Modern Apprenticeships - The state they're in...
- Prison Help! UKSSAC (UK Social Support & Careers)
- Nov 25, 2015
- 4 min read
After a damaging hiatus when they were dismissed as outdated relics of the ‘rust-belt’, apprenticeships have now been dusted off, doused in WD-40 and resurrected – Lazarus-like – for the new digital age. Indeed, with the Government proclaiming “… record numbers (starting) an apprenticeship – over two million (…) – since 2010”, their manifold benefits are once again at the heart of a ‘re-balanced’ post-industrial economy.
Why the sudden upsurge in interest? After all, the apprenticeship ‘brand’ has been around for over 800 years, and – tellingly – never lost its lustre in countries where people still actually make things. (Some think ‘branding’ to be a new idea, but medieval craft guilds were thinking along these lines long before Don Draper and Madison Avenue’s silk-suited sybarites). Having served an apprenticeship myself, I am happy to provide surety: a five year programme of both practical and academic study; the achievement of universally recognised vocational qualifications; a steadily rising income; and a growing self-esteem based on the knowledge that I was joining the lower echelons of the (soon to be usurped) ‘labour aristocracy’ . Employers and society benefitted too. Apprenticeships cultivated the skills base needed to replenish Britain’s pool of skilled labour. They also tempered youth unemployment, and were a crucially important rite de passage for generations of blue collar Britons (what American sociologists would no doubt call their ‘latent’ function).
But to recent developments. As a training provider, Prison Help! (a division of UK Social Support & Careers) is delighted that apprenticeships have returned to the fore. Firms taking the time to train their own practitioners – thereby increasing the supply of domestically sourced skilled labour – appears a social, economic and political win-win(-win). It is even more important to those in custody. The training of prison inmates to take vocational qualifications is vital to both their rehabilitation, and also to a more general reduction in rates of reoffending. Nevertheless, there is a ‘but’. According to statistics from the Department of Business, Innovation and Skills, the number of apprentices has risen from 491,300 in 2009 to 851,500 in 2014 – an increase of over 70%. Sounds encouraging, but a more detailed look at the stats reveals that over 40% (350,000) were aged 25 or over, and more than 5% were over 50 (50,000)! Increased training for older age groups is laudable, but why aren’t these future Acton Smith’s, Dyson’s, Grange’s and Hadid’s being spotted earlier? Also, isn’t offering a 52 year old an apprenticeship rather defeating the object? Clearly, something else is going on here. Outside of cutting-edge specialisms like technology and advanced engineering (aerospace, chemicals, nuclear, automotive, energy et al), the very idea of what constitutes ‘an apprenticeship’ is under attack. Instead of concentrating on teenage tyros entering the work force, what we are being presented with here increasingly is on-the-job training – but diluted and re-categorised so businesses can trouser easy subsidies. And you can hardly blame them! With the Government pledging to create a further three million if re-elected (to which we can add even more from our “pumped” Premier just last week), it seems we’re all going to be paying for this latest wheeze.
Unlike the fuzzy logic favoured by our legislators, Prison Help! will do things differently (and thereby save a lost generation of potentialcraftsmen and women). Its strategy is to work closely with corporate Britain, integrating both the training of school leavers and graduates with their eventual recruitment as skilled, qualified practitioners. Reinstating the old link between apprenticeships and jobs will produce employees motivated to near Stakhanovite levels, and also erase the box-ticking and financial wastefulness of current practices. As an Institute of Enterprise and Entrepreneurs Centre of Excellence (with Academy status to boot), P4G can now offer the kinds of qualifications and training businesses require (including the creation of apprenticeships), but bench-marked against the most rigorous and credible of international standards. Great news if you are under 25 and living in Burnley or Scunthorpe, but rather less so for the ‘d’jeunes’ of Bucharest or Szczecin.
In Hilary Mantel’s brilliant, acclaimed novels Wolf Hall and Bring Up The Bodies, she revealed that her anti-hero – the scheming consigliereThomas Cromwell – had served an apprenticeship as a blacksmith in late fifteenth century Putney. Thereafter – and in one of the most extraordinary acts of social mobility ever – he became in rapid succession: a mercenary, a banker, a multilingual merchant, possibly a spy and ended up asde facto King of England before his luck ran out in 1540. If he’d completed one of the apprenticeships on offer today – at the positively senescent age of 52 – he would probably have kept his head… but his life would have been rather less eventful!
Prison Help! is owned and operated by UK Social Support and Careers Limited. It is a social enterprise founded in 2015 by Steve Newell, Managing Director.. It has a highly experienced management team that aims to deliver realistic and reliable services to all levels of UK business. Our parent company – UK Social Support & Careers (UKSSAC) – supports all aspects of training, development and ongoing support for people returning to work following unemployment. It is also a one-stop solutions provider to corporate businesses on Corporate Social Responsibility, employee readiness training, workforce development and specialist professional prison consultancy services.
Comments