Schools hired 6,300 apprentices last year

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.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.