Question to the Department for Education:

To ask the Secretary of State for Education, what support is available for full-time further education students seeking apprenticeship opportunities.

Apprenticeships provide people with the opportunity to earn and learn the skills needed to start an exciting career in a wide range of industries, everything from artificial intelligence, archaeology, data science, business management, and banking. We want more young people to benefit from high-quality apprenticeships.

To encourage more young people to consider apprenticeships, we are promoting apprenticeships in schools and colleges through our Apprenticeship Support and Knowledge programme. This free service provides resources and interventions to help better educate young people about apprenticeships and has reached over 600,000 students across England in the 2020/21 academic year.

In the ‘Skills for Jobs’ White Paper, published in January 2021, we announced the introduction of a three-point-plan to enforce provider access legislation. This requires that all maintained schools and academies provide opportunities for providers of technical education and apprenticeships to visit schools to talk to all year 8-13 pupils. This plan includes creating clear minimum legal requirements, specifying who is to be given access to which pupils and when. This is an important step towards real choice for every pupil.

We are introducing a range of measures to incentivise schools and colleges to prioritise careers guidance and hold them to account for the quality of their careers programmes. In addition to a strong statutory framework, this includes tougher enforcement and an Ofsted review of provision. To build a whole-school or whole-college approach, we will build careers awareness into every stage of teacher professional development and embed careers education into the secondary curriculum.

The National Careers Service, a free, government-funded careers information, advice and guidance service draws on a range of labour market information to support and guide individuals. The National Careers Service is impartial, and careers guidance is tailored to individual needs. Young people aged 13 to 18 can access ongoing in-depth information, advice and guidance from the service via local telephone-based advisers or the National Careers Service website.

The department offers guidance and support to young people who are considering applying for apprenticeships through our apprenticeships.gov.uk website, which explains the application stages in a step-by-step process. Students can search for new apprenticeship opportunities on our Find an Apprenticeship (FAA) service; over 15,000 apprenticeship vacancies were advertised on FAA in October 2021.