McDonald’s aim was to provide up to 6000 apprenticeships in 2009, and then up to 10,000 per year from 2010. This will make McDonald’s the UK’s largest government-supported apprenticeship provider. At the heart of this paper are three questions: what is an apprenticeship, is what McDonald’s aims to offer equivalent to an apprenticeship, and should taxpayers be funding a notion of apprenticeship that seeks to certify training already undertaken by the employer?