, and that’s a big mistake [link removed]
Athletic departments need better mental health training for coaches and more resources to help their students cope

Tracking Trump: His actions on education [link removed]

The president is working to eliminate the Education Department and fighting ‘woke’ ideology in schools. A week-by-week look at what he’s done

OPINION: Workforce Pell can lead to good jobs for students if they get the support needed for long-term success [link removed]
The spirit of learning from successful associate degree programs must be applied to short-term training as well

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