Fact check: Apprenticeship statistics and AI-generated teacher image

This round-up of claims has been compiled by Full Fact, the UK’s independent fact-checking charity which works to give people access to reliable information they can trust.

Have apprenticeship starts risen or fallen under Labour?

Conservative shadow business minister Bradley Thomas MP claimed in Parliament last week that the number of new apprentices has fallen in the past two years.

Speaking in a debate with the education minister, Paul Waugh MP, Mr Thomas said: “When comparing the academic year 2025/26 with 2023/24, the number of people that have started apprenticeships has dropped by 9%.”

Mr Thomas’s office provided Full Fact with figures for England that show this claim is based on a calculation comparing the number of apprenticeship starts in the first nine months of the 2025/26 academic year – which is the latest data currently available – with the number in the whole academic year of 2023/24.

That is obviously not a fair comparison, so it cannot tell you whether the number of starts is rising or falling.

If you compare the first nine months of 2025/26 with the equivalent nine months of 2023/24 instead, then the number of apprenticeship starts has risen by about 11%.

Later in the debate, Mr Waugh said apprenticeship starts “have gone up by 8.7% under this Government, whereas apprenticeship starts collapsed under the last government since 2020”.

That 8.7% figure looks like the change between 2025/26 (August to April) and the same months the previous year, so it is a fair comparison.

Mr Waugh appears to be wrong about the number of starts under the last government “since 2020”, however. Between 2020/21 and 2023/24, the number actually increased. (Although the figure for 2020/21 may have been affected by the pandemic).

There was a marked fall in the number of starts in the years before 2020 – from around 500,000 per year from 2011 to 2017, to roughly 350,000 annually in the years since. This effectively reversed a large rise that occurred in the early 2010s.

Full Fact approached Mr Waugh’s office for comment.

Image of teachers saying they would quit over Pride flag removal is AI-generated

Many people on social media appear to have been fooled by an AI-generated picture that supposedly shows a group of teachers protesting against the removal of Pride flags from their classrooms.

The image shows a group of four women standing in a classroom holding a sign that reads: “If you make us take the Pride flags out of our classrooms we will quit teaching!” Hundreds of people have commented on a Facebook post sharing the image, suggesting they believe it is genuine.

But the picture is not real. It contains an invisible SynthID watermark that shows it was made using Google’s AI tools. And there are also a number of visual clues that indicate the image has been fabricated, including nonsense text and an alphabet chart on the wall which misses out the letters “a” and “i”.