Poor apprenticeships damage prospects

In the early 1980s, young people were offered a range of government schemes designed to get them off the dole, trained and into work. Despite the plethora of initiatives – chief among them the Youth Training Scheme – the problem appeared to persist. It wasn’t just the lack of jobs that was the problem, but that young people had lost confidence in work as a positive experience. The promise of training didn’t match the actual experience, with young people complaining that they were being exploited for cheap labour rather than trained for the workplace.

And it wasn’t that they expected their first experience of work to provide an easy route up into the upper echelons. My first experience of work did not give me expectations of being handed the keys to the kingdom because I was promised nothing, so I didn’t expect anything.

Fast forward to 2012 and we have a freakishly similar situation. A million young people are unemployed, meaning that one in five do not have a job. The government response is not dissimilar to the response of the 80s: a plethora of promises and schemes. The biggest of these is the expansion of the apprenticeship programme.

I have always thought that apprenticeships are a good thing. Back in my day, many of my friends went to college one or two days a week, but spent the rest of the week learning on the job alongside trained and experienced plumbers, electricians or even solicitors. The expectation of obtaining a set of journeyman skills and a job was not only a reasonable expectation, but it actually happened.

So it was with some dismay that I watched the recent BBC Panorama programme on television, which showed examples of many young people placed on training courses that were advertised and funded as apprenticeships, but were in effect either cheap labour with little content or prospects of a job at the end of it. In one example, it was clear that public money was being spent on apprenticeships that simply were not leading to jobs.

The problem appears to be the push to get the numbers up, but not necessarily the quality. I watched the programme with a sinking feeling as it was claimed that nearly 40 per cent of Morrisons staff were apprentices. These were not new jobs – they were current jobs and not necessarily skills. It seemed to me that I, as a taxpayer, was simply subsidising the Morrisons work for costs.

It is simply unacceptable to place any young person in the position where they are being exploited by people who are using the economic situation to make a quick buck at taxpayers’ and young people’s expense. Also, it introduces young people to a world in which the powerful exploit the weak and those without the right connections.

It’s no wonder that many of the young people interviewed in the Panorama investigation called the apprenticeships they had been sent on a waste of time.

So what is to be done so that we don’t repeat and deepen the mistakes that were made in the past? First, we need to ensure that public money goes only to apprenticeships that fit the old-fashioned but effective model: training alongside a seasoned professional that results in life-long skills and a career. This will mean that ministers may have to ensure quality, not just quantity.

Second, we need to incentivise employers to take on apprentices and provide placements that allow young people to train not just for present but also for future needs with an apprenticeship that is the starting point for life-long learning.

Given that 90 per cent of jobs are in the service sector, we need people who are capable of developing a new understanding of customer need and who are flexible and resourceful.

Just like the ’80s, the economic downturn will end eventually. We need young people to be ready to take up the opportunities available with a positive view of the workplace as opposed to a justifiable anger and cynicism focused on the world of training and work and to those who invent schemes and programmes to entice them.

Lord Victor Adebowale is visiting professor and chancellor at the University of Lincoln