Question to the Department for Education:

To ask the Secretary of State for Education, if he will publish time series data on the number of apprenticeship starts in the NHS in each month since June 2010; and if he will make a statement.

In November 2018, we published details of our progress against the public sector apprenticeship target for the first year of the target. These can be viewed at the following link: https://www.gov.uk/government/statistics/public-sector-apprenticeships-in-england-2017-to-2018.

This showed that, in the National Health Service (NHS), 1.2% of employees started an apprenticeship between 1 April 2017 and 31 March 2018, which is 13,800 new starts. It should be noted that this data is based on self-declared information on organisation headcounts and apprentice recruitment submitted by public sector bodies.

The department also publishes data on apprenticeship starts in the health, public services and care sector subject area. This includes the number of starts on the ‘Registered Nurse’ degree apprenticeship and ‘Nursing Associate’ apprenticeship standards.

Monthly breakdowns for individual standards and frameworks, as well as for sector subject areas, have been published from 2014/15 onwards and can be accessed at the link below: https://www.gov.uk/government/statistics/apprenticeship-and-levy-statistics-february-2019.

The Department for Education and the Department of Health and Social Care are working closely with employers and Health Education England to make sure that the NHS is fully supported to recruit the apprentices they need to deliver high quality care.