Apprenticeship achievement rates come from the National Achievement Rate Tables. They describe people who left an apprenticeship programme in the year – not people currently on one, and not the same population as the starts figures.
Three rates are published, and they are built from three counts.
| Count | What it covers | England, 2024/25 |
|---|---|---|
| Leavers | Programmes in the achievement-rate cohort for that year. | 299,960 |
| Completers | Apprenticeships recorded as successfully completing the learning programme. | 200,210 |
| Achievers | Completers who achieved the apprenticeship. | 196,320 |
| Rate | How DfE calculates it | England, 2024/25 |
|---|---|---|
| Retention rate | learning aims completed ÷ leavers | 66.7% |
| Pass rate | learning aims achieved ÷ aims successfully completed | 98.1% |
| Achievement rate | programme aims achieved ÷ number started | 65.4% |
The rates are all based on the Hybrid End Year: the hybrid end year is the later of the achievement year, expected end year, actual end year or reporting year of a programme.
Why you must not read the achievement rate alone
The achievement rate is retention and pass combined, so on its own it cannot tell you what happened. Two providers can report the same achievement rate for opposite reasons.
Nationally, the recent improvement in achievement rates has been overwhelmingly retention-driven: between 2023/24 and 2024/25 the achievement rate rose +4.9 pts, while retention rose +4.8 pts and the pass rate rose only +0.4 pts.
That does not mean differences between individual providers, standards or sectors are primarily caused by retention. Differences in provision mix can materially affect those comparisons. The national trend and a particular comparison are different questions, and the first does not answer the second.
That is why this resource always shows all three rates, and never the achievement rate on its own.
Reading a low rate properly
A low achievement rate is not evidence of poor teaching until you have looked at which component is low.
- Low retention, high pass – apprentices are leaving before completing their learning aims. Look at employment continuity, job changes, programme length, and how apprentices were matched to the standard.
- High retention, low pass – rare nationally, and would point at assessment readiness.
- Small cohort – a rate built on a few dozen leavers moves violently year to year for reasons that have nothing to do with the provision.
Suppression
DfE suppresses values where cohorts are too small to publish safely. In the underlying provider-level file, 259,804 cells are suppressed or unavailable. A provider with no published rate has not necessarily performed badly, and suppressed values should never be estimated or reverse-engineered from totals.