Accountancy Apprenticeship in York

Earn as you Learn - Accountancy Apprenticeship

If you're finishing school or college and wondering whether university is the only way into a professional career, it isn't. An accountancy apprenticeship means you earn a salary from day one, study for a nationally recognised qualification, and pay nothing for your training. By the time most students are graduating, you could already be a qualified accountant.

We're not recruiting just yet. Applications for our September 2027 intake open in January 2027, and we're taking early interest now. Register below and we'll keep you posted, including an invitation to come and see the office before you apply.

Register your interest

What You’ll Actually Do

At Change, you’ll work across the full range of what a practice does. Because we’re a team of fourteen rather than four hundred, you won’t spend your first two years doing only one thing. From early on you’ll be involved in bookkeeping, preparing accounts, dealing with payroll, VAT returns, and working with clients directly. Practically, that means:

  • Recording and reconciling transactions in Xero or FreeAgent
  • Preparing and reviewing basic accounts for sole traders, landlords, and limited companies
  • Helping with VAT returns and payroll runs
  • Corresponding with clients and, eventually, with HMRC on their behalf
  • Learning how to use Dext for receipt capture and bookkeeping

You’ll have a qualified accountant alongside you throughout. The work is real from day one, not fulfilling coffee orders.

Change Accountants Tax and Operations: Five People Meeting 3

The Qualification

We support the AAT (Association of Accounting Technicians) qualification, which is the standard entry route into professional accountancy. You’ll study at Level 2, 3 and 4, with each level taking up to 15 months.

One day a week is set aside for study with a training provider. The rest of the week you’re working in the office. Your training and exam fees are funded in full, covered by the government and by us, so there is nothing to pay.

Once you’ve completed AAT, we will choose together what you should study next. It could be the next level of accountancy exams, as a chartered certified accountant (ACCA) or it might be a specialism, such as tax (Chartered Tax Advisor, CTA). We’re accredited by the ACCA and the AAT as an employer, which means we can support you through the full journey from first-year apprentice to qualification.

The pathway looks like this:

→ AAT Level 2 (approx. 9 months)

→ AAT Level 3 (approx. 15 months)

→ AAT Level 4 (approx. 15 months)

→ ACCA (3–4 years part-time)

That’s a route to full chartered status without a degree or student debt.

What We Need From You

GCSE Maths and English at grade 6 or above, and the equivalent of 104 UCAS points.

Whatever your results, what matters most is that you’re comfortable working with numbers, you communicate clearly, and you're genuinely interested in how businesses work. We can teach you the rest.

Tax team discussing a job

Why a Small Firm

There’s a version of an accountancy apprenticeship where you spend the first year processing one type of document, then the second year processing a slightly different type. That’s not this.

At Change, we’re fourteen people in one York office. You’ll know everyone by name within a week. You’ll sit near the people who handle personal tax, company accounts, payroll, and cloud accounting, and over time you’ll work across all of it. That breadth is worth something. Apprentices at large firms often qualify having seen only a narrow slice of what accountancy actually involves.

It also means you’re not stuck in the back office while the actual business gets discussed elsewhere. You’ll get exposure to the commercial side too: sitting in on team meetings, seeing how decisions get made, and understanding what it takes to run a practice, not just work in one.

We’ve been doing things this way since 2014. Everyone on the team, including the people who joined us from Sunley & Co, works under one roof, which means the knowledge is all in one place and available to you.

Stacey’s Story

Stacey McVeighty, who founded Change in 2014, left school and went straight into an accountancy apprenticeship. She qualified 4 years later as a chartered certified accountant in 2003 and made partner at a Yorkshire firm in 2007, becoming the youngest woman in the county to do so. She was 27.

She started Change because she wanted to run the kind of practice she’d have wanted as a client. The same thinking applies to how we train people: we’d rather invest properly in someone from the beginning than bring in someone half-formed and spend years unpicking bad habits.

If you work hard and stay with us, the path from apprentice to qualified accountant is genuinely open.

Come and See for Yourself

Before you apply, come and have a look around. Bring a parent or a friend if that helps.

On the day, you’ll get:

  • A tour of the office
  • A presentation on the role, now and where it can lead
  • The chance to meet some of the team who’d be training you
  • A few words from Tynam, Matt, and Josie on what the job’s actually like. Tynam started as an apprentice straight from school and is now part of our management team; Josie also started as an apprentice with Change and is now part of our senior accounts team
  • An open Q&A, ask whatever you want

Details of the date and format are coming soon. Register your interest and you’ll be the first to hear.

Register your interest

Julia Matt Discussing Tax 3

Applications Open January 2027

We don’t have a role open right now, but here’s exactly how the next intake will run:

Now Register your interest, come to our open office event (details coming soon)

Autumn 2026 We’ll keep in touch as things get closer

January–March 2027 Applications open

April 2027 First round interviews

May 2027 Final interviews

September 2027 Start date

Frequently Asked Questions