Kevin Brennan (Minister of State (also in the Department for Business, Innovations and Skills), Department for Children, Schools and Families; Cardiff West, Labour)

Apprenticeship funding for further education (FE) colleges and providers is set out in a maximum contract value (MCV). This amount reflects the anticipated cost for an academic year of supporting learners continuing on programmes from earlier years as well as new starts. We do not fund on the basis of expected places rather the number of total learners that can be supported in a given year with the funds available.

Planning assumptions for funded apprenticeship places for the 2009/10 academic year were published in the Grant Letter to the Learning and Skills Council (November 2008). Further to this, we announced a £140 million package to deliver 35,000 extra apprenticeship places over 2009/10. Although information on apprenticeship places is not available, we do publish the number of apprenticeship starts in each academic year, at both a national and sub-national level.

Apprenticeship Starts for 2003/04 to 2007/08 were published in a statistical first release (SFR) on 25 June:

http://www.thedataservice.org.uk/statistics/sfrjun09.

Supplementary table 5.1 shows apprenticeship starts by constituency, local authority, Government office region and England for 2003/04 to 2007/08.

Supplementary table 11.1 shows provisional apprenticeship starts for the first nine months of 2008/09. Provisional full-year figures for 2008/09 were published in a statistical first release on 22 October:

http://www.thedataservice.org.uk/statistics/sfroct09.

Supplementary geographic breakdowns will be available shortly after the main release.