Question to the Department for Education:

To ask the Secretary of State for Education, how many and what proportion of apprenticeship levy-paying employers have hired apprentices.

The attached table shows the figures for apprenticeship starts for Wolverhampton North East constituency for each month by academic year from 2015/16 to 2018/19 (quarter 1 reported to date).

In May 2017, there were significant structural changes to the apprenticeship funding system, including the introduction of the apprenticeship levy and apprenticeship service. The profile of apprenticeship starts changed significantly, both in the run-up to the introduction of the levy and subsequently. Care should be taken when comparing individual months with previous years as they are unlikely to provide a meaningful year-on-year trend. Numbers of reported starts are likely to change as the reforms to apprenticeship funding continue to bed in and employers engage with the new system.

The information requested is not held centrally regarding the proportion of levy-paying firms that have taken on apprentices. However, the department holds information on the number of apprenticeship service accounts (ASAs) registered. As of 31 December 2018, there were 16,100 ASAs registered on the apprenticeship service.

Since the introduction of the levy, 268,500 levy-supported starts have been recorded for England. Levy-supported learners are those supported by levy-paying organisations using at least £1 of their own levy funds. For context, there have been 555,800 total starts for England since the levy (from quarter 4 of 2016/17 to quarter 1 of 2018/19).

In addition, in January 2018, we published that 91.7 percent of those who had PAYE schemes with apprenticeship levy declarations in England of over £150,000 had registered on the apprenticeship service.