Question to the Department for Education:

To ask the Secretary of State for Education, with reference to the Edge Foundation's report entitled Our Plan for Apprenticeships, published on 2 March, what assessment he made of the implications for his policies of that report's finding that the number of apprenticeship starts has dropped from 521,000 in 2011-12 to 376,000 in 2017-18; and what steps he is taking to meet the Government’s target of three million apprenticeship starts by 2020.

In 2015, we set ourselves ambitious targets, but we will not sacrifice quality to get there. We are aware that the number of people starting apprenticeships has dropped, but we have moved away from the old frameworks and onto new, high quality standards, improving the quality of apprenticeships.

The number of people starting on these new standards is growing fast. Nearly 60% of people doing an apprenticeship are now starting on standards (in the first 2 quarters of the 2018/19 academic year). In this period, there were 128,100 starts on standards, compared to 71,600 at the same time last year.

Employers will lead on the design of new standards, giving apprentices the skills that businesses need. There are now over 420 apprenticeship standards approved for delivery and this number continues to grow. We have made a further £3.5 million available to support the Institute for Apprenticeships to introduce new standards and update existing ones, meaning that there will be more choice for employers and people considering their training options.

We are supporting employers to make the long-term, sustainable investment in training which will generate more apprenticeship starts. We have already extended the time levy-paying employers have to spend their funds from 18 to 24 months, and we will increase the amount of funding that levy-paying employers can transfer to other employers from 10% to 25%, from April 2019, to make the system more flexible. To ease the cost of apprenticeship training for small employers, we are halving the co-investment rate from 10% to 5% for new starts from April 2019.

Our new communication campaign, ‘Fire it Up’, is working to grow the number of high-quality apprenticeships offered and started, by changing the way people think about apprenticeships, demonstrating that they are an aspirational choice.