I recently had a chat with a local tradesman who has taken on a sixteen year old apprentice to replace a carpenter. The conversation was strange mostly because his worries about his new employee related mostly to this child behaving , well like a sixteen year old child.

This set me thinking, when did we start expecting our children to leave secondary school at sixteen fully formed, fully trade skilled, and ready to slot into the workplace without further development? Is that really what school is for or is it a reaction to death of proper workplace training in the 1980's? A death we are now experiencing as a “skills shortage” while those who created it and have spent the last three decades blaming teachers & whining about the cost of actually creating the skilled workforce they desire or the “red tape” if any government attempted to impose responsibility upon them.

Just how many young people today are looking at a future markedly different from the glossy apprentice adverts were photogenic youngsters do apprenticeships to degree level in blue chip companies, while their admiring parents look on aghast that such beneficence should and could exist? The line “we are graduates and you are doing the same work as us” being the point where the advert jumps the shark.

The real thing we have forgotten it seems that an apprenticeship is more than just on the job training its an introduction to adulthood and its as much as a social obligation on the employer as a commercial one. It was, at least, before we became, in the words of Margaret Thatcher “the world first post industrial society” very much part of the metamorphosis from schoolchild to adult and if we are to bring this apprenticeship system back employers need to understand that they nurturing children to adulthood as much as they are training a skilled worker, and that maturity levels may not match chronological age in all apprentices. They need to be forced by legislation to introduce the same support and mentoring systems we routinely install into universities for the children of a different social strata.

For this to happen the first stage will be to end the constant knocking and deriding of the uk worker and the qualifications gained at school.It was terrifying to me when I worked there to see the UK GCSE system was well known all over South America, at least amongst english speakers who read British newspapers online, well known for being “not worth the paper its written on” and taken by “youths who have no concept of work and responsibility” etc, etc. Take a bow Iain Duncan Smith, your appalling, ignorant rhetoric has crossed the globe! Instead let us deride those who moan about the lack of skills but who avoid the tax that pays for those skills, those employers unwilling to train employees fully or pay a living wage to those with skills and who flounce out of the UK to places like Malaysia at the first hint that may have to do both while whining about EU red tape . These are the true culprits in Britain’s skills gap and they should be brought to book for it .