How many apprentices actually finish?

Rules and figures checked: 2026-07-25. Funding, tenancy and tax rules move — verify before relying on them.

Before I started, I asked a lot of questions about the salary, the university, the rota and the office. I did not ask the one question that would have told me most about whether the programme was any good, which is: of the people who started this scheme four years ago, how many finished it?

Nobody asks that. It feels rude, or pessimistic, or like you're planning to fail. It is in fact the single most informative thing you can ask, and the national data explains why.

The national picture

The apprenticeship achievement rate is the proportion of people who started an apprenticeship and completed it, including passing the final assessment. For England in 2024/25 it was 65.4%.

That's the highest it has been, and it's the end of a genuinely steep improvement:

It still fell just short of the government's long-standing 67% target, and ministers have said they want the sector past 70%.

Now the part that matters if you're looking at a degree apprenticeship specifically. Achievement rates vary a lot by the type of organisation delivering the training, and universities delivering degree-level apprenticeships achieved 73% in 2024/25, up from 68.6% the year before. FE colleges came in at 65.7%. So the route you're considering performs better than the system average.

It's still roughly one in four who don't finish.

What the missing quarter is made of

Not passing the final assessment is a small part of it. The much bigger part is people who never get that far.

Leaving the employer. This is the big one, and it's the thing people don't anticipate. An apprenticeship is a job first. If the job ends — redundancy, dismissal, a restructure, or you resign because you've had enough — the apprenticeship usually ends with it, because there's no employer to be apprenticed to. It doesn't have to be terminal: there are routes through, and switching employer part-way through and if it goes wrong: redundancy, dismissal and leaving early cover them. But they require you to act quickly and most people don't know they exist.

The job not being what was described. Someone signs up to a four-year programme on the basis of a careers page and finds themselves doing something adjacent to it, badly supported, with a manager who wasn't briefed. That's a slow leak rather than a dramatic exit, and it accounts for a lot of second-year withdrawals.

Study time that never materialises. Off-the-job training hours are a funding requirement, not a nice-to-have, and when they're not delivered the apprentice is the one who ends up behind on assignments while still doing a full job. That's a well-worn path to quitting, and it's the most fixable problem on this list — not getting your off-the-job training hours? is the fix.

Academic failure and momentum loss. Failing a module doesn't end a degree apprenticeship, but it can cost you a year, and some people don't come back from that. Failing a module, resits and splitting a year is the map.

A better offer. Genuinely common at year three, when you're two-thirds qualified, visibly competent, and cheap. Some of the "non-achievers" in the statistics walked into better jobs.

Life. Moving 150 miles at 18 is a large thing to do, and some people are homesick, or isolated, or have something happen at home. That's not a character failure, and it deserves saying out loud rather than being filed under "dropout". Loneliness inside a busy social life is the honest version.

A methodology caveat, briefly

Achievement rates are calculated on a "hybrid end year" basis — an achievement counts in the year the final assessment completes, not the year the training ends. Combined with the pandemic disruption sitting in the middle of the comparison series, that makes year-on-year movements less clean than the table above implies. The direction of travel is real. The precise gap between any two years is softer than it looks.

How to check a provider before you commit

All of this is checkable, in about twenty minutes, before you accept an offer. Very few applicants do it.

1. Achievement rates by provider. The Department for Education publishes national achievement rate tables broken down by provider. If a provider is well below the national rate, that's a question to ask, not necessarily a reason to run — some providers work with harder-to-serve cohorts — but you want to have asked it.

2. Ofsted. Ofsted now inspects apprenticeship provision at all levels, including Level 6 and 7, having taken that over from the Office for Students. Reports are public. Note that since November 2025 there's no single overall grade — you get a five-point scale across several evaluation areas, so read the apprenticeship-relevant ones rather than looking for a headline word.

3. Apprentice feedback ratings. The government's find apprenticeship training service publishes star ratings from apprentices themselves for providers and standards. Under 2.5 stars is flagged as needing improvement. This is the closest thing to a review site that exists in this sector and hardly anyone knows it's there.

4. The employer's own retention. Ask directly. "How many people started this scheme in each of the last three years, and how many are still on it?" A good employer will answer, and a good answer is specific. A vague one tells you something too.

More on all of this in who actually teaches you: the training provider nobody tells you to check.

The questions I'd ask now

If I were sitting in a final interview again, knowing what a quarter of a cohort not finishing actually looks like from the inside:

• How many apprentices started this programme in each of the last three years, and how many completed?
• Who is the training provider, and what did their last Ofsted report say?
• How is off-the-job training scheduled — protected days, block release, or "fit it in"?
• What happens if I fail a module?
• What happens if my manager changes, or my team restructures?
• What did last year's finishers go on to do here?

That list looks aggressive written down. In practice it reads as someone who has thought about a four-year commitment seriously, and in my experience employers respond well to it. The ones who don't have told you something useful.

What actually predicts finishing

Having watched a cohort of about forty go through it across intakes, the people who finished were not the cleverest. They were the ones with three things: protected study time that their manager defended, a provider that ran a coherent timetable, and someone at work whose job it was to notice if they were struggling.

None of those are things you supply. All three are things you can ask about before you sign. That's the whole argument for asking the awkward question.

The one-line version

About two-thirds of apprentices nationally finish, and closer to three-quarters on university-delivered degree apprenticeships — and the difference between the people who finish and the people who don't is mostly about employer and provider quality, which is checkable in twenty minutes before you accept.