Full Fact, the UK's independent fact-checking charity, has published a round-up of recent claims, including an apprenticeship statistics dispute in Parliament and an AI-generated image that fooled social media users.
Apprenticeship starts under Labour
Conservative shadow business minister Bradley Thomas MP claimed in Parliament that the number of new apprentices has fallen in the past two years. The reverse is true when comparing like-for-like periods.
Speaking in a debate with 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 showing the claim is based on a calculation comparing apprenticeship starts in the first nine months of the 2025/26 academic year – the latest data available – with the whole academic year of 2023/24, which is not a fair comparison.
Comparing the first nine months of 2025/26 with the equivalent nine months of 2023/24 shows apprenticeship starts have risen by about 11%.
Minister's response scrutinised
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 appears to compare 2025/26 (August to April) with the same months the previous year, making it a fair comparison. However, Mr Waugh appears wrong about starts under the last government “since 2020” – between 2020/21 and 2023/24, the number actually increased, though the 2020/21 figure may have been affected by the pandemic.
There was a marked fall in starts before 2020, from around 500,000 per year from 2011 to 2017 to roughly 350,000 annually in subsequent years, reversing a large rise from the early 2010s. Full Fact approached Mr Waugh's office for comment.
AI-generated teacher image
An AI-generated picture showing a group of four women in a classroom holding a sign reading “If you make us take the Pride flags out of our classrooms we will quit teaching!” has fooled many social media users. Hundreds commented on a Facebook post sharing it, believing it genuine.
The image contains an invisible SynthID watermark indicating it was made using Google's AI tools, and visual clues – including nonsense text and an alphabet chart missing the letters “a” and “i” – reveal it is fabricated. Full Fact advises checking whether content comes from a verifiable and trustworthy source before sharing, and offers a guide to spotting AI content and a toolkit on identifying bad information.
