The ApprenticeRoute

Which sectors actually have degree apprenticeships

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

If you formed your picture of degree apprenticeships from the places people discuss them, you would conclude that they are mostly a technology and professional services thing: software at the big American tech firms, audit at the Big Four, something in a bank.

That picture is wrong, and it's wrong in a way that costs applicants real opportunities. The actual map of what exists is close to the inverse of the map of what gets talked about.

This site holds every Level 6 and Level 7 apprenticeship standard currently approved for delivery in England — 172 of them, taken from the Skills England register. Here's what that data says.

The map

Standards approved for delivery at Level 6 and Level 7, by occupational route:

Route Total Level 6 Level 7
Health and science 43 27 16
Engineering and manufacturing 34 23 11
Legal, finance and accounting 16 8 8
Creative and design 15 8 7
Construction and the built environment 15 12 3
Business and administration 12 7 5
Digital 11 6 5
Sales, marketing and procurement 6 6 0
Education and early years 5 3 2
Care services 4 3 1
Agriculture, environmental and animal care 4 3 1
Transport and logistics 4 4 0
Protective services 3 3 0
Total 172 113 59

Read that table against your mental image of this sector and the mismatch is immediate.

Health and science is the largest route by a distance — 43 standards, a quarter of everything available. Biomedical scientist, diagnostic radiographer, dietitian, dental hygienist, environmental health practitioner, clinical trials specialist. These barely feature in the online conversation about degree apprenticeships, and there are more of them than anything else.

Digital is one of the smallest, with 11 standards, six of them at Level 6. It generates more discussion than every other route combined.

Construction has more Level 6 standards than digital and finance put together — civil engineer, chartered surveyor, construction site management, building services engineer, architectural assistant, fire safety engineer — and generates almost no chatter at all.

And the vacancies point the same way

The standards register tells you what's approved. It doesn't tell you what's actually being advertised, so here's the other dataset this site holds: a live snapshot of Level 6 and Level 7 vacancies taken from the government's Find an apprenticeship service.

At the time of writing, of 62 live higher and degree apprenticeship vacancies:

Construction had four times as many live vacancies as digital. This is a snapshot from one day and it churns constantly — I wouldn't build a life plan on the exact numbers — but the shape is consistent with the standards map, and it is the opposite of where applicant attention goes.

I don't think this is mysterious. The famous schemes are famous because the employers are famous consumer brands, and because thousands of applicants discussing the same twenty employers generates a lot of visible activity around a small number of places. The routes nobody discusses are the ones where a mid-sized regional employer quietly hires two people a year and fills them.

If you want a rough heuristic: the more you have heard about a scheme, the worse your odds are. How to find degree apprenticeships worth applying to is the method for getting off the well-trodden list.

The thing that isn't obvious: "Level 6" doesn't always mean a degree

This is the single most important line in this article and almost nobody knows it.

Of the 113 Level 6 standards, 30 do not include a degree. That's better than a quarter. They're Level 6 — bachelor's level — and they lead to a professional qualification, a licence to practise, or occupational competence, but not to a BSc or BA.

Some of the bigger names in that group:

Look at that legal and finance list in particular. Six of the eight Level 6 standards in "legal, finance and accounting" don't carry a degree. The sector that dominates apprenticeship discussion under the label "degree apprenticeship" is largely not delivering degrees at Level 6 — it's delivering chartered and professional qualifications, which for those careers are often the more valuable credential anyway.

That's not a scandal. A chartered legal executive qualification is a route to practising law; ACA is what actually matters in accountancy. But if you specifically want a degree at the end — because you want the letters, because your family expects it, or because you want a clean route to a master's later — you have to check, per standard, before you apply. Every course page on this site states which it is.

There's a further split among the ones that do include a degree: 71 Level 6 standards have an integrated degree, where the degree and the final assessment are combined into one thing, and 12 have a non-integrated degree, where you do a degree and a separate assessment at the end. The second is more work. Understanding levels, standards and the degree explains why that distinction matters.

Route by route, briefly

Health and science. The largest route and the most structurally different: many of these lead to registration with a professional regulator, which means the standard is tightly specified and the training is long. NHS trusts recruit for them, often department by department with no central scheme, which is why they're both under-discussed and slow to respond. Worth applying to for exactly that reason.

Engineering and manufacturing. 34 standards, deep employer base, and the sector with the strongest tradition of taking school leavers seriously. Defence, aerospace, rail, automotive, nuclear. Expect a longer pre-employment process than elsewhere because of security clearance and vetting.

Construction and the built environment. The most under-applied route relative to its size. Twelve Level 6 standards, an ageing workforce, and government infrastructure commitments driving demand. If your reason for wanting an apprenticeship is "I'd rather be doing the job than reading about it", this is the route where that instinct is best served and least contested.

Legal, finance and accounting. The most competitive per place, and the one most disrupted by policy. Level 7 funding was restricted in January 2026 to under-22s and a narrow exempt group, which hits the solicitor and accountancy routes hardest — the full picture is here. If you're aiming at law or accountancy, read that before you plan anything.

Digital. Six Level 6 standards, and one of them — digital and technology solutions professional — carries a very large share of all the famous tech schemes. If you're applying to five different technology employers, there's a good chance you're applying to five versions of the same standard, with the same knowledge, skills and behaviours, and therefore very similar competency questions. That's a genuine advantage once you notice it.

Business and administration. The route to watch, and not in a good way: two of its seven Level 6 standards — chartered manager (degree) and improvement leader — lose government funding from 1 September 2026. If you're looking at management-flavoured programmes, check the funding status on the standard before you apply. The 2026 funding changes covers what's going and why.

Creative and design. Fifteen standards and almost no visibility. Journalist, advertising creative, VFX artist, model maker. Small intakes, but the ratio of applicants to places is nothing like the finance route.

Protective services, transport, agriculture, care. Small routes, but they include some of the most-searched individual programmes in the country — police constable degree apprenticeship, first officer pilot. Tiny numbers of standards, very large numbers of applicants for a few of them.

How to actually use this

Three suggestions, in order of how much difference they make.

Start from the standard, not the employer brand. Decide what you want to be doing at 24 and find the standards that lead there — there are 172 to choose from and most people have looked at four. The course pages list all of them.

Then find who delivers it. Any standard tells you which employers and providers are running it, which is how you find the mid-sized employer in your region who isn't fighting six thousand applicants.

Check three things on the standard before you apply: whether it includes a degree, whether that degree is integrated or not, and whether the standard is still funded. All three are on the page, all three change what you're signing up for, and none of them appear in the marketing.

The one-line version

There are 172 approved Level 6 and Level 7 standards. Health and science is the biggest route with 43; digital is one of the smallest with 11, and generates most of the noise. Construction had four times as many live vacancies as digital in our latest snapshot.

Thirty of the 113 Level 6 standards don't include a degree at all — including most of the Level 6 legal and financial ones — so check per standard rather than assuming "Level 6" means "BSc".

And two Level 6 standards, chartered manager and improvement leader, lose funding from 1 September 2026. Check the standard, not the brochure.