Question to the Department for Education:

To ask the Secretary of State for Education, what recent assessment he has made of progress towards the Government’s target of 3 million apprenticeship starts by 2020.

We publish progress on the number of apprenticeships starts within the department’s further education and skills statistical first release, which can be found at: https://www.gov.uk/government/collections/further-education-and-skills-statistical-first-release-sfr#2017-releases. The latest release was published on 22 February 2018.

There have been over 1.2 million apprenticeship starts since May 2015 and we intend to achieve three million apprenticeship starts in England by 2020.