Cameron is right to focus on quality apprenticeships

If there are ‘no votes in skills’, as the old dictum goes, there seem to be some in apprenticeships. Hence David Cameron’s call this morning for apprenticeships to become a ‘gold standard’ qualification ranking alongside degrees from the best universities. His goal is to rectify Britain’s shockingly poor performance on mid-level skills compared to world leaders such as Germany.

So how hard would it be for us to catch the Germans? The numbers speak for themselves. Of every 1,000 employed people in England 11 are apprentices; compared to 40 in Germany. Here, fewer than one in ten employers are training an apprentice; in Germany it’s roughly a third. Although the present government has done well in closing the gap, catching up would still require something like a tripling of scale.

But Cameron is right to concentrate on making apprenticeships a ‘gold standard’ — because although we lag on quantity, we’re even worse on quality. An average apprenticeship in England is roughly a third of the length of an apprenticeship in Germany. You don’t need an NVQ in accounting to see that means our young people are likely to learn less. But our apprenticeships are also, in practice, less intensive. Unsurprisingly, a system that cajoles employers into short-term relationships with apprentices encourages less rigorous training than one in which employers commit more willingly for longer periods.

Counterintuitively, one indicator of this quality gap is that our apprentices are much better paid, earning in some cases 40 per cent more than their German counterparts. Far from this being profligacy on the part of employers or government, IT reflects the fact that many apprenticeships here just aren’t all that attractive. For young Germans an apprenticeship is a genuine period of training that will later pay off, and one that’s worth investing in, in similar fashion to a three year degree. In the UK by contrast, although the best apprenticeships lead to high wages later, the worst see no return at all.

Another difference with the Continent is that our apprentices are already far older — and they’re getting much older under the current government’s reforms. The number of people starting an apprenticeship rose 58 per cent in the coalition’s first year, an achievement rightly lauded by Cameron. Yet among under-19s they rose only 10 per cent, while, from mid 2010 to early 2011, apprenticeships among over-25s were up 234 per cent. Today, for the first time ever, there are more older apprentices than young.

In one sense, of course, more apprenticeships for over-25s means more retraining opportunities for those who missed out the first time around. Yet if we want to transform the skills of school leavers in the UK then apprenticeships also need to be expanded as a priority for the young.

So, overall, Cameron is right to focus on quality. But he needs to make sure that ambitions on quantity do not push quality in the wrong direction. The truth is, a really bad apprenticeship is little more than a lousy job — not something any government should boast about creating. One of the coalition’s most stinging critiques of Labour is that they too often let headline targets undermine what really mattered. It would be a bitter irony if they repeated the mistake here.

This blog first appeared on Coffee House, The Spectator Blog.