Question to the Department for Education:
To ask the Secretary of State for Education, what his Department's target is for apprenticeship starts by 2020.
In 2015 we set an ambitious goal of three million apprenticeship starts by 2020, and that remains our ambition. Whilst we do want to see an increasing number of apprenticeship starts, we will not sacrifice quality for quantity.
New, employer-designed standards are replacing the existing frameworks which were often not fit-for-purpose. Starts on these 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 2017/2018 academic year; more than ten times higher than the 11,000 reported at this time last year (2016/17). This represents just over 40 per cent of all stats reported in the 2017/18 academic year, compared to 2.5 per cent in 2016/17.