Today, we announced we will deliver 100,000 more apprenticeships by the end of the next parliament and we will pay for this by cutting low-value degrees.

• We want young people to secure the best opportunities with a good well-paid job which means we need to crack down on university degrees which make people poorer at the expense of the taxpayer.

• That is why we have set out a clear plan to deliver 100,000 more apprenticeships per year by the end of the next parliament, funded by changing the law to close the poorest performing university courses. This will make sure we continue with the rollout of our successful apprenticeship program which since 2010 has seen over 5.8 million people get the skills and opportunities they deserve. 

• This bold action will ensure young people have the skills they need to get good, secure jobs. Labour would halve the number of apprenticeships and take young people back to square one.

We are doing this by:

• Delivering 100,000 more apprenticeships every year by the end of next parliament, securing opportunities for young people. Thanks to our reforms 70 per cent of occupations are covered by apprenticeships but we will go further by expanding the number of apprenticeships with 100,000 more every single year by the end of the next parliament, securing opportunities for future. 

• Delivering almost 5.8 million apprenticeships since 2010 and getting more disadvantaged students into university. Since we came into office there have been almost 5.8 million apprenticeships starts, with over 752,000 people participating in an apprenticeship in England between August 2022 and January 2023 alone. In 2023, the number of disadvantaged students applying to the most selective universities continued to rise following a record number of disadvantaged students accepted in 2022 (Explore Education Statistics, Apprenticeships and traineeships, 8 June 2023, link; BBC News, 26 October 2023, link). 

• Reforming apprenticeships to boost uptake and cut red-tape for businesses. We are already fully funding young people (up to the age of 21) to do an apprenticeship in SMEs, increasing the amount of money apprenticeship levy payers can give to SMEs to hire an apprentice and putting all apprenticeships on UCAS so young people can compare apprenticeships in the same way they would a university degree.  

• Closing university courses that make students poorer, driving up values for taxpayers money and securing the opportunities that people deserve. One in five courses make people poorer so our new law would grant new powers to the universities regulator to close courses that are underperforming and have the highest dropout rates. Every penny saved will be invested into new apprenticeship opportunities. 

Key political point: 

• Labour would halve the number of apprenticeships by allowing 50 per cent of Apprenticeship Levy funds to go to other non-apprenticeship training, meaning worse life opportunities for young people. Labour want businesses to spend half of their apprenticeship levy on non-apprenticeship training which could reduce apprenticeships to just 140,000, every year less than half the number of apprenticeships. This means SMEs being left with no funding to hire an apprentice. The IFS have said that broadening the levy creates a ‘significant risk’ that it ‘simply pays for training that would have already taken’ (IFS, Investment in training and skills, October 23, link).

Q: Funding?

100,000 more apprenticeships will cost £885 million in 2029-30. We will pay for this by cutting the poorest performing university degrees, this will save money as more student loans will be paid back, meaning the taxpayer won’t have to pick up the tab instead.