Poll: Concerns over apprenticeship achievement rates

In the face of a growing skills gap in the engineering and manufacturing sectors it’s widely accepted that apprenticeship schemes represent an increasingly critical method of enabling employers to develop the workforce that will need to compete in the future.

And yet despite increasing efforts to drive the uptake of apprenticeships and to encourage employers to think increasingly carefully about how their schemes are structured, there are concerning signs that this push isn’t delivering the pipeline of skills that industry requires,

Indeed, according to the most recent set of complete figures from the UK government (2021/2022) Engineering and Manufacturing apprenticeship achievement rates in England have fallen to 58 per cent. Apprentice achievement rate in general across England have dropped from 73.8 in 2011/12 to just 53 per cent in 2021/22, which is way off the government’s target of 67 per cent.

Clearly, given the widely recognised importance of vocational routes into industry, and the noted skills shortages across many sectors of industry, this is a worrying and perhaps somewhat surprising trend. So where have we gone wrong?