This morning, the Department for Education (DfE) published figures on the number of apprenticeships that were started in July 2019 - the final month of the 2018-19 academic year. And although the numbers are still provisional, they provide us with a pretty clear picture of the apprenticeships sector.

The big stories this year do seem a little familiar: there were fewer apprenticeship starts than in the years before the apprenticeship levy and wider regulatory forms came into play.

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Starts at level 2 (GCSE-equivalent) continued to fall, while those at higher education-equivalent levels (levels 4+) continued to rise. However, there are trends (ever so slightly) below the radar: how changes to the apprenticeship system have affected 16- to 18-year-olds as a whole, and what this could mean for 16- to 18-year-olds living in less well-off places.  

But first, as always, the headline figures. Figure one shows that there were 389,000 apprenticeship starts in 2018-19, up by about 13,000 from last year but still considerably below the number of starts in pre-reform years.

Apprentices aged 25 and over 

Of course, there’s more change beneath the surface. For instance, the number of apprentices aged 25 and over starting programmes at level 2 fell by 59 per cent between 2015-16 (the last full academic year before the reforms came in) and 2018-19. And yet, the number of apprentices aged 25 and over starting programmes at level 4+ grew by 157 per cent over the same time-frame - albeit from a low base.

Since so many of these striking changes seem to have occurred among apprentices at the upper-end of the age scale (ie those 25 and older), there’s been far less focus on those at the bottom-end: apprentices aged 16 to 18.

Figure two focuses on them: it shows the number of apprenticeships that were started by 16- to 18-year-olds from 2015-16 to 2018-19. The number of starts in this group has been falling since even before 2017 (when the introduction of the apprenticeship levy and regulatory reforms came in), worsening each year.  

Overall, there were 27 per cent per cent fewer starts among 16- to 18-year-olds in 2018-19 than there were in 2015-16.

Again, however, we see different patterns beneath the surface: over the same time frame the number of 16- to 18-year-old starts at level 2 fell by 38 per cent and the number at level 3 fell by 9 per cent. By contrast, the number at levels 4+ more than doubled, from 1,800 in 2015-16 to 3,900 in 2018-19.

Disadvantaged versus advantaged apprenticeship starts

Sixteen to 18-year-olds, like any age group, aren’t a homogenous bunch - so it’s unlikely that these changes have been distributed evenly. For instance, we at Resolution Foundation are worried that the growing number of higher-level apprenticeships are going, disproportionately, to those from better-off backgrounds.

Figure three sums up the number of 16- to 18-year-olds who started an apprenticeship in 2015-16 and 2017-18 (the latest available figures) according to both apprenticeship level and whether that apprentice lived in a worse-off (areas classed as having high levels of deprivation) or a better-off (low-levels of deprivation) area.

In the past, there were more young people from deprived areas starting apprenticeships (55,100) than there were from better-off areas (48,700). And although the total number of starts among 16- to 18-year-olds fell across the board between 2015-16 and 2017-18, that overall fall was particularly acute for those from less well-off areas (23 per cent) than from better-off areas (14 per cent). Perhaps even more worryingly, the changes in apprenticeship level that we outlined above have had different effects on these two groups of young people - as figure four illustrates.

While both groups experienced a reduction in starts at levels 2 and 3, these falls were larger for those from less well-off areas (31 per cent and 25 per cent, respectively) than for better-off areas (6 and 1 per cent). And while both groups saw a rise in the number of apprenticeships at level 4+ (even if from a low base), that rise was much larger for those from better-off areas (+82 per cent) than for those from less well-off areas (+58 per cent). In fact, there were twice as many young people from better-off areas than from less well-off areas starting higher-level apprenticeships in 2017-18.

‘A focus on quality, not quantity’

Of course we need to remember that these figures are from 2017-18 - we could see a shift once we get access to numbers for 2018-19, hopefully by the end of the calendar year.

All in all, however, these patterns underscore a central message: don’t just focus on the headline numbers as the real story lies beneath the surface.

At the Resolution Foundation, we think that the apprenticeships should be designed to offer a clear route to a good career for young people and new starters - that means we need to focus on not just on quantity but also on training quality.

So to that end, we’re disappointed to see a continued fall in the number of starts going to young people in 2018-19. In future we hope to see that number rise, and be spread more evenly.  

Kathleen Henehan is research and policy analyst at the Resolution Foundation