Rachel Hamada looks at the case for a massive overhaul of apprenticeships in Scotland
Thinking big isn’t always a Scottish characteristic. But it doesn’t get much bigger than the contract that looks set to be landed at the Rosyth dockyards, and the scale of the work that is going to be carried out there.
That job is to do the final assembly and fit the HMS Queen Elizabeth and HMS Prince of Wales – the largest ships that will ever have been built for the Royal Navy. Gigantic aircraft carriers, the two ships involve a thorough overhaul of the facilities at Rosyth and the introduction of a vast Goliath crane that will dominate the skyline for miles around and can lift 1,000 tonnes. In engineering and shipbuilding terms, this is the big time.
Driving round the Rosyth site the day after Scottish Secretary Des Browne was here to witness the start of a £50m investment project to the dockyard in preparation for the super carriers, the echoes of the past are resounding. Look one way, and you see decommissioned Polaris nuclear submarines. Look another, and you see the huge pit where Trident was to be assembled in the 1990s. Rosyth resounds with history, and back in the mid-1980s was a bustling place with over 6,500 workers plying their trade. Since then it has been through difficult times, reaching a nadir last year when jobs numbered only 1,300 or so. But now the place is starting to thrive again. When we visit, in one dock they are refurbishing navy minehunters for sale to the Estonian navy. In a nearby workshop, workers are creating the modular units that will help to make up a new hospital for Birmingham. Times have changed, and Rosyth has a future again.
The company heading up this work is Babcock Marine, and the particularly good news for the local community is that Babcock is serious about apprenticeships. As well as older skilled workers, training manager Phil Crichton explains, Babcock wants to take on and train enthusiastic young people and give them skills for the future. The company is working in partnership with local colleges Adam Smith and Carnegie to get the right young people on board. The majority will be carrying out fabrication and welding work, as required to assemble the aircraft carriers, but Crichton says that Babcock wants to make sure that apprentices have transferable skills that will be relevant to future projects as well. The plan is to keep retraining apprentices as the demands of the work change.
“We put a ladder out in front of them, and they can climb as high as they want
We put a ladder out in front of them, and they can climb as high as they want 
,” says Crichton. Some of the brightest young people can go all the way from an apprenticeship through to first class honours at university via this parallel route. The point is, this kind of vocational education isn’t a cop-out or for school drop-outs – it’s a clear route into work and to a high-level job if that is what you make it.”
Babcock has also organised apprentice mentors – normally supervisors or managers – to support young people at the yard. With the shipyard expecting to take on at least 50 apprentices this year, and many more after that, the old tradition of apprenticeships at Rosyth is finally being revived.
One major alumnus of the Rosyth apprenticeship is Labour MSP John Park. After leaving school at 15, he became an electrical fitter apprentice, splitting his time between the dockyards and Fife College – now Adam Smith College. He ended up working at the yards for many years and making his way up through the union ranks. After becoming a full-time union worker, he eventually made the jump to the Scottish Parliament at last May’s election. Despite being a new face, he has been given the skills brief for Labour, and has been entrusted with drawing up a major Bill that will address apprenticeships and skills – one of the party’s key priorities.
This was reflected in the debate on the SNP Government’s Budget Bill. The key focus of Labour’s amendment to the Bill was to call on the Government “to continue throughout 2008-09 to seek ways to expand programmes of skills and training generally and modern apprenticeships specifically”. This amendment was passed by all the parties except for the Liberal Democrats (although Labour then failed to support the Bill including its own amendment).
There are currently about 33,000 modern apprentices in Scotland, across a wide range of skills areas. However, Park says that success stories, such as that at Babcock, are the exceptions to the norm and much more has to be done to encourage employers to take on apprentices. He has never had a letter about a young person failing to get a college or a university place, he explains, but he regularly hears from parents whose sons or daughters have failed to secure an apprenticeship.
How would Park define an apprenticeship? “A vocationally-based training scheme that has a clear link to employment and employers.” How long should an apprenticeship be? For more technical and advanced subjects, three to four years, he says, and for subjects involving less theory, two to three years, but these lengths won’t be set in the Bill – they will be up to employers and industry sectors.
So, what will the Bill he is drafting entail? Much of the content matches that of the UK Apprenticeship Reform Bill (see box), but developed for a Scottish context. The Bills have in common a number of factors: an entitlement to an apprenticeship for young people aged 16 to 18, providing they meet the entry requirements set by the relevant sector; a duty on public bodies to offer apprenticeships; and a duty on the Government to promote apprenticeships to public organisations.
