The Department for Education’s Individualised Learner Record (ILR) and the Office for National Statistics Inter-Departmental Business Register (IDBR) have been matched together to allow information about apprentices to be linked to business information relating to the apprentice’s employer, covering:
- Learner characteristics: age, gender, ethnicity, learners with learning difficulties and/or disabilities and whether they live in a relatively deprived area (based on the Index of Multiple Deprivation (opens in a new tab))
- Apprenticeship information: level, standard/framework, subject studied, whether they were supported by levy funds from an Apprenticeship Service Account (ASA) and geography of the workplace of the apprenticeship (region, local authority and parliamentary constituency),
- Employer enterprise characteristics: industry sector (broad, 2 and 5 digit Standard Industrial Classification 2007 (opens in a new tab)), size band (number of employees) and legal status.
The statistics presented here relate to ILR-IDBR matched apprenticeship starts only, and so will be slightly lower than the official figures published in the DfE Apprenticeships and Traineeships National Statistics. In 2021/22, there were 349,190 apprenticeship starts in England, of which 98% (343,400) were matched to an employer enterprise in the ONS IDBR.
Please note that the matching approach to link to the IDBR has been changed in this release. For more details, please see the methodology note.
Industry characteristics
The use of the term ‘enterprise’ in this publication refers to an enterprise as defined in the ONS IDBR as ‘a business under autonomous and single control, usually producing a single set of accounts’. The geographical information refers to the workplace of the apprenticeship.
Work will continue to improve the statistics as knowledge of the underlying data source develops.
ONS have supplied the Inter-departmental Business Register data used in this publication, but they bear no responsibility for the further analysis or interpretation of that data contained here.
Policy context
An apprenticeship is a job with training. Through their apprenticeship, apprentices will gain the technical knowledge, practical experience and wider skills and behaviours they need for their immediate job and future career. The apprentice gains this through formal off-the-job training and the opportunity to practise these new skills in a real work environment.
The UK-wide apprenticeship levy came into force on 6 April 2017 requiring all UK public and private sector employers with an annual pay bill of £3 million or more to invest in apprenticeship training. As of May 2017, reforms have been made to how apprenticeship funding works, including the introduction of the apprenticeship levy and apprenticeship service. The profile of apprenticeship starts changed significantly since the introduction of the levy which, along with the introduction of apprenticeship standards (that are replacing frameworks), has impacted on the number and nature of apprenticeship starts.
Until July 2020, there were two types of apprenticeships: ‘frameworks’ and ‘standards’. New standards have been replacing the older apprenticeship frameworks in recent years. All new apprenticeship starts from the 2020/21 academic year onwards are on apprenticeship standards.
In addition, the 2019/20 and 2020/21 data covers a period affected by varying COVID-19 restrictions, which will have impacted on apprenticeship learning and also provider reporting behaviour via the Individualised Learner Record. Therefore, extra care should be taken in comparing and interpreting data presented for those years.