Soon to be ex-Prime Minister Keir Starmer pinned his colours to the idea of a “gold standard apprenticeship” for young people, back in last September’s conference speech – but never really explained what this meant.
More pertinently for future policy under Andy Burnham, the initial Milburn report on young people and work was pretty clear on the main dysfunction in the apprenticeship system:
The apprenticeship system ought to be one of the main routes through which employers bring young people into work. Too often it is not operating that way. The Apprenticeship Levy, introduced in 2017, has in practice driven a significant reallocation towards older workers and higher-level qualifications. It has been captured by the economic logic of upskilling existing employees. The entry-level provision that matters most for young people outside work has been hollowed out.
It’s expected that Alan Milburn’s final report, due in that politically charged period in the run-up to this autumn’s Labour conference, will have more to say on this topic.
The push to refocus apprenticeships towards young people isn’t a new one – it’s become increasingly central to Labour’s moves in the skills space since coming to power, culminating in this recent Jacqui Smith letter to Skills England, which is blunter about the need for further change than ever before.
But Burnham is no stranger to picking up policies which are already in motion (think buses) and making them defining features of his own platform, and so you wouldn’t bet against something similar happening with apprenticeships.
To simplify – enormously – the political impetus around their provision seems to oscillate over time between a desire for higher volume and a desire for better quality. At the moment the former very much has the upper hand, but the conditions are in place for reforms that push for both, despite the investment this will require.
This ought to present an opportunity for further and higher education institutions to strengthen their roles. But equally we could suspect that there is a heightened risk of both sectors ending up marginalised, for reasons we will get into. First let’s work out how we got here.
The politics of apprenticeships
Rebadging the apprenticeship levy as the growth and skills levy was one of Labour’s few manifesto commitments on post-compulsory provision. In office, this has been characterised by policy adjustments designed to decrease the level of levy funds that go towards older people, in particular those already in employment, and to increase the share going to young people.
Despite landing poorly in the higher education sector, and getting pushback from employer groups, it’s important to stress that these reforms have overall been positively received. The Resolution Foundation recently said that “re-focusing apprenticeship funding toward young people is a first step […] but there may be a case to go further and ring-fence at least two-thirds of the Growth and Skills Levy funding for young people.” It’s not an unusual conclusion in policy circles.
And as the new approach has begun to fall into place, so too has the political salience of the issue increased. The fact that “apprenticeship starts for young people went down by 40 per cent” under the previous Conservative government has become a regular parliamentary refrain from the Labour frontbench – despite the fact that it is a statistic for which an unpacking of both the policy context and the underlying data is important, of which more later.
Government ministers have been deploying the “40 per cent drop” soundbite at an accelerating rate in recent months; in Parliament alone, it was used to criticise the opposition’s record on 3 March by Rachel Reeves, 24 March by DWP minister Baroness Sherlock, 20 April by education minister Josh MacAlister, 14 May by Pat McFadden, and 3 June by Keir Starmer (to pick but a selection).
But despite Labour’s attempts to wrest control of this narrative, if anything the prevailing sentiment elsewhere in politics is that the government has not gone far enough. Essentially all parties in Westminster are advocating, in many cases forcefully, for larger reforms to the apprenticeship system in pursuit of higher participation levels, in particular for young people:
- The Liberal Democrats’ recently passed policy platform on universities includes a pledge to “strengthen skills development and employer engagement, by […] doubling the number of degree apprenticeships in skill shortage areas and reserving at least 50 per cent for these for students from low-income households.”
- Reform UK’s manifesto for Scotland saw a commitment to “reboot the Apprenticeship Levy funding model and guarantee every penny is invested into apprenticeships linked to colleges.”
- The Conservative Party’s alternative King’s Speech pledged to “expand high quality apprenticeships through an apprenticeship guarantee” – the party has elsewhere announced that it would double England’s apprenticeships budget, a multi-billion pound commitment funded through reducing university places.
