The training deficit: Accredited apprenticeships are the answer to filling skills shortages and finding young people jobs

Once upon a time, we all knew what an apprentice was. Their training in ancient crafts and trades went on for many years along lines set over many generations. They and their status were protected by statute, but otherwise the state had little role in the relationship between master and trainee. Pay was low, but their preparation was usually successful and the system was stable; vestiges of it survive in the training of barristers, accountants and medics today.

Elsewhere, however, the apprentice system fell into a long, pitiful decline, not least in engineering and technical vocations, where it collapsed even more rapidly than Britain’s manufacturing industry. Once, school leavers in Coventry, Glasgow and Manchester might have looked with confidence to a local apprenticeship leading to a secure, skilled, well-paid job in one of our great exporting enterprises. But today’s youngsters, under so-called modern apprenticeships, are left to do the photocopying. It is not surprising so many give vocational training little thought and instead turn to the universities for their intellectual fulfilment and the promise of a good salary in due course.

That so many leave university to take non-graduate jobs is hardly their fault; through neglect of apprenticeships, successive governments have badly distorted the higher-education system. Worse, they seem to have encouraged employers to take on apprentices with ill-thought-out, flimsy training schemes. Subsidies for training of one sort or another have, all too often, been used by companies as a way of taking on young people in entry-level jobs they were intending to take anyway, but at lower wages than they would otherwise have had to pay. For three decades and more, apprenticeships (where they exist at all) have failed to improve the stock of human capital in the British labour market. Even when unemployment has been high, shortages of skilled workers have created pinch points in the economy, choking off growth and leaving firms with little choice but to import foreign workers with the right skills. We even had to turn to Canada to find a governor for our own central bank.

The former Business Secretary Vince Cable made strenuous, sincere efforts to revitalise apprenticeships, as did Gordon Brown when he was Chancellor, and yet the results have been disappointing. As we exclusively reveal today, only 140 of 255,000 apprenticeships created in 2013-14 were in science and maths – hardly sufficient to compete in the “global race” ministers like to talk about. We should not be that surprised that Britain’s productivity record is so poor.

To return apprenticeships to their old usefulness and status a few things are needed. First, the state subsidy needs to be much lower and confined to the educational aspects of a scheme. Second, all apprenticeships should have minimum standards attached to them, and lead to the demonstrable accumulation of skills to follow a trade or profession. Third, reforms to higher education should be aimed at deterring those who would not benefit from a university education from adding to the surplus of graduates we are now experiencing. Further education needs to be restored as an equal of higher education; we might also bring back those rather grand apprentices’ certificates.