Apprenticeship and traineeships: May 2020
Updated with the latest official statistics that include monthly apprenticeship starts and the apprenticeship service.
- From:
- Department for Education
- Published
- 10 May 2019
- Last updated
- 1 May 2020 — See all updates
- Proposed release:
- May 2020
- Cancellation date:
- 28 April 2020 10:44am
Statistics release cancelled
As the demand increases for statistics and data to measure the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic, the Department for Education has had to change its data gathering and release practices, focussing efforts on priority analysis and statistics. Our statement of 26 March 2020 (https://www.gov.uk/government/organisations/department-for-education/about/statistics#announcements) explains this further, and, in line with guidance from the Office for Statistics Regulation (https://www.statisticsauthority.gov.uk/covid-19-and-the-regulation-of-statistics/) the decision has been made to replace all in-year statistical releases relating to further education and apprenticeships for the 2019/20 academic year. The current releases and measures we publish may now provide very little value and/or may be misleading given how the pandemic will have impacted on both apprenticeship training and provider reporting from March. While collections remain open we have no way to quantify how robust any reporting by providers will be during the period affected by the pandemic. Where there are updates they may well be small corrections to pre lockdown periods. Therefore, given the expected large drop in starts from March, comparing a participation measure in say the third quarter of 2019/20 to this point in 2018/19 would offer no meaningful insight to activity in the third quarter. We will publish the end-of-year releases normally published in November, but the replacement of the remaining in-year dates will enable us to provide release(s) with more relevant information to cover the period affected by the pandemic. Headline data would still be central to releases but we wish to seek to refocus releases on the most relevant material that offers comparison of fresh insight where available. This means headline statistics such as apprenticeship starts will still be available, and to similar timescales to those currently, but we intend to repurpose our releases to focus on the most relevant information available. We are consulting users on this and seeking feedback on key data needs, which can be provided via FE.OFFICIALSTATISTICS@education.gov.uk. In particular, we are seeking user feedback on key data needs in terms of the regularity of data needed and also the type of breakdowns users would find most useful, e.g. similar to those we currently publish such national apprenticeship starts by age, level and individual framework/standard etc, so we can consider going forward and in light of continued data quality assessments. We will keep users updated of further changes via the Department for Education statistics website (https://www.gov.uk/government/organisations/department-for-education/about/statistics).