David Willetts

At the start of National Apprenticeship Week, new figures show that the Government is set to miss its key apprenticeship target of 130,000 apprenticeship completions by 2010. At the current rate, it would take until 2029, thus failing another generation. David Willetts, the Shadow Secretary of State for Innovation, Universities and Skills, said:

“These new figures demonstrate the huge gapbetween ministers’ promises and what they are actually delivering. This evidence shows a triple failure on apprenticeships. The Government is way off its target for increasing apprenticeships, the number of under-25s starting apprenticeships is falling, and there’s a particularly shocking fall in apprenticeships for 16-18 year olds. Once again, Gordon Brown is letting down young people and failing to deliver the skills we need to emerge from the recession.”

ENDS

NOTES TO EDITORS

1. All age completions remain static. The Government has set a target to increase the number of apprenticeship completions for all ages to 130,000 by 2010/11 (HM Government, PSA Delivery Agreement 2, October 2007). But the final figures for 2007/08 show that progress is minimal:

· 112,600 people successfully completed apprenticeships, up just 800 (or 0.7%) from 111,800 in 2006/07 (The Data Service, DS/SFR1 v 2, 22 December 2008).

· If the number of completed apprenticeships continued to increase by 800 each year, the Government would only meet its target in 2029/30, 19 years later than promised.

2. Fewer under-25s starting apprenticeships. Apprenticeship starts by younger people are falling sharply. Comparing August-October 2007/08 to August-October 2008/09, there has been a fall in all apprenticeship starts for 16 to 24 year olds of 12%, from 83,000 to 73,000

This is made up of:

· a fall in Level 2 apprenticeship starts for 16 to 24 year olds from 56,000 to 49,000

· a fall in Level 3 apprenticeship starts for 16 to 24 year olds from 27,000 to 24,000

These figures have been compiled from Table 8 of the latest Statistical First Release (SFR) on post-16 education. We have combined the data for 16-18 year olds and 19-24 year olds. All figures are given to the nearest thousand. The SFR states that “these provisional data for 2008/09 are likely to increase by around 5 per cent due to the time lag in providers sending data returns to the LSC.” Even on this basis, the three categories outlined above would still show large declines.

3. Moving backwards on 16-18s. As part of its decision to raising the school leaving age to 18, the Government has promised a huge expansion in the number of apprenticeships for young people aged 16 to 18: ‘We want to increase the number of 16-18 apprenticeships available by 2013 and to ensure that from then every qualified school leaver is entitled to an apprenticeship place’ (DIUS, Press Release, 16 July 2008). But the number of young people starting apprenticeships has fallen by 16 per cent:

(The Data Service, DS/SFR1 v 2, 22 December 2008)

The same release continues: ‘We anticipate that around one in five of all young people will be undertaking an apprenticeship in the next decade.’ But the Government are far off this aspiration as well. In 2007/08, 1 in 37 young people started an apprenticeship. In 2008/09, the figure was 1 in 44.

(The Data Service, DS/SFR1 v 2, 22 December 2008)

All data is available online at http://readingroom.lsc.gov.uk/lsc/National/nat-ds_sfr1-dec08.pdf