Labour has questioned why ministers are spending more than £2.5m with a single advertising agency to promote apprenticeships, when the number of people entering such schemes is dropping and the government seems to have abandoned its targets in the area.

A written parliamentary question to the Department for Education (DfE) from the shadow education secretary, Angela Rayner, found the department was paying £2.55m in the 2018-19 financial year to promote apprenticeships.

The money going to M&C Saatchi, which is a favourite advertising agency of the Conservative party, was being spent on “a new integrated communications campaign to change perceptions of apprenticeships and to encourage more people to see the positive value that apprenticeships can have on their business or their career”, the junior education minister Anne Milton said in the reply.

The contract was awarded after a competitive tender, she added, and also covered areas such as research and digital services.

But Labour queried the spend when the latest official figures for apprenticeship take-ups show that at, 290,500 in the first three quarters of the 2017-18 academic year, they were 34% lower than in the same period in 2016-17 and 24.5% lower than the year before that.

The government remains committed to expanding apprenticeship opportunities but has struggled to push up the numbers, and has seemingly abandoned a longstanding target to create 3m apprenticeships by April 2020.

The pledge was initially made by David Cameron in 2015, and continued under Theresa May. But after the manufacturers’ representative group EEF, which is heavily involved in apprenticeships, said it seemed unlikely the target would be reached, Downing Street declined to confirm it was still in place.

Rayner said: “Austerity is not over for our colleges, but this government is more than happy to hand out millions of pounds of taxpayers’ money to the Tories’ favourite advertising agency after abjectly failing to meet their own apprenticeships targets.

“Labour will genuinely end austerity, providing free lifelong learning in colleges and invest in workplace training as part of a national education service for the many, not the few.”

Milton said: “The aim of the new campaign is to grow the number of high-quality apprenticeships offered, and started, by 2020 and to change perceptions of apprenticeships to encourage more people to see the positive value they can have on their business or their career.

“Our reforms have driven up investment in the quality of apprenticeships to build skills and give people more opportunities to succeed … In the last 12 months more than 100,000 more people have started these new apprenticeships, putting them on the path to success in a range of cutting-edge and exciting industries such as aerospace engineering, nuclear science and architecture.”