Apprenticeship Mix

Changing the Apprenticeship Mix

Everyone will have heard about the Government's apprenticeships target of 3 million new starts.

FE Week are asking the question whether the Government's drive towards these numbers will have a big change in the FE sector.  It's a very fair point, there is a significant difference between the delivery and therefore funding of full time study programmes compared to mainly employer based Apprenticeships and so far, the numbers of 17 year olds on Apprenticeship programmes is low.

A little bit of digging into the recently published SFA stats https://www.gov.uk/government/statistical-data-sets/fe-data-library-apprenticeships reveals some interesting stats based on the 2014/15 year just completed.

• Almost 60% of Apprenticeship starts are at level 2, just 4% are at level 4 or above. 
• The most popular sectors are Business, Health and Care, Retail and Engineering making up 90% of all starts.
• 25% of starts are by those aged 16-18, 32% are 19-24 and the largest sector is the 25+ age group with 43% of starts.

Perhaps these statistics do show that the Government sees the growth in the 16-18 sector as being the biggest opportunity?