It’s National Apprenticeship Week – but it seems that young people are being put off choosing to do apprenticeships due to a lack of accurate information.

New research has revealed that many young people received little or no information about apprenticeships while they were at school and that there are still plenty of misconceptions about apprenticeships out there – including how much apprentices earn.

The majority of the school-leavers involved in the research believed that apprentices earn less than £200 per month and 4 per cent believe that apprentices work for nothing!

In fact, the average weekly wage for an apprentice is £257. This is set to rise later this year when the national minimum wage for apprentices increases from £3.30 to £3.40 per hour, from October 1st.

It isn’t just the lack of information about an apprentice’s wages that is putting young people off. The study found that one in ten young people didn’t know that apprenticeships offer nationally recognised qualifications.

Around 30 per cent of 16-18 year-olds said that the information they had received about apprenticeships from their school or college was “poor”, “very poor” or “non-existent.” This is compared to just 6 per cent of pupils who thought information regarding the option of going to university was not good.

Elsewhere, 8 per cent of school-leavers said they thought that apprenticeships were for those who couldn’t get into university – this is despite the fact that some apprenticeship programmes offer qualifications which are equivalent to a Bachelor’s or a Master’s degree.

With so much misinformation flying about, it is clear that more needs to be done to broadcast the truth to young people about apprenticeships and National Apprenticeship Week hopes to offer a high profile platform for giving the facts about apprenticeships some extra exposure.

As the Government marches on with its ambitious plan to increase the number of apprenticeship starts in England to 3 million by 2020, we must expect their campaign to dispel misconceptions about apprenticeships to continue apace.

But ensuring that all apprenticeship schemes really are top quality – and that they really are a genuine alternative to university – still appears to be an uphill battle for the Government and it’s message that’s proving difficult to hit home. They are now busily deploying apprentices into UK schools, in an effort to persuade young people that apprenticeships really are a positive route into meaningful employment and not just a scrapyard for university failures.

But ultimately, the Government’s big drive to big-up apprenticeships should not be about diminishing the perceived superiority of university over apprenticeships, of the academic option versus the vocational route. It’s about being given, and having access to, the right information about all the education and training options available to you, which suit you best – not just your parents or your school. And it’s the delivery and accuracy of that information that the Government must address if apprenticeships are to stand any chance of succeeding.