There is a risk that the debate around apprenticeships could become uber-party political, exacerbated by perceptions that the Scottish Bill is a tartan version of what Westminster is proposing down South, raising nationalist hackles. But the hope for now is that there is enough political will amongst politicians of all parties to surmount differences of allegiance and thrash out major plans for the future that will benefit Scotland, its youth and its economy. Between now and 2017, it is projected that around 100,000 new job openings will occur every year in Scotland – there is a desperate need to create the home-grown skills base required to fill these jobs.
The Bill cannot be considered in a vacuum – there are other factors that will impact on its success. For example, there needs to be the right support for school pupils to decide what their own strengths and passions are. “We need to be identifying the strengths of young people at an earlier age. It is crucial to have the right advice, to understand your own skills and strengths, as well as realism about the demographics of what’s out there – that should help to build confidence. When I was 14 or 15, I didn’t know what I wanted to do – an apprenticeship was the right thing to do, but I was doing a wide range of qualifications at the time, and there was nobody except one guidance teacher helping me decide what I should do,” says Park. Colleges such as Ayr College have schemes whereby school pupils can come into college and meet apprentice groups and talk to them – such initiatives could help educate young people about their options.
There also needs to be improvement in literary and numeracy at school level – for without reasonable levels of literacy and numeracy, it is harder for young people to meet the entry requirements for apprenticeships.
What the Bill offers could be major, including the possibility of cracking that old chestnut of “parity of esteem”. When Labour was punting the idea of skills academies, the language was sometimes unhelpful, often implying that these places would be ghettoes for less bright and troubled pupils, who couldn’t hack the more glorious academic route. A major political boost to modern apprenticeships, it’s hoped, could finally lay to rest the idea that vocational education is inferior, which has sometimes led to young people with practical talents going to university because that is the done thing, or what is expected of them by parents or teachers.
Dr Peter Hughes, chief executive of Scottish Engineering, says that there is a constant battle with headteachers thinking that if children aren’t going to university, they have failed. “The perception of apprenticeships is sometimes about 50 years out of date!” Apprentices can be on £15,000 to £20,000 as soon as they finish and their salary will increase fast after that, he says. The advantage for employers is that apprentices are “oven ready”, with a broad base of transferable skills, whereas “some graduates come out of university, don’t want to get their hands dirty, don’t have the right skills and expect ten grand more...”
Employer involvement in training should ensure that young people are developed in a way that is useful to business and to the economy going into the future. However, Scotland is a nation of small businesses as much as big enterprise. According to the most recent Labour Force Survey, 69 per cent of apprenticeships take place in firms with fewer than 50 staff. For smaller businesses, taking on apprentices is a substantial risk. It’s a long-term, costly human investment that could choose, after four years, to hotfoot it down the road to a competitor for an extra few grand a year or better holiday benefits (although a Learning and Skills Development Agency report showed that most former apprentices did choose to stay with their original employer, and showed loyalty to them). Employers need more support to take such risks, says Park. “There should be wage supplementary support for businesses doing training so that the risk is proportionate.”
The Federation of Small Businesses agrees that the costs to small businesses with relatively few staff can be critical, and that government support is therefore essential.
However, it does express some concern about the idea of young people being “entitled” to an apprenticeship. “A key concern for small businesses, and indeed any organisation, would be that they are compelled to take on board unsuitable or under-motivated apprentices. SMEs must continue to have the right to take on apprentices that they judge to have
an appropriate skill set and attitude, according to their own criteria,” warns spokesman Stuart Mackinnon. “It should be small businesses themselves that decide whether or not they can afford the resources spent on taking on apprenticeships.” He also says that a universal entitlement could run the risk of devaluing the qualification.
The CBI’s take is, like Park’s, that young people need to be properly informed about their choices in order to make the right decisions. “Not all 16 to 18-year-olds are suited to apprenticeships and this should be addressed by ensuring that young people have all of the necessary information relating to what a modern apprenticeship involves before committing to one,” says policy executive Iain Ferguson. “Employers are willing to play their part in promoting the benefits to young people in schools before they take their decision. The key here is to ensure the quality of careers advice on offer to young people helps them to take the decision that is right for each individual.” He also stresses that, while CBI Scotland welcomes the ambition to raise the number of people on apprenticeship schemes, “there must be a focus on quality and relevance as well as quantity”.
Working with employers to find out the best way forward is part of the plan for Park, but he is clear that stimulating supply to increase demand must be part of the equation and that apprenticeships can’t be left to the markets alone. “That failed in the 1980s and 90s and left us with the skills shortages we have now.” While saying he doesn’t want the debate to be party political, he does criticise the Government for reducing business rates and says that the money could instead have been spent on directly incentivising businesses to train young people. He also points out that the SNP has said that it won’t have targets for apprenticeships but that it has set targets for 50,000 training places that have yet to be defined. “They can’t have their cake and eat it.”
