What was claimed
The number of people who have started apprenticeships dropped by 9% between 2023/24 and 2025/26.
Our verdict
Misleading. This is based on incomplete data for 2025/26 compared with a full year’s worth of data for 2023/24. If you compare the latest nine months with the equivalent nine months in 2023/24, apprenticeship starts in England have risen by about 11%.
What was claimed
The number of apprenticeship starts collapsed under the last government after 2020.
Our verdict
Incorrect. The number of apprenticeship starts per year in England rose after 2020/21—although that year may have been affected by the pandemic. Apprenticeship starts did fall significantly in the years before 2020.
The shadow business minister Bradley Thomas MP claimed in parliament on Monday that the number of new apprentices has fallen in the past two years. In fact the reverse is true. The number has risen.
Speaking in a debate with the education minister, Paul Waugh MP, Mr Thomas said: “When comparing the academic year 2025/26 with 2023/24, the number of people that have started apprenticeships has dropped by 9%.”
Mr Thomas’s office provided Full Fact with figures for England that show this claim is based on a calculation comparing the number of apprenticeship starts in the first nine months of the 2025/26 academic year—which is the latest data currently available—with the number in the whole academic year of 2023/24.
That’s obviously not a fair comparison, so it can’t tell you whether the number of starts is rising or falling.
If you compare the first nine months of 2025/26 with the equivalent nine months of 2023/24 instead, then the number of apprenticeship starts has risen by about 11%.
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Did apprenticeships ‘collapse’ under the last government?
Later in the debate, Mr Waugh said apprenticeship starts “have gone up by 8.7% under this Government, whereas apprenticeship starts collapsed under the last Government since 2020”.
That 8.7% figure looks like the change between 2025/26 (August to April) and the same months the previous year, so it’s a fair comparison, but it only describes what happened in this period, not under the whole of the current government so far.
Mr Waugh appears to be wrong about the number of starts under the last government “since 2020”, however. Between 2020/21 and 2023/24, the number actually increased. (Although the figure for 2020/21 may have been affected by the pandemic).
There was a marked fall in the number of starts in the years before 2020—from around 500,000 per year from 2011 to 2017, to roughly 350,000 a year in the years since. This effectively reversed a large rise that occurred in the early 2010s.
Full Fact approached Mr Waugh’s office for comment.
