decisions, decisions
Our television screens have recently been filled with the annual scene of expectant teenagers joyfully receiving their exam results and deciding how to embark on life’s rich tapestry of experiences. Good on the lot of ‘em and I sincerely wish them every happiness and success. For some university beckons, for others apprenticeships and work schemes, whilst others may slink back to their darkened bedrooms for a lifetime on social media.
It was refreshing to hear the new kid on the block, Andy Burnham, openly discuss the validity of ‘hands-on’ vocational careers and accepting the idea that ‘debt-trap’ degrees are not the only determinant of ambition and success. The PM stopped short of admitting we’re sending too many young people to university but promised to place technical qualifications on a par with academic ones. Offering those more practicably-disposed pupils clearer routes into careers such as catering, engineering, farming, care work or hospitality makes eminent sense. But to turn the people-pleasing rhetoric into actual jobs and worthwhile opportunities is going to take some effort.
First things first, it’s still about the economy, stupid, and it’s our stagnant economy that accounts for the majority of problems we need to address. Put simply we’re not generating enough good jobs for either the ‘blue-collar hard-hats’ or ‘white-collar mortar-boards’. Ministers can tinker with educational reforms, such as expanding University Technical Colleges, as much as they like but the key to better, and increased, outcomes is boosting economic productivity. We all, as a society, need to crack-on a bit.
Secondly, the need to support, and the manner of that support to those actually doing the hiring needs to be dramatically changed. The vast majority of the trade, retail and hospitality sectors consists of small-and-medium-sized enterprises, many of them sole traders. Research from Screwfix shows that many want to take on apprentices and trainees but each stage of the process – from the paperwork, to recruiting, to managing apprentice workload – is either too complicated or too expensive, and all too often this prevents it from happening. Employer support of up to eight-grand is available but the process is so complex and time-consuming that almost 50% of tradespeople who hired a young person last year claimed no funding whatsoever.
Unless this is fixed urgently, the problem will remain and our future generational talent will continue to go to waste.