- The Green Party’s recent Welsh manifesto stressed that apprenticeship opportunities, alongside colleges and universities, are “vital to ensure young people reach their full potential” and “vital to Wales’ future workforce and economic development.”
Evidence of broad appetite across the political spectrum for higher levels of apprenticeship starts will come as little surprise to those who follow public pronouncements on these matters – but it is important to stress that no party frames the ramping-up of such opportunities as a means to “shake up the system” or to introduce more dynamic (private) competition into the landscape of provision. Rather, we see indications of a cross-party consensus which positions the apprenticeship system as a national project, linked to renewal, opportunity, and the public good – and one in which quality matters as well as numbers.
How did we get here?
The 2010s saw wide-ranging reforms to apprenticeships, in response to the Richard Review and concerns that qualifications were in some cases too short in duration and lacking in rigour. It is in this context that the fall in starts needs to be understood – comparing participation in apprenticeship frameworks (the old regime) with participation in apprenticeship standards (gradually introduced from 2014) is a clear example of apples and oranges. But it is also the kind of finickety policy point which gets lost in the broad-strokes political debate about increases and decreases to headline volume.
The new system, which from 2017 was funded via the apprenticeship levy, continued to receive criticism. For one thing, the allegations of poor quality which the Richard Review’s recommendations were meant to address never fully went away. In 2022, think tank EDSK found that many problems persisted, concluding that “many apprentices are still being badly let down by the current system.”
The other widely-aired bone of contention with how the levy-funded system developed was the growing use of apprenticeships at higher levels to train existing staff, with a corresponding decrease in provision for younger learners. This table shows how the proportion of starts has shifted:
| 2017–18 | 2018–19 | 2019–20 | 2020–21 | 2021–22 | 2022–23 | 2023–24 | 2024–25 | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Under 19 | 28.4% | 24.8% | 23.6% | 20.3% | 22.2% | 23.1% | 23.2% | 21.2% |
| 19 to 24 | 30.3% | 29.5% | 29.5% | 29.4% | 30.5% | 29.3% | 28.3% | 27.5% |
| 25 plus | 41.4% | 45.7% | 46.8% | 50.3% | 47.4% | 47.6% | 48.4% | 51.3% |
This clashed with the popular conception of an apprentice as a first foot on the career ladder, as well as – arguably – the growing clamour for such qualifications to serve as an alternative to university study. Since Labour came to power in 2024, there have been three major policy developments in which we can clearly detect the shape of a purposeful response to a system that had become less focused on younger learners.
First, the defunding of level 7 apprenticeships for those aged over 21. This was announced by Keir Starmer during 2024 Labour conference, and confirmed in 2025 as part of “refocusing investment towards young people”. Then came the defunding of management apprenticeships, which was announced by Department for Work and Pensions in January 2026 as part of a “major youth employment drive”. And finally, the tentative introduction of apprenticeship units for those already in work – ministers had previously suggested that “up to 50 per cent” of an employer’s levy contribution would be available for non-apprenticeship training, but so far only a small number of these short courses have been introduced.
And there have been plenty of other smaller tweaks which to a greater or lesser extent have had the same goals – more young people, more starts – at their root: shortened minimum apprenticeship duration, a changed end-point assessment system, flexibilities around English and maths requirements, faster expiry of levy funds for employers, and the commissioning of Skills England to review funding rates for those standards more important for under 25s.
Despite these shifts, it will take some time for any rebalancing of the system to be reflected in apprenticeship figures. The latest in-year statistics for 2025–26 showed a staggering 25 per cent increase in starts for over-25s (from 88,810 to 111,370) compared to the same six-month period in 2024–25. This was at least in large part a symptom of employers rushing to avoid the defunding “cliff-edge”. And there is good reason to believe that top-down measures aimed at forcing employers to take on more younger, entry-level apprentices will struggle to have an impact: shifts to other standards, or simple disengagement with the system, could easily win out.
