In our last newsletter, we reflected on the government's changes to Level 7 apprenticeship funding and what they might mean for our profession. Since then, the conversation has only intensified, not least at our recent meeting of the ICAEW Academia & Education Community advisory group.
At its heart, the advisory group serves straightforward purposes. It seeks to represent the accounting education community, to ensure ICAEW hears what matters to us and to connect members with the support and resources they need. With around 20,000 members, that voice carries real weight, and we encourage you to use it to help your perspective be heard.
But amid the uncertainty, the strength of our global community of accounting educators has never been more apparent. Across the world, educators are coming together to share ideas, support one another and reimagine what accounting education looks like. Whether through BAFA's Accounting Education Special Interest Group, IFAC's network of Accountancy Education Directors, Accounting Cafe or our own committee, these communities are doing vital work. They provide spaces where we can be honest about the pressures we face and creative about the solutions we develop.
And there is no shortage of pressures. Recruiting and retaining lecturers remains a challenge, a recent search on jobs.ac.uk returned around 30 accounting lecturer vacancies across the UK, with many posts looking for teaching focused faculty ready to teach in the new semester starting September 2026. Student attendance and managing behaviour in the classroom are also ongoing concerns, and universities themselves are under financial strain.
Accounting continues to be widely misunderstood, particularly at school level, where pupils often have little idea what a career in the profession actually involves. Initiatives such as Accounting Clubs in Schools and Rise are doing brilliant work to change that narrative and attract a more diverse range of students earlier. If we want to shape the profession of the future, we need to start much earlier.
Accessibility to the profession remains uneven. Securing internships, placements and graduate roles is difficult for many students, and disproportionately so for those from minority backgrounds, where the data continues to show a stubborn gap in assessment and employment outcomes. International students face additional barriers around visas and employer perceptions.
Beyond access, the employment picture itself is mixed. We heard reports that students are finding the job market harder to navigate, not because of technical deficiencies, but because of gaps in social and practical skills. However, smaller and medium-sized firms appear to be quietly expanding their recruitment, which might be fertile ground for students and for the academics who support them.
The skills, capabilities and aptitudes the profession requires are evolving rapidly. Technical knowledge remains important, but so too do critical thinking, professional judgement, communication and the ability to work with technology rather than be replaced by it.
Which brings us to artificial intelligence. We should be operating on the assumption that students are using AI on all open-book assessments. That is not necessarily a problem, but it requires us to rethink how we design our teaching and our assessments. The goal must be to ensure students use AI as a tool for learning, not as a shortcut that bypasses it. Academic misconduct in this space is a growing concern. At the advisory group, there was broad agreement that the answer is not simply to prohibit but to redesign. Structured oral presentations, vivas, poster exercises, peer mentoring and assessments that ask students to interrogate AI outputs rather than reproduce them all featured in our discussion. If you want to explore this further, do join our upcoming webinar on AI in accounting teaching on 24 March at 1pm.
We are also watching developments around Level 4 apprenticeships and the potential for credit for prior learning with interest. Changes here could open up new funding routes and reshape how students enter higher education.
The challenges are real, but so is the appetite within the accounting education community to respond thoughtfully and collectively. The advisory group exists to share insights and ensure our concerns reach people with the power to act on them. If you have issues you are facing, or solutions we can highlight, we would love you to get in touch. Please just email sophie.hickson@icaew.com.
There is a great deal to navigate, but there is also a great deal of energy and goodwill across our community. We remain optimistic, not because the challenges are small, but because the people tackling them are determined, collaborative and increasingly well-connected. Always choose connection!
Jenni and Toby
*the views expressed are the author’s and not ICAEW’s