What’s gone wrong with apprenticeships?

By Tom Ogg

As a teacher in north London for students who have been expelled from school, I’m pretty clear that few of my students really want to do more schooling after they finish their GCSEs. Modern apprenticeships are a much more attractive option for my charges. The prominent advertising campaign featuring Sir Alan Sugar suggested that the apprenticeships system was being taken seriously by the Labour government as a proper route for young people into training and employment.

But if you search for an apprenticeship on the government’s flagship website, you’ll be sorely dissapointed. How many apprenticeships in London are there, say, for construction? Zero, it turns out. OK, what about sports and fitness in London? Zero again. It turns out that there are only 28 apprenticeships in the whole of London. The site only lists a total of 501 vacancies for apprenticeships for the whole of the UK.

What hope for my students, or other students in North London who would like to take a vocational route into employment? Very little, apparently. And whose fault is it? Is this just another sign of how serious the recession in the UK is, or is the government to blame for poorly organising the system?

If you want to search for yourself, you can go to apprenticeships.org.uk and click ‘search for vacancies’, then click on ‘search by occupation type/job role’ and you can choose your options to see just how many apprenticeships are available.