This morning the Department for Education (DfE) published figures outlining the number and type of apprenticeships that were started during the first month of 2019. January isn’t a big month for apprenticeship starts. However, it does mark the completion of the first half of the academic year and, as such, is a good time to take stock of how today’s system compares against the recent past.
So first, the numbers. Provisional figures tell us that 29,100 people began an apprenticeship during January 2019 and 226,000 began one between August 2018 and January 2019 (the first half of the 2018-19 academic year).