England's apprenticeship starts are up 8.7% on the same months last year, but full-year starts remain below 2018/19
Is the apprenticeship system building the technical skills a growing economy needs? Starts, achievements and participation in England by level, age, region and named technical sector, from 2017/18 — every figure traced to DfE. Apprenticeship statistics are devolved; Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland are not included.
308,770
Apprenticeship starts, England, 2025/26 (provisional, August to April)
Same months of 2024/25: 284,190 (DfE reports +8.7%). DfE, Apprenticeships 2025/26 (August to April, provisional), 16 July 2026
146,210
Achievements, 2025/26
735,500
Total participants, 2025/26
Apprenticeship starts, England — all levels combined
Full-year starts in England were highest in this series in 2018/19 (393,380) and were 353,500 in 2024/25. The 2025/26 bar covers August to April only: compared with the same months of 2024/25 (284,190), starts are up 8.7%. This chart shows when starts changed, not why: the series begins after the April 2017 levy was introduced, so it cannot isolate the levy's effect.
View data table
| Year | Apprenticeship starts, England — all levels combined |
|---|---|
| 2017 | 375760 |
| 2018 | 393380 |
| 2019 | 322530 |
| 2020 | 321440 |
| 2021 | 349190 |
| 2022 | 337140 |
| 2023 | 339580 |
| 2024 | 353500 |
| 2025 | 308770 |
England · Source: Department for Education (DfE), Apprenticeships — Headline Full year: Starts, Achievements, Participation by Level, Levy, Age, Region, Provider type · series Headline Full year data set — start_count, apprenticeship_level=Total, age/funding/provider filters=Total · as of 2025/26
Starts by level
Apprenticeship starts by level, England
Higher-level apprenticeships (Level 4+) have grown from a small base to a substantial share while intermediate starts have fallen. The data show the shift, not its cause.
View data table
| Year | Intermediate (Level 2) | Advanced (Level 3) | Higher (Level 4+) |
|---|---|---|---|
| 2017 | 161390 | 166220 | 48150 |
| 2018 | 143590 | 174730 | 75060 |
| 2019 | 99220 | 140840 | 82460 |
| 2020 | 84150 | 138490 | 98810 |
| 2021 | 91520 | 151310 | 106360 |
| 2022 | 76280 | 147930 | 112930 |
| 2023 | 70840 | 146520 | 122230 |
| 2024 | 65680 | 147090 | 140730 |
| 2025 | 53350 | 128760 | 126660 |
England · Source: Department for Education (DfE), Apprenticeships — Headline Full year: Starts, Achievements, Participation by Level, Levy, Age, Region, Provider type · as of 2025/26
Achievements and participation
Starts is the flow into the system; participation is the stock in training at any time; achievements is the flow of people who actually complete. Reading starts alone can overstate throughput if completion rates are falling.
Apprenticeship achievements, England — all levels combined
Achievements track starts with a lag, as expected for a multi-year qualification — but the gap between the two is itself informative about completion rates.
View data table
| Year | Apprenticeship achievements, England — all levels combined |
|---|---|
| 2017 | 276160 |
| 2018 | 185150 |
| 2019 | 146900 |
| 2020 | 156530 |
| 2021 | 137220 |
| 2022 | 162320 |
| 2023 | 178220 |
| 2024 | 198330 |
| 2025 | 146210 |
England · Source: Department for Education (DfE), Apprenticeships — Headline Full year: Starts, Achievements, Participation by Level, Levy, Age, Region, Provider type · series Headline Full year data set — achievement_count, apprenticeship_level=Total, age/funding/provider filters=Total · as of 2025/26
Apprenticeship participation, England — all levels combined
Total participation is consistently larger than any single year's starts, reflecting multi-year apprenticeships in progress.
View data table
| Year | Apprenticeship participation, England — all levels combined |
|---|---|
| 2017 | 814790 |
| 2018 | 742390 |
| 2019 | 718950 |
| 2020 | 712990 |
| 2021 | 740350 |
| 2022 | 752150 |
| 2023 | 736530 |
| 2024 | 761480 |
| 2025 | 735500 |
England · Source: Department for Education (DfE), Apprenticeships — Headline Full year: Starts, Achievements, Participation by Level, Levy, Age, Region, Provider type · series Headline Full year data set — participation_count, apprenticeship_level=Total, age/funding/provider filters=Total · as of 2025/26
By age and region
Starts by age, latest year
Starts by region, latest year
Engineering, construction and digital
DfE's own Sector Subject Area categories for the three technical sectors most relevant to growth constraints — no UK Facts mapping or re-grouping involved.
| Sector | Starts, latest year | Achievements, latest year |
|---|---|---|
| Engineering and manufacturing technologies | 40,150 (2025/26) | 19,350 (2025/26) |
| Construction, planning and the built environment | 23,900 (2025/26) | 9,650 (2025/26) |
| Digital technology | 26,260 (2025/26) | 10,020 (2025/26) |
No skills-shortage forecast is shown
Skills-shortage numbers should be clearly labelled as forecasts where that is what they are, and we could not find a live, numeric, citable source to show: the Migration Advisory Committee's Shortage Occupation List is categorical (an occupation is either listed or not, not a numeric shortfall per period), and DfE's own quantitative skills projections ("Working Futures") have not been refreshed since a 2017-2027 horizon report. Rather than force a stale or non-numeric source into a chart, this is recorded as an honest gap.
How this is calculated, and what "evidence class" means
- A — Observed official statistic — every chart and table on this page: DfE's Explore Education Statistics apprenticeships dataset (Accredited Official Statistics).
DfE publishes apprenticeships data through two API hosts. The Explore Education Statistics API used elsewhere on this site (statistics.api.education.gov.uk) is not reachable from this site (requests are refused by the host). The data on this page comes from DfE's separate, working public API (api.education.gov.uk), discovered via Explore Education Statistics' own content-security-policy header — a real, live, distinct route to the same underlying releases, not a workaround of the block. Local-authority-level apprenticeship data exists in the same source family but only as a single-year snapshot so far, not yet a comparable time series — left for a future update.