Higher education institutions had for several years been aiming to increase apprenticeship numbers at higher levels and integrated with degrees. Indeed, for a long time this was with the explicit backing of government: the Office for Students ran a degree apprenticeship funding competition (the investment for which was discontinued under Labour), while former education minister Robert Halfon was well-known for saying that “degree apprenticeships” were his two favourite words in the English language.
The shift away from higher-level apprenticeships has therefore, unsurprisingly, attracted pushback from the HE sector. This has been on various grounds: the impact on productivity and economic growth, the kicking away of routes for career progression in employers such as the NHS, the upheaval inflicted on universities’ own levy spending for professional development.
No-one really denies the merit of these arguments; the counterarguments are largely premised on the idea that while higher-level provision is valuable, provision for younger learners – the “foot on the career ladder” – is more valuable, if we assume a zero-sum investment environment.
But make no mistake, a reading of the government’s recent moves, the wider political climate, and public opinion leads us inexorably to a – not particularly controversial – conclusion: the policy debate about the role that apprenticeships play in the skills system is largely settled. They are a qualification that should be used primarily to bring young people into the world of work. It is far from impossible to see a future government dusting off the Richard Review and wondering why one of its central recommendations went nowhere:
There has been a drift towards calling many things apprenticeships which, in fact, are not. This does not help us define and support apprenticeships going forward. Simply enough, not all instances of training on a job are apprenticeships. Apprenticeships require a new job role, a role that is new to the individual and requires them to learn a substantial amount before they can do that job effectively.
Arguments about productivity, career development, employer preferences, industrial strategy and whatever else are, it seems, set to fall on deaf ears for many years to come. The direction of travel has moved from contested to blindingly obvious – the question now is what the emphasis on starts for young learners in new roles will mean in practice, and how education institutions should respond to it.
The scale of the challenge
The apprenticeship budget will hit £3.3bn next year. This does not represent the entire proceeds of the levy, as a portion is passed to the devolved governments and another is “top-sliced” by the Treasury. While there is still scope for an increase, especially given the unpopularity of the Exchequer retaining several hundred million pounds of employer receipts, it has been clear for some time that the apprenticeships budget is stretched. Levy reform to increase the amount paid in by employers, or to widen the number of employers who contribute, appears politically unviable for the medium-term (due primarily to the employer national insurance hike fallout).
So it is not currently clear where funds for expansion will come from. This explains much of the recent “reprioritisation” of the system away from older learners and higher-level programmes – you can intuit that, for all DWP might bang on about certain standards “not meeting the country’s skills priorities,” this is basically just a pretext for finding money for elsewhere.
Funding aside, arguably a much greater challenge is the “absorptive capacity” of the economy to take on more apprentices. Employers’ appetite to do so, and ability to create and support appropriate roles at scale, is rightly the source of no small scepticism.
These significant challenges aside, let us imagine a future several years hence where the number of apprenticeship starts for those aged 24 and under has risen from around 170,000 (as in 2024–25) to 250,000, and from being around 49 per cent of all starts (again, as was the case in 2024–25) to, for sake of argument, more like 60 per cent of starts.
What, then, would the apprenticeship system look like? Opinions will differ on whether assuming the system will look the same, only larger, is dangerous, naive, or simply a missed opportunity. But it does not seem fanciful to argue that a desire for change, backed up by policy moves and investment of public money, should be accompanied by a more fleshed-out vision than simply a change from Number A to Number B.
If the system is changing in volume, this should surely be supported by a broader vision about what this entails for place, subject, provider, and employer. And we do see glimpses of this vision, in the industrial strategy and elsewhere, in terms of subject area: witness departments such as the Ministry of Defence and the Department for Energy Security and Net Zero leaning into direct budget transfers to support provision for specific future skills needs.
There has also been some, perhaps limited, policy attention to the question of where apprenticeships are delivered. We can see this in the pilot funding for “brokerage” services in mayoral authorities, in recognition of the fact that local networks can effectively bring together employers and apprentices in a way that is hard to manage from Whitehall (the question of continued funding for brokerage services in non-mayoral areas is, as the Edge Foundation has warned, unresolved).
