Apprenticeship and traineeships: April 2020

#Apprenticeship and traineeships: April 2020 

This release includes summary statistics on apprenticeships and traineeships in England. Due to the impact of COVID-19 on further education and apprenticeship training activity, and the reporting of data, we are replacing the planned further in-year statistics releases after this release.

We will publish the end-of-year releases normally published in November, but replacing the remaining in-year dates enables us to provide release(s) with more relevant information to cover the period affected by the pandemic.

We intend to make headline statistics such as apprenticeship starts available on a regular basis, and to similar timescales to those currently, but we intend to repurpose our releases to focus on the most relevant information available.

The current releases and measures we publish may now provide very little value and/or may be misleading given how the pandemic will have impacted on both apprenticeship training and provider reporting from March.

Gillian Keegan, Minister for Apprenticeships and Skills said:

“The reforms introduced in 2017 mean apprenticeships are longer, more rigorous, and quality assessed by independent organisations. This has resulted in a slight decline in the number of starts, but we will continue to prioritise quality over quantity.

“While the impact of the coronavirus is still becoming clear, we are supporting employers, apprentices and training providers during this challenging time so people can continue to access high-quality apprenticeship opportunities. Apprenticeships are a valuable route into good quality employment and will play a vital role in securing our economic recovery, post-coronavirus.”

While collections remain open we have no way to quantify how robust any reporting by providers will be during the period affected by the pandemic. Where there are updates they may well be small corrections to pre lockdown periods.

Therefore, given the expected large drop in starts from March, comparing a participation measure in say the third quarter of 2019/20 to this point in 2018/19 would offer no meaningful insight to activity in the third quarter.

While we expect to include some headline summary we wish to repurpose our releases to focus on the most useful and relevant measures and comparisons. We are therefore consulting users on this and seek your feedback on key data needs in terms of the regularity of data needed and also the type of breakdowns users would find most useful, e.g. similar to those we currently publish such national apprenticeship starts by age, level and individual framework/standard etc, so we can consider going forward and in light of continued data quality assessments.

Statistics covering the apprenticeship service to the end of March 2020, and monthly apprenticeship starts to February 2020 

26 March 2020 (Updated 30 April 2020 to include the latest apprenticeship service data and monthly apprenticeship starts only)

Please see the ‘changes in the next release’ section on page 11 for more information.

This document is a transitionary approach while we move all our further education and apprenticeship releases to a new dissemination platform, which we plan to do during 2020.

The Apprenticeships and traineeships: March 2020 release contains provisional1 data for all age apprenticeship and traineeship learning in England for the first two quarters of the 2019/20 academic year (August 2019 to January 2020). This April update of the release now includes later monthly apprenticeship statistics, and registrations and commitments from the Apprenticeship Service based on data returned to the start of April 2020.

Apprenticeship and traineeship data tables for the original March 2020 publication can be found here.

Previously published data for the latest full, final year can be found here.

Tables relating to the April 2020 update are below:

Published 30 April 2020