Alan Milburn proposes pre-apprenticeship route for young people in England

Alan Milburn will recommend a national pre-apprenticeship route in England for young people who need more preparation before entering work, the Guardian reported on 10 October 2026. The proposed college-based course would combine English and maths, technical learning and experience with employers. It is a recommendation for his youth employment review, not a scheme the government has agreed to launch.

The proposal is aimed at people who may lack the qualifications, confidence, workplace experience or routines needed to obtain and sustain an apprenticeship. Milburn told the Guardian that some young people first need to improve their English or maths or gain experience of a workplace. Employers, he said, want assurance that candidates will attend, learn and stay with the job.

What Milburn’s pre-apprenticeship proposal would offer

Milburn described a national route based in colleges that would bring classroom learning and practical preparation together with time spent with employers. The distinction matters: an apprenticeship is itself a job with training, while the course he proposes would prepare a young person to seek and sustain one. The Guardian compared the idea with a one-year pre-vocational pathway in Austria; that comparison does not establish a duration for the English proposal.

The Guardian reported that Milburn’s full review, previously expected the following week, has been delayed until at least November. Sources close to the review confirmed the delay to the newspaper. That leaves the final wording of the recommendation and its supporting analysis unavailable in the dated account. The published reporting does not establish eligibility rules, funding, a national start date, employer commitments or how the route would be evaluated.

What England’s apprenticeship figures show

Department for Education figures recorded 353,500 apprenticeship starts in England during the 2024/25 academic year, a rise of 4.1% from 2023/24. Under-19s accounted for 74,990 starts, or 21.2% of the total. Their share had been 23.2% the previous year. Those figures show that overall starts rose while the youngest group took a smaller share; they do not measure how many people would qualify for Milburn’s proposed route.

The department’s longer series puts total starts in 2024/25 about 10% below their 2018/19 level, despite a recovery since the pandemic-era decline. It says starts fell by a third between 2016/17 and 2020/21, while changes in apprenticeship standards and the balance between shorter intermediate courses and longer higher-level programmes affect comparisons across years. These are programme-wide trends, rather than evidence of an outcome for the proposed course.

The mix of training is changing too. Higher-level apprenticeship starts increased by 15.1% to 140,730 in 2024/25, while intermediate-level starts fell by 7.3% from the previous year. The same release recorded 761,480 people participating in apprenticeships and 198,330 achievements across all ages. Starts, participation and achievements are different measures, so none should be read as a count of young people ready for an entry route.

What teachers said about preparation for work

A Department for Work and Pensions interim report published in April provides a separate view of the barriers the proposal seeks to address. It summarises an online survey of 1,004 UK primary and secondary school teachers conducted in March. In that survey, 73% said the curriculum gave too little attention to preparing young people for employment, and the same proportion said it gave too little attention to employment-related soft skills.

Support for additional routes was also high among respondents: 92% favoured more applied or vocational pathways before age 16, and 95% supported alternatives for young people who struggle with the current curriculum. The report says 60% thought young people had weaker soft skills than five years earlier and 66% thought they were less prepared for work. These are teachers’ assessments, not direct measurements of young people’s abilities or evidence that Milburn’s course would improve outcomes.