Question to the Cabinet Office:

What steps he is taking to improve the quality of civil service apprenticeships.

The Civil Service will be launching a new Apprenticeships Strategy in the new financial year. The first phase will have delivered 30,000 apprenticeships by April. In this strategy we will focus not just on numbers but on the quality of training on offer to ensure that departments are better equipped to nurture talent in house and in plugging skills gaps

To this end, we recently published the "Curriculum and Campus for Government Skills", with the goal of setting the highest standard in vocational training for all Civil Servants, including apprentices.