Where are the apprentices to build the future?

THIS GOVERNMENT will enter the history books for many reasons, but will it be remembered for its efforts to promote apprenticeships? On balance, it should be given credit as the Northern Powerhouse Partnership stages a major conference today on skills.

In a recent speech to announce a review into the funding of university courses, the Prime Minister urged parents to “throw away” the oldfashioned attitude that university is the only desirable route for their offspring. The notion that vocational education is for “other people’s children” must change, she said.

Now Education Secretary Damian Hinds has told 100 business and education leaders that we’ve turned into a nation of “technical education snobs”.

Actually, I’d like to hear what the Labour leader, Jeremy Corbyn, has to say too. Skilling up the next generation of bricklayers, electricians, IT programmers, software engineers, childcare workers and motor mechanics can’t remain some hazy notion based on ‘equal opportunity’.

Labour has a lot to answer for in this respect. In the name of social mobility, former leader Tony Blair promoted university degrees for all. It was an admirable aim, but it had the knock-on effect of putting technical education in the shade. Now we are all paying the price.

For despite all the efforts of Theresa May and her team, Department for Education figures show a 24 per cent fall in apprenticeship starts for the 2017/18 academic year.

This is catastrophic. The programme should be steaming ahead, buoyed up by the sense that Great Britain needs to become a self-supporting, selfsustaining independent country.

Brexit is a factor of course; many companies, uncertain of what the outcome will be, are unwilling to make long-term commitments to employing further staff. However, this reluctance must sit aside the fact that controls on immigration are stemming the flow of overseas labour which has until now helped to build our homes, cared for our children and elderly people and answered our endless queries in call centres.

The only answer, practically, is to ensure that we have the framework to train enough of our own young people to meet the shortfall. Yet this is clearly not happening.

Brian Berry, chief executive of the FMB (Federation of Master Builders) is apoplectic. He is demanding that the Government make further reforms to the Apprenticeship Levy, which supports employers to take on apprentices.

He wants ministers to focus on small businesses instead of assuming that only large construction companies have apprenticeships to offer. “It’s the smaller firms that train more than two-thirds of all apprentices,” he says.

And I’d add that the Government needs to focus