Sector by sector: where degree apprenticeships actually exist, and where they don't

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

Ask a parent to name a degree apprenticeship and you will usually get one of four answers: a Big Four accountancy firm, a bank, an aerospace manufacturer, or "something in tech".

That map isn't wrong, exactly. Those schemes exist, they are excellent, and they are the ones that get written about. But they are a small and unrepresentative corner of the actual system, and a shortlist built from them will miss most of what your child could realistically get.

This is the real map, taken from the official register of approved standards rather than from anybody's marketing. There are 172 approved standards at Level 6 and Level 7 — 113 at Level 6, 59 at Level 7. Here is where they are.

The map

Three things jump out of that table, and all three are things parents typically have backwards.

Health and science is the biggest sector by a distance, and it isn't close. Twenty-seven Level 6 standards — paramedic, midwife, registered nurse, physiotherapist, dietitian, radiographer, biomedical scientist, speech and language therapist, occupational therapist, osteopath, podiatrist, sonographer. If your child is interested in healthcare and you have been assuming that means a conventional university degree and £50,000 of debt, that assumption is worth re-examining this month.

Engineering and manufacturing is second and enormously varied — aerospace, robotics, nuclear, control systems, materials science, space systems, rail, embedded electronics. It is not one thing and "engineering" as a shortlist entry is far too coarse.

Digital is eleven standards. Eleven, out of 172. The sector that dominates the online conversation about apprenticeships is the seventh largest on the register. It is a good route with strong employers, and it is nothing like the share of the market your child's YouTube feed implies.

The strongest thing on this table, if you're worried about status

Thirty-five of these standards are regulated — meaning the qualification at the end is not just a certificate but a licence to practise, overseen by a statutory professional body.

• 21 in health and science, regulated by the Health and Care Professions Council or the Nursing and Midwifery Council
• 7 in legal, finance and accounting, including standards regulated by the Solicitors Regulation Authority, CILEx Regulation, the Council for Licensed Conveyancers and the Institute and Faculty of Actuaries
• 3 in education, overseen by the Department for Education
• and one each in care services, construction, engineering and protective services — the last of those being the police constable route, overseen by the College of Policing

If the family worry is whether an apprenticeship is a real qualification, this is the shortest possible answer. A young person who completes the registered nurse degree apprenticeship is a registered nurse, on the same register, doing the same job, as someone who did it the university way. There is no asterisk. The regulator does not have an apprenticeship category.

Where the vacancies actually are right now

Standards are what could be studied. Vacancies are what someone is hiring for today, and the two lists do not match.

When we pulled the live Level 6 and 7 adverts from the government's Find an apprenticeship service for this site, there were 62 nationally at that moment, split like this:

Construction was advertising four times as many places as digital. It is the sector with the fewest Level 7 standards, no Level 6 standards without a degree attached, and the most immediate demand — chartered surveyor, civil engineer, quantity surveyor, site management, building services engineering, fire safety engineering, transport planning.

Two health warnings on that table. It is a snapshot on one day, and it captures only the vacancies advertised on the government service — most of the large corporate schemes recruit through their own early-careers portals and never appear there at all. But the shape of it is consistent with the standards data, and the direction of the mismatch is the useful part: the sectors that dominate the conversation are not the sectors doing the most hiring.

The health and science line is the one worth reading carefully. Forty-three standards, five live adverts. Our read is that a large share of health apprenticeships are filled internally — an NHS trust developing its existing healthcare assistants and technicians rather than recruiting eighteen-year-olds off the street. That is our inference from the pattern rather than a published figure, and it matters practically: for healthcare routes the search often has to start with local trusts and their own recruitment pages, not with a national vacancy site.

The sector where I'd be most careful

Creative and design. Fifteen standards on the register — journalist, VFX artist, interior designer, advertising creative, production manager, broadcast systems engineer, model maker. On paper it looks like a genuine route into industries that are notoriously hard to enter.

In practice, across the 104 universities registered to deliver Level 6 and 7 apprenticeships, only four deliver anything in the creative route at all, and 11 of the 15 creative standards have no university delivering them. Six of the eight Level 6 creative standards include no degree.

A standard existing on the register is not the same as a programme existing in the world. Anyone can read the government's list and conclude there is a degree apprenticeship route into journalism; the delivery to make that real is, on this evidence, close to absent.

This is not unique to creative — it is just worst there. Across all 172 standards, 44 have no university provider at all and 39 have exactly one. If your child's chosen standard has a single provider in the country, there is no alternative if the relationship goes wrong, and no competition on quality. Who actually teaches an apprentice covers how to check this, and every course page on this site lists the universities registered to deliver that standard — a short list there is a real signal.

What this changes about a shortlist

Widen the sector before widening the employer list. The commonest shortlist failure I see described is not aiming too high. It is a list of eight employers, all in two sectors, all recruiting through the same three-month window, all attracting the same four-figure application volumes. Adding a ninth bank does very little. Adding construction, health or a regulated professional route changes the odds materially.

Match the sector to the child, not to the parent's sense of prestige. The register is organised by occupation, and occupations are concrete. "Chartered surveyor" is a job with a working week you can describe. "Something in business" is not, and business and administration is also where the funding is being withdrawn — the Chartered Manager degree apprenticeship loses funding for new starts from September 2026.

Check three things per standard before it goes on the list: does it actually include a degree, how many universities deliver it, and is anyone advertising for it. All three are on this site's course pages, and all three are on the standard's own official page.

Expect three and a half years, not three. The median Level 6 standard runs 42 months. The four-year figure people quote is not marketing padding; it is roughly right, and it is a real difference from a three-year degree when you are comparing timelines at seventeen.

Follow the geography. Sector determines where your child would live, and that is a household decision as much as a career one. Construction and engineering places are spread across the country and often outside big cities; finance and professional services concentrate in London and a handful of regional hubs; health follows NHS trusts, which means almost everywhere. Housing an apprentice covers what that actually involves when there are no halls to fall back on.

The applicant-facing version of this map, with the route-by-route detail, is at which sectors actually have degree apprenticeships. If you do one thing with this page, make it the widening: the single highest-value hour is spent finding the two sectors your child has never considered, rather than the ninth employer in the one they have.