The competition has changed beyond recognition. Figures obtained by the BBC show there are now 11.3 applications for every Level 6 apprenticeship place in England, up from 2.8 two years ago. At E.ON, roughly 165 people apply for each degree apprenticeship role, against 45 in 2023.
For ambitious sixth formers keen on a career in finance, technology, engineering or professional services, the degree apprenticeship is not an easier alternative to university. It is frequently the harder option to get, and that changes what schools are being asked to do to assist their students.
A different kind of application
Schools understand university applications extremely well, and reasonably so, because the process has been broadly stable for decades and is predominantly academic. Teachers can advise confidently on predicted grades, subject combinations, personal statements and course selection.
A degree apprenticeship asks something else entirely. The student is applying to become an employee and to continue their education at the same time, which means the employer wants evidence of commercial awareness, communication, teamwork, judgement and a genuine understanding of the industry, alongside the academic potential. Saying that a student is interested in finance carries very little weight when the person reading the form has three hundred others near identical ones in front of them.
So the question facing sixth form leaders is no longer whether it has provided careers advice. It is whether its students have accumulated enough evidence to support the choices they are being encouraged to make.
The burden this places on careers teams
That is a substantial additional responsibility, and UCAS itself acknowledges that apprenticeship applications work quite differently from university admissions: vacancies appear throughout the year, every employer runs its own recruitment process, and students can make an unlimited number of applications alongside their five university choices. A careers adviser may therefore be supporting one student through a single familiar route while helping another navigate a dozen employers, each with its own deadlines, questions, online assessments and interview rounds. The second student almost certainly needs more of their time, not less.
There is an equity problem sitting underneath this too. Students whose parents work in professional careers already have access to the conversations, the contacts and the quiet explanations of how recruitment actually works. Everyone else depends on their school. Lucky breaks of the kind I had were never evenly distributed either, but at least the system did not pretend otherwise. UCAS research has found that one in three apprentices from lower socioeconomic backgrounds received no support at all with their application. If degree apprenticeships are genuinely going to widen opportunity, access to the experiences needed to win one cannot rest on who a student’s parents happen to know.
Enrichment has to produce evidence
Traditional work experience still has value, but a week spent observing people in an office no longer does much for a competitive application. Employers want to know what the student did, what they decided and what they took from it, which means good enrichment has to leave the student with something they can talk about intelligently at interview: a company they researched, an investment they analysed, a recommendation they made and then had to defend when someone challenged it.
There is a second benefit, and I would argue it is the more important one. Students find out whether they actually like the career they think they want. Choosing at sixteen or seventeen between university, an apprenticeship and employment is a serious decision, and careers education should be doing more than producing better applicants. It should be giving young people enough real exposure to make better choices.
Schools cannot carry this alone
The risk in all of this is that the success of degree apprenticeships transfers yet another workload onto teachers and careers departments who are already stretched. No school can be expected to recreate the professional environment of every industry in-house. Employers, universities and external providers need to take on more of it, and there is a straightforward commercial argument for doing so: if businesses want better-prepared applicants, helping students understand the industry before recruitment opens serves everybody.
I should declare an interest here. I have spent nearly twenty years running Junior Trader, putting sixth formers into experiential financial markets and commercial awareness programmes precisely because I kept meeting bright young people who had been told about the City but had never been anywhere near it. It is not a neutral position, and I would rather say so than pretend otherwise.
But the underlying point holds regardless of who provides the experience. Telling a student about a career is no longer enough. They have to be given the chance to try it.
When that student finally sits opposite an employer and is asked why this career and what they have done to prepare for it, they need a real answer. Providing the raw material for it is fast becoming one of the hardest jobs in sixth form education.
#TradeSafe
