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Too many rubbish apprenticeships - OFSTED

Too many apprenticeships are a low quality waste of time and money...

Speaking to Sky News, Sir Michael said: "Those apprentices are being sold short, spending one year doing a pretty worthless job - not really an apprenticeship - and having no employment prospects at the end of it.

http://news.sky.com/story/1573946/low-skilled-apprenticeships-a-waste-of-time

Britain’s apprenticeship system is failing young people and wasting public money, the education watchdog will say on Thursday in a withering assessment of a flagship government policy.

http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/2f7a3746-7806-11e5-933d-efcdc3c11c89.html [paywall]

Reply 1

Simonthegreat

There are some that are really a total waste of time. It is just pure exploitation and a reason to pay peanuts. It takes away the opportunity for someone to have a proper job on a proper wage. Also some employers just use apprentices for a short term period with no real prospect of a proper job for them in the end. There has to be some proper legislation to stop this kind of exploitation.

Reply 2

WokSz

Apprenticeships don't necessarily need to promise a job at the end but should give the apprentices worthwhile training and on the job experience. Wages should be fair but not necessarily 'high'. Germany's apprenticeship model, despite its flaws, has worked for decades and one the British model should be built on.

Reply 3

nulli tertius

Original post by Joinedup

Too many apprenticeships are a low quality waste of time and money...

http://news.sky.com/story/1573946/low-skilled-apprenticeships-a-waste-of-time

http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/2f7a3746-7806-11e5-933d-efcdc3c11c89.html [paywall]

Many of the apprenticeships of the "golden age" were simply ways to delay access to a job. Young people spent 5 years as an apprentice being trained in skills that could be learned in weeks.

OFSTED overlooks the fact that in a job market that fetishes experience, these low grade apprenticeships provide the only skill that is needed for many jobs, the skill of having done the job before.

Reply 4

llys

There are either too few or too many, I can't decide which.

Reply 5

RichardBig

something is better than nothing, you have to think of it from the employers point of view. If you had two identical applicants, one with any experience or the one without, who would you take on?

Reply 6

Howard

Original post by nulli tertius

Many of the apprenticeships of the "golden age" were simply ways to delay access to a job. Young people spent 5 years as an apprentice being trained in skills that could be learned in weeks.

I wouldn't quite go to that extreme but you do make something of a point.

My dad was an apprentice as a carpenter as a young man and served a 5 year apprenticeship. According to him there was a hell of a lot of wasted time and he had all the skills he really needed to do his job proficiently after 3 years. The extra two just gave his employer an excuse not to pay him the same as everybody else.

Reply 7

nulli tertius

Original post by Howard

And the union two years to stop him taking the old men's jobs. Employer and union were complicit in this.

Carpentry, though was a job with real skills.

There were a lot of laggers, fitters, riveters and "makers" etc out there whose jobs had been denuded of serious levels of skill (if they ever had them) by the 1940s. A lot of different types of "makers" didn't make things from scratch at all. They were simply assemblers or finishers in trades where things had once been made by hand from sheet metal and the like.

People see the upside of the German system. I first came across the downside when I heard of someone who wasn't allowed to set up as a secondhand bookseller because you need a permit to be a secondhand bookseller and he hadn't done an apprenticeship.

Read the end of this article

http://news.yahoo.com/german-employers-struggle-apprentices-082616256.html

There is a lad who is doing a three apprenticeship to be a waiter in something close to a fast food restaurant.