Question to the Department for Education:

To ask the Secretary of State for Education, what progress the Government has made on plans to create three million apprenticeships by 2020; and if he will make a statement.

There have been 1.4 million apprenticeship starts since May 2015. Whilst we do want to see an increasing number of apprenticeship starts, we will not sacrifice quality for quantity. We continue to work closely with employers to help them take advantage of the changes to grow their apprenticeship programmes, and to meet our target.

The government is moving away from old apprenticeship frameworks, which employers said were often not suitably equipping apprentices for the job, towards new and higher quality apprenticeship standards with a longer average duration, designed by employers themselves. Compared to this time last year, the expected average number of training hours per apprenticeship has increased by over 20 per cent - from 540 hours to 670.

Starts on apprenticeships standards continue to grow; latest data on apprenticeships in England show there have been 119,500 starts on standards in the first three quarters of the 2017/18 academic year; more than 10 times higher than the 11,000 reported at this time last year (2016/17). This represents just over 40 per cent of all starts reported in the 2017/18 academic year, compared to 2.5 per cent in 2016/17.

In May 2018 we published an update on the progress of apprenticeships reforms, including progress towards the apprenticeships target in England. This can be found at: https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/707896/Progress_report_on_the_Apprenticeships_Reform_Programme_May_2018.pdf.