But the question of who will deliver the large increase in apprenticeship starts which everyone seems to agree the country needs has received far less attention.
The current landscape of apprenticeship provision in England is dominated by private providers, who were responsible for over two-thirds of starts in 2024–25. This was comfortably more than double the number of starts at further and (public) higher education institutions combined.
And the share of starts at FE colleges in particular has fallen in recent years, from 22.8 per cent in 2019–20 to less than 16 per cent in 2024–25. Universities have increased their share, due to the rise in level 6 and 7 provision which recent policy changes will reverse, though it remains to be seen exactly how the landscape changes.
Commentators have described further education colleges as having been “pushed to the margins” of apprenticeship delivery in England:
It is a story about the weakening of civic, place‑based institutions that can sustain a genuine youth‑to‑work mission over time, as in the 1980s, when FE colleges delivered the majority of work-based provision.
Colleges have also been squeezed by years of real‑terms funding cuts, capital constraints, and a policy environment that requires them to constantly rebid, rebrand, and realign to meet central Whitehall initiatives. In that context, apprenticeship becomes just one income stream among many, rather than the core of a locally placed-based skills settlement negotiated with employers and municipalities.
The Association of Colleges recently called for government investment in the relationship between businesses and colleges – its 2026 employer engagement survey showed that for apprenticeship provision in every sector, a majority of colleges report that employer engagement was very or somewhat challenging. Further education institutions are not currently geared up to invest heavily in generating new business.
Against this backdrop, it is worth considering how sustained growth in apprenticeship provision for young people is likely to pay out, especially when coupled with rapid and unpredictable changes to policy and fundable standards of the sort that Labour has introduced over the last couple of years, which shows little sign of settling down.
The inevitable conclusion is that pressure to increase starts without an accompanying government vision for who is involved in delivery seems nigh on certain to result in more apprentice provision being delivered by private providers who are better able to quickly pivot to follow funding incentives. Many of the largest training providers in England are backed by global private equity, and the most high-profile – Multiverse – is well-known for having been run on a loss-making basis while it expands its market share.
Such training firms are well-positioned to capitalise on rapid shifts in the delivery landscape. But if the government prioritises the fostering of long-term relationships between education institutions and their places and local employers – which the research literature highlights as a central component of high-quality programmes – then both further and higher education institutions would appear a better fit.
This is not to say that there are not excellent private training providers with long-standing track records. But the coming expansion in apprenticeship places – desired across the political spectrum, and by the general public – should be seen as an opportunity for civic institutions such as colleges, and universities, to take a more central role in the landscape.
A sector-led response
To summarise the challenge in one sentence: expanding apprenticeships for young people will require further government investment at a time when the public finances are stretched; it assumes capacity on the behalf of employers which should not be taken as read; and it is likely to bring about a larger market share for private training provision – at least, if rapid increases in starts are the overriding policy priority.
There are many responses to such a state of affairs. One could continue to make the case for level 6 and 7 provision to continue roughly as was, and for the apprenticeships system to be age-blind and level-agnostic (an argument the higher education sector has made repeatedly and continues to make). One could call for a “topslice” of the levy to fund national and local priorities (as the Association of Colleges has done). One could argue for a reformed system in which the growth and skills levy is interconnected with the Lifelong Learning Entitlement (a proposal which further and higher education sector representative bodies have jointly made).
None of these arguments lacks merit, but they run up against the reality of the government’s stance – supported, as we have seen, across the political spectrum – of making expansion of apprenticeship starts for younger learners the central quest of system-level changes.
This, essentially, is a settled direction. Rather than continuing to advocate for policy tweaks (or upheavals), I’d argue that the higher education sector – in particular – would be better off thinking about how it can get on board with the direction of travel that the government has instigated, and how that contribution can potentially address some of the stumbling blocks acting as barriers to expansion. The alternative is that the apprenticeship system leaves universities behind (and simplistic depictions of a binary between the two options will persist, both in the press and in government rhetoric).
