Question to the Department for Education:

To ask the Secretary of State for Education, what funding his Department has made available to help support agricultural businesses offer apprenticeships in the most recent period for which data is available.

In the current 2022/23 financial year funding available for apprenticeships in England is £2.6 billion. The government is increasing apprenticeships funding to £2.7 billion by the 2024/25 financial year.

Employers of all sizes and in all sectors can access the funding available for apprenticeships. The government continues to pay 95% of apprentice training costs for non-levy paying employers, often small and medium-sized enterprises, and meets 100% of training costs for the smallest employers (those with fewer than 50 staff) when they take on eligible young apprentices.

Employers in the agricultural sector have developed 41 high-quality apprenticeship standards to allow them to develop their workforces, including crop technician, livestock unit technician, and land-based service engineering technician. So far for the 2021/22 academic year, between August 2021 and April 2022, there have been 6,000 apprenticeship starts in agriculture, horticulture and animal care subject areas, an increase of 31% compared to the same period the previous year.