Conservative commitments - 16, 15 fails

Creating 3 million new apprenticeships

I really don’t know enough about them. 3 million training courses sounds like a large deficit in the jobs market which we might otherwise have noticed. On the one hand, government-subsidized training for employers sounds like the government paying for job skills that a company should plan and pay for; on the other hand, education is expensive and a national good, and the government might legitimately contribute to it.

On balance, I think that job-specific education is much less of a national good that is the government’s business. Good general education creates engaged, well-informed and cultured citizens who make a country a better place. Good job-specific education earns the employer and employee more money.

One thing I can say is that apprenticeships are demand-led: the government offers funding but the apprenticeships themselves need employers, trainers and apprentices to come together. Another 3 million is ambitious. Furthermore, apprenticeships are flawed because they are a legitimate way of offering below the minimum wage. At the moment, many are simply excuses to pay young people too little; apprenticeships are a form of indentured servitude, forcing people to work in otherwise illegal poverty in order to get training that they should be getting as a normal part of a job.

In this sense, apprenticeships are part of a raft of policies that punish the young and force them to earn less and take on more responsibility than the older generation.

Further education institutions are also annoyed that apprenticeships are getting a lot of funding when large cuts are being made to FE. Apprenticeships are a limited and narrow type of education that are not applicable to all types of work. We left the apprentice and master system behind when we moved away from guilds and feudal government. If the government were really devoted to education and skills, FE would see funding as well. Instead we have indentured servitude of the young.

We had 850,000 apprentices at last count, costing the government almost £1.5bn. Another 3 million at the same average cost, if they were to be found, would be 3 million people earning below the minimum wage and costing the government £5.3bn a year. The Conservatives idly predicted that this new policy will cost £300m a year. Only 1760% wrong.