So what does rolling up one’s sleeves and getting stuck in to “new job apprenticeships” (in the Richard Review’s terminology) look like? One possible answer is ugly: universities battling each other for the small number of level 4, 5 and 6 starts that employers have capacity for in each city or region, and doing their best to steal colleges’ lunch as well.
But there are surely other ways forward as well. One – more in keeping with the purported spirit of the times – would see higher and further education institutions in a region setting up collaborative initiatives to drive up new apprenticeships (for the HE sector, this would need to involve recognition that some learners and some places are better served by colleges).
These regional partnerships could act as a one-stop shop for employers and, perhaps longer-term, prospective apprentices. Such an initiative would benefit from scale, going some way towards solving the issues around capacity for business development faced by colleges in particular. In the crowded “market” for apprenticeship training, employers would have a visible and respected partner who could connect them with a suite of different options taught at public education institutions, rather than leaving individual universities and colleges competing both against one another and against many private training firms, with businesses fielding approaches from many suitors.
This would go some way to solving the need for more “brokerage” in the apprenticeship system, in particular if government is unwilling to publicly fund such services nationwide. Such services, it has been recognised, remain geographically “patchy” and “vulnerable to policy churn.” Where regional brokerage services did exist, the new HE-FE apprenticeship networks would be able to collaborate with them closely.
There are indications that many universities and colleges are starting to think along these lines already. Much of what’s been said publicly about the recent “strategic alliance” between Leeds Beckett and Luminate focuses on apprenticeship pathways and employer connections, while the duo of Universities West and Colleges West recently established to cover Bristol and Bath feels like a promising move as well.
Money money money
Funding still remains the main pain point in the system, for all that the government thinks it can solve deep-rooted issues via changing standards and rules as if they were cheat codes. A collective, regional HE-FE approach could help here too.
While mindful of the fact that philanthropy gets regularly trotted out as the answer to anything the government won’t commit to fully funding – research, university finances, international aid – there is clearly scope for apprenticeships to be a beneficiary, given the high esteem in which they are held in the public imagination. As the landscape currently lies, it’s not really clear how this would manifest – businesses are not going to receive donor funding to take on new apprentices, and individual private training companies are going to struggle to truly appear a charitable cause. But a partnership of public institutions might be able to make the case.
And then there is the hoary old chestnut of employers’ diminishing investment in workforce training, where the UK does increasingly poorly in international comparison. Skills England’s annual report suggests that it sees the answer in more qualification churn in the name of flexibility, if I can paraphrase somewhat unkindly. The government increasingly likes to talk about this issue, but is unlikely to solve it from the top down. A gradual ramping up of new apprenticeship starts, and a corresponding decline in levy-funded training for existing staff, is one of those things that on paper is bad news for universities – but with a committed, sector-wide approach it’s also an opportunity to support more professional development and in-work education and training.
To an extent this is all simply a public affairs argument. If the higher education sector can position itself as bringing funding into the apprenticeships system, and taking the lead on tackling employer underinvestment, this is a much stronger position to be in than simply being one suitor for a limited funding pot.
We started off by observing that, over long timescales, the apprenticeship debate tends to veer between worries about headline start numbers and the quality of provision. As Labour tries to drive up the former for England’s young people, the pendulum will inevitably one day swing back towards whether the system is well run, value for money, and delivering the hoped-for results (especially if we start getting stories with echoes of previous scandals).
That’s why at a time of churn in standards, shifts in employment patterns and (in theory) big expansions in starts, it’s vital that colleges and universities are ensuring that apprenticeships are fulfilling their full potential rather than simply increasing in number. That’s through student support, through a focus on achievements and destinations as well as starts, through links to research, facilities and quality pedagogy. And learning journeys that are more than just one qualification, and relationships with industries which are for the long-term.
That’s what “gold standard” should mean. Even if the suspicion remains that the government sees the term more as a branding exercise, it’s still an aspiration the higher education sector should be running with, rather than watching slip past.
