Most of the growth in adult FE learners last year was down to Multiply courses, FE Week analysis has found.
New participation statistics released today show that of the 75,300 extra adult learners in education and training in 2022/23, 70 per cent took a course through the prime minister’s maths scheme.
There were just over 1.8 million adult learners in FE and skills in 2022/23, up 5.8 per cent on the year before. While now firmly back to pre-pandemic levels of 2019/20, there were still 1.3 million fewer adult learners in the system than in 2010/11.
This is the first-time participation statistics have been released for a full academic year of the Multiply programme, which was announced by then-chancellor Rishi Sunak in the 2021 spending review and launched the following April.
