UK Government Moves to Boost Apprenticeships for Young People

For the roughly 64% of young people who do not go to university, apprenticeships are vital gateways to the world of work. The way that funding has flowed away from them and towards older workers in recent years was flagged as a problem in the interim report from Alan Milburn’s review on young people and work in May. Mr Milburn’s recommendations are still some months off. Apprenticeships are not solely for school‑leavers: people of all ages should be able to apply for paid trainee posts. But it is clear that the way incentives in the system have tilted against younger adults is one reason behind the huge rise in the number who are not in education or jobs.

The positive signs are that ministers will not wait for Mr Milburn to do something about this. A letter from Jacqui Smith, the skills minister, to the recently formed agency Skills England, last month, asked for urgent advice about which apprenticeship programmes should receive funding increases. It also announced an ambition for 50,000 more young apprentices, annually, by March 2029 – reversing almost half of the decade-long decline.

Clarity about past mistakes enables them to be corrected. The Conservatives introduced the apprenticeship levy for big employers in 2017. As a reward for paying, firms were given too much freedom over how to spend money from the centrally held fund – and have used an increasing share of it on training their existing staff, sometimes at degree level or higher. Advice from an earlier review that apprenticeship funding for new entrants should be kept separate from wider training budgets was disregarded. The disastrous result was that apprenticeship starts among 16- to 24-year-olds fell by 40% in a decade. In 2024/25, 43% of new apprentices had already been with their employer for a year or more.

Skills England has yet to prove itself. (Its predecessor body, the Institute for Apprenticeships and Technical Education, was disbanded after presiding over this reallocation of resources away from their intended target.) But Lady Smith’s intervention suggests that the decision to transfer responsibility for the £4bn skills budget to the Department for Work and Pensions was a good one. Ministers there are rightly extremely concerned about the 16-24 cohort, and looking for ways to boost their participation in the workforce. A further pledge is that employers will receive £2,000 for each apprentice in this age group to whom they give a job.

Much has yet to be worked out. Last year’s skills white paper made great play of English devolution, and proposed that strategic authorities will in future be the bridge between local jobs and training. This ought to sit well with Andy Burnham’s commitment to empowering the regions. It remains to be seen how this shift will be effected, what role remains for Whitehall, and whether the government’s industrial strategy can deliver sufficient entry-level opportunities.

Tom Bewick, who last year published a book about skills policies, believes that they are “key to Labour taking on Reform UK at the next general election”. Voting patterns in areas of high unemployment and poor health back this up. The absence of economic opportunities is damaging to democracy as well as a blight on lives. Apprenticeships are vital stepping stones and the UK urgently needs more of them.