There are clearly arguments to be had in the Chamber about how the future of apprenticeships will unfold, with Labour more convinced of the size of the role to be played by apprenticeships than the SNP. Meanwhile, not everyone outside the Parliament is convinced that apprenticeships are the be-all and end-all of training.
Craig Thomson, principal at Adam Smith College, which is supplying Babcock with many of its apprentices, queries CR Smith chairman Gerard Eadie’s claim that modern apprenticeships are the “Rolls Royce” of vocational education. “If someone is doing an HNC, does that mean they’re doing the Mini?”, Thomson asks. He is positive about SNP politicians’ time in power so far, saying that they are listening and that their minds are less cluttered by the past than the previous Government’s. However, he worries that the creation of a major skills agency could emphasise existing faultlines in the education system. “If that is the skills agency then how is it linked to the thousands of students at Adam Smith, where our funding and direction doesn’t come from there at all?”
Apprenticeships are important, says Thomson – but not in isolation. “We are never going to sort out Scotland’s problems just by looking at apprenticeships.” The idea that college-based qualifications (such as NQs and HNCs) are academic routes that are somehow less valid than modern apprenticeships is “absurd”, he says, stressing that whatever happens with apprenticeships, it needs to be joined up with the rest of the vocational education system in Scotland.
A major expansion of the apprenticeship programme also has considerable resource implications for colleges, which deliver most of the classroom component. Shelagh McLachlan at Ayr College says that capacity will be a challenge, because of a fixed number of staff and rooms. “As we are funded by the Scottish Funding Council, we really can’t do more than we have the money for.” However, she said that the college would try to be as flexible as possible and opening hours could be extended to accommodate more students. “Certainly, the most popular thing we get asked for is apprenticeships in construction.”
Park’s Bill would include a right to public funding for apprenticeship programme expansion under the new
“entitlement”, but the costs aren’t yet clear. Eadie who, as well as being the chairman of CR Smith, is vice chair of the Prince’s Trust in Scotland and started his own career as a glazing apprentice, says that it shouldn’t be about hand-outs or diverting funds from colleges. “But it would show that government understands the business realities for all types and sizes of employer and would demonstrate, beyond any doubt, a serious commitment to motivate, train and ultimately provide everyone with a means to a sustainable future.
“Apprenticeships are employment with training – not training then work - that’s why they are so effective. We have plenty of training programmes and further education courses, when what’s really needed is work. Apprenticeships have to be the way forward.”
Meanwhile, the delivery mechanism is rapidly changing – Scottish Enterprise’s and Highland and Island Enterprise’s training and skills functions will move over to new agency Skills Development Scotland in just a few weeks and local enterprise companies, which have traditionally delivered apprenticeships, will be phased out soon. Employers are raising concerns that they have not been provided with information about the imminent switch to Skills Development Scotland – either in relation to budgets for existing trainees or for the apprentice intake in the coming year.
At the moment, things are pretty up in the air. With Park’s Bill due to be lodged in the Parliament in mid-March and then going to consultation, as well as the launch of Skills Development Scotland and hopefully, more clarification about the direction it will take, the debating floor has really become open to all interested parties.
Scotland has a great number of major infrastructure projects on the cards – from the aircraft carriers at Rosyth to the new Forth Crossing, the Glasgow Commonwealth Games in 2014, the Edinburgh tram project and swathes of new housing and leisure developments. Major UK projects such as the London Olympics will also create a “pull” effect on Scotland’s construction and engineering workforce.
Without the right skills, these could all be missed tricks and lost opportunities to give the Scottish economy heavyweight status. Without the right training, these jobs may be largely taken by migrant workers rather than offering great chances to develop an indigenous workforce that will help to safeguard Scotland’s fate in an uncertain global economic environment.
It might not be easy – there may be a struggle ahead before Scotland makes all the right decisions, just as there was an almighty fight to keep Rosyth alive. But the rewards are clear to see at the latter as a once stagnating site becomes buzzing and thriving once again.
“Hopefully, people will look at the Bill for what it is – a genuine attempt to up the skills of young people leaving school and going into work… I don’t think there is anything remotely political about this. It’s an area Scotland cannot afford to ignore,” Park states. “Apprenticeships may have their roots in the labour movement, but they are practical not political
Apprenticeships may have their roots in the labour movement, but they are practical not political
.”
Eadie goes even further: “If the Scottish Government were to provide additional funding as well as its considerable time, support and endorsement to the development of a widespread, structured apprenticeship programme, it would be their most productive investment in this term of government.”
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