Apprenticeship starts fell sharply after the 2017 levy reforms and still haven't fully recovered
Is the apprenticeship system building the technical skills a growing economy needs? Starts, achievements and participation by level, age, region and named technical sector, since the 2017 levy reforms — every figure traced to DfE.
308,770
Apprenticeship starts, 2025/26 (provisional, part-year)
146,210
Achievements, 2025/26
735,500
Total participants, 2025/26
UK apprenticeship starts — all levels combined (England)
Apprenticeship starts fell sharply after the 2017 levy reforms, partially recovered, then dipped again — the 2025/26 figure is still part-year and will rise.
View data table
| Year | UK apprenticeship starts — all levels combined (England) |
|---|---|
| 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, partly displacing intermediate starts.
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.
UK apprenticeship achievements — all levels combined (England)
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 | UK apprenticeship achievements — all levels combined (England) |
|---|---|
| 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
UK apprenticeship participation — all levels combined (England)
Total participation is consistently larger than any single year's starts, reflecting multi-year apprenticeships in progress.
View data table
| Year | UK apprenticeship participation — all levels combined (England) |
|---|---|
| 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 Stat Pack 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
The mandate for this page asks for skills-shortage numbers to be clearly labelled as forecasts where that is what they are. This session checked for a genuinely live, numeric, citable source and did not find one worth wiring: 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 genuinely blocked from this infrastructure (a confirmed Azure WAF-level 403, re-tested this session). 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.