Future Apprenticeships - 3 Million New Starts by 2020 is a Big Goal

There are big plans to increase the number and quality of apprenticeships in the UK. In England the Government has committed to increase the number of apprenticeships to 3m by 2020 - that's 3m starts in 2020. At the same time the Government wants to raise quality. Apprenticeships will become more rigorous - simpler, employer led standards together with independent end point assessments will raise the profile and quality of apprenticeships.

Another big change is coming around funding. A new apprenticeship levy will be introduced from 6th April 2017. All employers with an annual payroll of more than £3m will have to pay the levy directly to HMRC. This builds up a fund that the employer can then use to recruit and train apprentices. The idea is that it puts the employer in control of the funding so that the employer starts to act as a customer, further driving up the number and quality of apprenticeships.

The 3m new starts in 2020 target is seriously ambitious. There's a good set of data available from the Department For Education’s FE data library that shows apprenticeship starts by sector subject area and English region over time. The trends in apprenticeship starts over time and the current number of starts in each sector are easy to see when the data has been imported (via MS Excel) into Power BI:

Some things that jump out from the data are:

1. The total starts in 2015/16 was 504k. So there's quite way to go to the 2020 3m target.


2. The vast majority of apprenticeships come from 4 big sectors - Business Administration & Law, Health, Public Services & Care, Retail and Commercial Enterprise, Engineering and Manufacturing Technologies.


3. SkillsLogic's sector - Information and Communication Technology - employs very few apprentices (only 1k in Yorkshire and The Humber in 2015/16).


4. The trend in some important sectors - for example Retail and Commercial Enterprise - might actually be downwards. I wonder if the bigger sectors are saturated? Maybe the growth in starts has to come from sectors that don't appear recruit a lot apprentices such as IT?

The report is a nice example of how you can use Power BI to explore quite simple data. The source data is an Excel table with 4 columns - Year, Region, Sector Subject Area and Starts. Transposing the original DfE data into that source table took about an hour, creating the report in Power BI (and publishing it to the web) was probably less than an hour.

There's a full screen version here that is easy to read. Full screen version Remember these reports are interactive - selecting an sector subject area in the top left changes the view in the column chart and the Treemap (used to show starts by region).