Question to the Department for Education:

To ask the Secretary of State for Education, by what method were people making apprenticeship starts between 1 August 2020 and 31 January 2021 recruited.

Apprenticeships are jobs with high-quality training, created by employers, and will be more important than ever in helping businesses to recruit the right people and develop the skills they need to recover and grow.

Apprenticeship opportunities in England can be found on the ‘Find an apprenticeship’ (FAA) service here: https://www.gov.uk/apply-apprenticeship. Employers can use the ‘recruit an apprentice’ service to advertise on FAA; we encourage employers to use this to maximise engagement with their vacancies. Prospective apprentices can search for vacancies on FAA and create an account to manage their applications and get alerts about new apprenticeships.

We publish figures for monthly apprenticeship vacancies reported on the FAA website here: https://explore-education-statistics.service.gov.uk/find-statistics/apprenticeships-and-traineeships. Between August and December 2020, employers advertised over 36,000 apprenticeship vacancies on the FAA website. Apprenticeship vacancies for January 2021 will first be published on 25 February in our ‘Apprenticeships and traineeships: February 2021’ statistics publication: https://www.gov.uk/government/statistics/announcements/apprenticeships-and-traineeships-february-2021.

Employers can also choose to recruit apprentices through their own channels, for example their own websites, which we do not monitor.

To help employers offer new apprenticeships, they are now able to claim up to £2,000 for every new apprentice they hire. These incentive payments were announced as part of the government’s Plan for Jobs in July 2020 and the extension of the scheme (to the end of March 2021) was announced in the November Spending Review. It is encouraging that employers continue to see the value apprentices can bring to their businesses; as of 8 January 2021 employers had so far claimed incentive payments for 18,670 apprentices.