This paper aims at contributing to the discussion about the need for EU-wide comparable statistics that capture precisely how many apprentices there are in a country in a particular year.

It presents Cedefop data on apprenticeship participation based on national sources, without the ambition of providing comparable data per country or across countries. It also offers some reflections on the challenges that make it difficult to estimate apprenticeship participation in EU Member States. In support of these reflections, the paper discusses two other EU-wide sources that seem most relevant in any attempt to estimate the number of apprentices: the European labour force survey, 2016 ad hoc module and the European labour cost survey.