Numbers have rocketed: 500,000 people started apprenticeships in 2010/11 – 63% up on the previous year.
"Right here in Crewe over 5,700 people have started apprenticeships, 43,000 people have had a tax cut," he told a small and rather sceptical-looking crowd of railway-carriage engineers.
Claims that men are more inclined to go for jobs or apprenticeships aren't necessarily borne out in fact – each year since 2010, more women than men have started apprenticeships.
In the recent Industry Apprenticeship Council annual survey, 89% of respondents reported that friends had either started apprenticeships or wished they'd taken them, while 74% said that having started their apprenticeships, their friends and family thought more highly of the system.
In all, some 422,700 people started apprenticeships of all kinds in the academic year just gone – a rise of more than half on the year before when the figure was 279,700.
The growth in the number of under-19s starting apprenticeship has slowed.
He argued that the coalition's vision of a smaller state meant that this had to change and big organisations were waking up to the need to act by starting apprenticeship schemes.
Can their outcomes discriminate profiles of respiratory health in healthy subjects starting apprenticeship in occupations with a risk of asthma?
Prevalence of symptom[ 18, 19] and BHR[ 19, 20] were similar to or lower than those found in other studies of trainees starting apprenticeship and exposed to high weight molecular agents.
Others are taking gap years or starting apprenticeships.
