National Apprenticeship Week belongs to the apprentices and employers who are making a real difference to the country’s skills base. It’s a reminder too of the importance of investing in our future. But for all the ministerial grandstanding, the fact remains that England has – according to the OECD – less than 10 apprentices per 1000 workers compared to Germany, Australia and Switzerland that supports in excess of 40 apprentices per 1000 workers. This has resulted in a manifest skills gap with our international competitors. Indeed, a chasm is now opening up in terms of how these nations are preparing for what the prime minister likes to call the ‘global race’.
With only two years to go to a general election, however, now is the time for Labour to put some detail behind its own industrial and training policies. As the UK teeters on the edge of a triple dip recession, the country is headed for a major productivity collapse. Cameron would argue that Britain has created one million private sector jobs since 2010, but the reality is that many of these jobs and new businesses are not of the high-value-add, wealth-generating variety. If they were then output would be much higher. Closer examination of the figures shows that these jobs are predominately in sectors that always benefit from loose monetary policy: shopping, personal services, mortgage brokers and the like. Despite the weak pound, the ‘rebalancing’ effort from domestic consumption to exports has simply not materialised. That’s because the hard-wired productive base of the economy has gone into free fall. The one thousand apprenticeships announced by Barclays this week is a welcome step in the right direction, whether or not it was squeezed out of them as penance for the LIBOR rate scandal. If Labour is to stand for one nation and something more than predatory capitalism at the next election then a different approach to skills and the economy is needed.
We can’t simply go back to 1997 and repeat the knowledge economy policies of Tony Blair and Gordon Brown. The country needs a new industrial policy that promotes what I call the ‘know-how economy’. For 30 years, policymakers have blindly put their faith in the expansion of higher education as the route to economic growth. Labour inadvertently gave the impression that it was only interested in the 50 per cent studying for a degree – knowledge at the expense of know-how. Looked at from the perspective of the international evidence you discover that there is absolutely no correlation between HE participation rates and growth. Germany sends far fewer people to university, 8 per cent fewer in fact than the UK, but has a thriving and highly productive skills base. Elsewhere, grads in America are increasingly voting with their feet. University enrolment rates have fallen for the first time in a generation. Graduate debt is reported to be above $1tn. Social mobility has stalled on both sides of the Atlantic. This is more than a temporary blip tied in with the Great Recession. Something far more fundamental and potentially transformational is underway. As Albert Einstein once said, ‘the only thing that interferes with my learning is my education.’
Millions of people around the world are taking to self-directed forms of learning. Ironically, American universities like Harvard, MIT and Stanford are at the forefront of this revolution. MOOCs – or massive online open courses are attracting thousands of sign-ups as ‘rock-star’ professors – formerly closeted away on campuses in their ivory towers charging $50,000 a year, are now taking their wisdom to the masses. Professor Michael Sandel’s Socratic ‘justice’ course at Harvard has been subtitled in Chinese and downloaded 20 million times. Thomas Friedman, author of the World is Flat, captures the new zeitgeist: ‘The world only cares, and will only pay for, what you can do with what you know.’ Competency based education is supplanting the ‘time-served’ model.
The brutal reality is that our expensive bricks and mortar three-year degree universities are no longer in vogue. Like the monasteries and medieval guilds that preceded them they will have to adapt or die in the coming generational shift. Of course we need strong universities and Britain is a world leader. Intellectual inquiry for its own sake is a virtue to be protected. But why should society afford these institutions an effective monopoly over state-backed student loans and R&D funding when those resources could be put to wider use? Why not create a genuine level playing field where £9000 a year can be taken as a loan to set up a company; a tax credit to transfer to an employer to take someone on as a higher-level apprentice or as a ‘future bond’ utilised by a redundant worker looking to retrain, and cash in, with a provider of their choice? Surely, that’s the acid test of a one-nation policy. A country where we put know-how at the centre of our economic policies: where society values the skills of all our people, and not just those with a degree.
———————————————————————————————————————————————-
Tom Bewick is chair of the International Skills Standards Organisation and is currently writing a book about the know-how economy
———————————————————————————————————————————————-
Thanks Tom. Yes, some interesting points and stats. You are quite right to emphasise the importance of striking the right balance between ‘academic’ and ‘vocational’ for a successful economy. The Labour 50% HE target was nothing more than a thoughtless ‘blanket bombing’ initiative when they thought they had the money to do it. No-one really knew what the outcomes would be but it sounded like a good idea (to someone).
However, it’s not just about the volume of participation in apprenticeships. It’s also about the quality and duration of learning. Most apprenticeship programmes in the UK bear little comparison with the quality of what’s on offer in the countries you mention. They’re really just old (and unfortunately not vintage) wine in new bottles. By and large most ‘apprenticeships’ are tarted up equivalents of the one and two year YTS schemes of the ’80s and ’90s. In calling them Apprenticeships they’re trying to evoke nostalgia for a real apprenticeship heritage (which I’m old enough to remember) and somehow pretend we are as good as Germany and Switzerland.
I think Richard did put his finger on what we really need which is better and longer periods of training.
Hope you’ll bear this in mind in the book.
Geoff Carroll
Absolutely! But there are centuries of obsessive snobbery about “trades” to be overcome in the UK. Much of the recent expansion in HE was geared towards the practical/ vocational (though I wish we could come up with better terms, redolent as these are of the prevalent snobbery) and many of these course were branded “Mickey Mouse” by the press and others. Perhaps we should have stuck to HNDs, many of which were replaced by these new degrees. It’s as if the only “real” degrees valued are Oxbridge Classics plus middle-class vocations – the law, priesthood and medicine.
As for YTS, it had many weaknesses but at least provided a clear framework for evaluating quality. In hindsight, the panic about youth training in the early 80s was more about sticking plaster for youth unemployment than about long-term commitments to raising the skills base across a broad swathe of occupations. No wonder people get cynical about “vocational initiatives.”
It’s also not just about education, but about a conscious industrial strategy that focuses on manufacturing as well as ‘knowledge’ industries. But that in turn requires a clear-headed view of what will make our manufacturing competitive. One of the key points is cheap and reliable energy, and I’m afraid renewables won’t do the trick. Is Labour prepared to commit itself to shale gas extraction for example, even if it means facing down the environmental lobby? The first industrial revolution was based on the key combination of cheap energy (coal in those days), advanced transport (canals then railways) and manufacturing innovation.
We need to be very clear that good, sustainable jobs for young people – including, as others have said, those who don’t go to university – comes before the green lobby.