Schools recruited 6,300 apprenticeship between May 2017 and March 2018, according to figures revealed by apprenticeships and skills minister Anne Milton.
Around half of these starts were in local authority maintained schools, the data provided in a written answer to a question from a backbench Labour MP reveals.
It also confirms apprentices only make up a small proportion of the total number of staff in schools. The last school-workforce census showed there were 947,000 full-time equivalent teachers, teaching assistants and support staff working in English schools in 2017.
The figures, published by the Department for Education, are calculated as an estimate from the Individualised Learner Record (ILR), but do not provide a breakdown of which schools the apprentices were hired at, or which apprenticeship standards they were undergoing.
Public sector apprenticeship target
Last month, Tes reported that just 90 teacher trainees were taken on under the new postgraduate apprenticeship route this September, far from the thousands predicted for the first school year when the new teacher-training route was envisaged.
From next April, academy trusts and multi-academy trusts (MATs) employing 250 or more staff will fall within the scope of the government’s public sector apprenticeship target for the first time.
Currently, state-funded schools employing 250 or more staff are within scope for the target, but not MATs. Where a council is the employer for schools, the local authority is in scope and is responsible for reporting on progress towards meeting the target.
It is not possible to report against the target for schools as a group. Instead, an estimate of the number of apprenticeship starts in schools during the reporting period has been calculated from the ILR.
