In a claim that will resonate with thousands of school-leavers wading through a torrent of rejection emails this summer, the skills minister has declared that securing a coveted apprenticeship in Britain has become harder than winning a place at Oxford or Cambridge.
Baroness Smith of Malvern, the former Commons home secretary turned Strictly Come Dancing contestant who now holds the skills brief at the Department for Education, told The Sun on Sunday that young people the length of the country were “queuing up” for apprenticeships, with employers spoilt for choice. Her remarks landed as Whitehall figures laid bare a deepening youth labour crunch: roughly one million people aged between 16 and 24 are now classed as Neets – not in education, employment or training.
The numbers behind the soundbite
The arithmetic appears, on the face of it, to back her up. Cambridge received 22,820 applications for the 2025 intake and offered 3,716 places, an acceptance rate of 16.3 per cent. Oxford was tighter still, admitting just 3,245 of 23,061 hopefuls, 14.1 per cent. By comparison, several blue-chip apprenticeship schemes, especially degree-level engineering programmes, routinely attract north of 150 applications per slot, eclipsing the odds at the dreaming spires.
According to the latest Department for Education apprenticeship statistics, there were 353,500 apprenticeship starts in England in the 2024-25 academic year and 761,500 people participating overall, with higher-level apprenticeships up more than 15 per cent year-on-year. Business, administration and law remains the largest single subject area.
To unblock the bottleneck, Lady Smith pledged £600 million of new funding to bankroll 60,000 additional apprentices, part of a broader push to plug skills gaps in construction, engineering and digital roles. “It can sometimes be easier getting into Oxford or Cambridge than it can be getting an apprenticeship,” she said, adding: “Sometimes people say, ‘Young people don’t want to work in the construction industry’, but they really do… they are queuing up.”
Why employers are hesitating
The pledge nonetheless lands awkwardly for the small and medium-sized businesses that have historically done the heavy lifting on apprentice intake. Industry data suggest just one in five construction SMEs is planning to take on an apprentice this year, and employers’ groups argue that the Chancellor’s autumn measures, chiefly the rise in employer National Insurance contributions from 13.8 to 15 per cent in Rachel Reeves’s first Budget, have left many smaller firms re-running the numbers on every new hire.
The minimum wage settlement that took effect in April only sharpened the squeeze. The apprentice rate climbed 6 per cent to £8 an hour; the 18-to-20 band rose 8.5 per cent to £10.85; and the National Living Wage for over-21s reached £12.71. As Business Matters has previously reported, the combined effect has been to push employer costs for low-paid staff up by more than £2,100 per employee, a sum that, for owner-managers in hospitality, retail and care, has made hiring under-25s, in the words of one trade body, “unaffordable” without external support.
A political squeeze tightens
The minister’s timing reflects a Treasury under mounting pressure to demonstrate that ministers can convert announcement into appointment. The latest Office for National Statistics NEET bulletin put the share of 16-to-24-year-olds out of work and study at 12.8 per cent, equivalent to 957,000 young people, with the next release due at the end of May.
Industry watchers will be looking for evidence that the policy mix is starting to shift the dial. With youth unemployment hovering near an 11-year high and employers warning that wage and tax bills are leaving little headroom to expand junior intake, the £600 million pledge will need to translate into hard cash on the ground, not merely a press notice, if Westminster is to ease the bottleneck that, on the minister’s own admission, is leaving Britain’s school-leavers fighting harder for an apprenticeship than for a place at the country’s most selective universities.
For SMEs, the calculation is unchanged: the talent is willing, and arguably abundant. The question is whether the policy framework finally makes saying yes affordable.