The number of apprenticeships in England has more than halved in a year, plummeting from 117,000 to 48,000 placements last summer. Can you imagine the reaction if university places had been slashed by 60 per cent or Oxbridge offers, God forbid, had been cut so drastically? Middle-class parents would have been appalled that their children’s chances had been so randomly blighted. The government would have been castigated for ruining the lives of hopeful teenagers. Yet almost no one has said anything about apprenticeships. The subject hasn’t even been mentioned in recent cabinet meetings.
Further education in this country is turning into a catastrophe, but in cabinet “they are more likely to ask for biscuits than raise the issue”, according to one minister. A whole generation is in danger of being failed, condemned to remain in unskilled jobs for the rest of their lives, just when this country is trying to become more productive.
Nearly half of children in England and Wales go to university, where they pay on average £27,000 in tuition fees to learn in safe spaces overseen by vice-chancellors on lucrative salaries. But we should be more worried about the 51 per cent who didn’t necessarily do A levels and are getting almost no help when they leave school. Only 2,100 school leavers got onto higher or degree apprenticeships in 2016-17 out of half a million 18-year-olds. Many of the most prestigious and lucrative are being taken by pupils at top private schools, according to the Sutton Trust, leaving everyone else scrabbling for scraps.
The Times Guide to Elite Apprenticeships started three years ago after the paper held a debate on our Good University Guide and many of the audience asked if there was any alternative to a graduate life saddled with debt. I chaired the panel of four entrepreneurs who all suggested apprenticeships were the way forward.
The guide, published again today, shows what can be done with imagination and determination. PwC, the professional services firm, has announced that it will extend its new degree apprenticeship to a third university, Queen’s in Belfast. One hundred students a year who sign up to a four-year apprenticeship will study, graduate with a degree and a job, pay no fees and receive a salary while in training. But there are few placements like this, or those at Google, Marks & Spencer or the Royal Opera House. So what are creative, caring, computer-orientated, retail-obsessed or mechanically minded teenagers who don’t want to go to university supposed to do?
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Budgets for sixth formers have been slashed by 14 per cent in real terms since 2010, just when teenagers need smaller class sizes and inspirational teachers. In most of Europe funding increases as a pupil progresses through a school. Here there are not even careers advisers any more. So the majority of our teenagers are given little help at a crucial time in their lives.
These are the children we need for the future of this country: they are the builders the country wants to create 300,000 new houses a year; the IT specialists, chefs, joiners and nursery school teachers.
Apprenticeships was meant to be the government’s flagship policy. The apprenticeship levy was introduced last year at 0.5 per cent of an employer’s pay bill over £3 million; the estimate was that it would raise £3 billion for training and deliver three million apprenticeships by 2020.
But large companies have easily wriggled out of their commitments, using their budgets to train existing staff on management courses, and smaller companies have scrapped their old schemes as the paperwork has become too complicated.
The snobbery that surrounded apprenticeships has only got worse now that nearly half of training firms inspected by Ofsted have been found to be inadequate or to need improvement. Aspirational parents still think an apprenticeship is a step down from university and teenagers can’t work out how to get on to a scheme — they are so hard to access, the Ucas process for university entry seems easy by comparison.
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It doesn’t need to be this difficult. In the Middle Ages everyone wanted to secure an apprenticeship for their sons and sometimes even daughters with another knight, squire, blacksmith or jeweller. Only poor boys under Henry VI considered going to Eton College. The first national apprenticeship system was introduced by Elizabeth I in the Statute of Artificers, which prevented anyone from “exercising any art, mystery or occupation . . . except he shall have been brought up therein seven years as an apprentice”. Oliver Twist gave apprentice undertakers a bad name but everyone from Isambard Kingdom Brunel to railway workers was apprenticed during the Industrial Revolution.
There were 340,000 a year in 1900, according to the Institute of Directors. By 1965, 35 per cent of all male school-leavers were on some sort of scheme. The Germans still have 60 per cent of children in vocational training programmes. The Chinese have now imitated them, quoting Confucius on their apprenticeship websites: “Memorising knowledge only, no matter how much you learn, won’t educate a capable person”.
We can make apprenticeships work in Britain in the 21st century. But they need to be simplified, with a university-style application system, and businesses shouldn’t be allowed to wriggle out of their responsibilities. Our Times guide can point out the best courses each year, but Ofsted needs more resources to monitor the new training companies.
If immigration is destined to fall, it’s even more vital to train up a domestic workforce. That’s what the cabinet should have been discussing in Downing Street yesterday. They could start by inviting a few of their civil service apprentices to sit round the table at their next meeting.