A British enthusiasm for apprenticeships that does not extend as far as actually wanting them

SNATCHING a brief break from all things European, Bagehot has been looking at youth unemployment this week (it will be the subject of my print column tomorrow night), as the official youth unemployment total crossed the one million mark for the first time in a generation.

As always when youth unemployment rears its grim head, British politicians have fallen over themselves to suggest that the answer lies in apprenticeships. David Cameron has invited big business bosses to Downing Street to talk apprenticeships and vocational training. The Liberal Democrat business secretary, Vince Cable, has written a foreword for a new 138-page report on apprenticeships by the Institute for Public Policy Research, a Blairite think tank (one of his Conservative junior ministers, John Hayes, has written a whole chapter of the report).

The IPPR report is sobering stuff. For three decades, British ministers have been talking up the joys of German-style apprenticeships, and declaring that the problem with Britain is that we need to respect craftsman who work with their hands and engineers, and take vocational education as seriously as university book-learning.

Mr Hayes, in his chapter, waxes positively elegaic, quoting Ezra Pound and writing:

While Britain's greatness was built on technical know-how, social change has bred a distain for physical labour. The explanations for this are both simple and complex. Simply, the tokens of success in post-war Britain were a ‘white collar', an attaché case and the firm's Ford Cortina. Fed by a thirst for change, as Saturday night turned to Sunday morning, Alan Sillitoe's earthy world of toil and temptation turned to the sterility of John Betjeman's avaricious young executive

The IPPR reports, accordingly, that apprenticeships in Britain are pitiful little things on the whole, that would not be recognised by a self-respecting German meister if one fell on him. Since the Conservative government launched what were dubbed "Modern Apprenticeships" in the early 1980s, the term has been slapped on shorter and easier courses, most of them now in the service sector and graded as "Level 2" courses by national qualifications boards. That little bit of jargon means they are the equivalent of GSCE examinations intended for 16 year-old schoolchildren. To put that in more context, a Level 2 knowledge of mathematics means long division and long multiplication.

The IPPR notes that in 2009-10 the most common apprenticeship sector was customer service, and just 22% of apprenticeships in that sector are at levels above Level 2. A typical apprentice on such a scheme works for a large retailer, and over their year-long course spends an average of just one hour a week in off-the-job training. In countries such as Germany, apprentices spend at least a day a week in a vocational college, in addition to on-the-job training, and take three to four years to complete their studies.

I don't share the IPPR's dismay that many apprenticeships are now taken by older workers in Britain. I assume that I will never be able to retire, as pensions will not exist by the time I hit my late 60s (assuming I am still going), so I am all for oldies getting training.

I think that apprentice-enthusiasts are missing the real reason that Britain can never match Germany's enthusiasm for years of on-the-job and vocational training: we are not Germany, and we are not about to become Germany.

I know that sounds a bit obvious, but bear with me. It is amazing how this point is missed. I saw a cabinet minister for an off-the-record cup of tea yesterday to talk about a bill his department is working on, and I took the chance to ask him about the whole question of apprenticeships and the new youth unemployment numbers.

Well, we are still doing a lot better than southern European countries, he said, it is just that we are not as good at vocational training as people like the Dutch or Germans. He told me about watching technical college students in the Netherlands, and how proud they and their parents were. "We look down our noses at people who work with their hands," he said.

I did not press the minister on why we were doing better at youth unemployment than southern Europe (and at 20.6%, Britain is still a smidgeon below the EU average for youth unemployment). I know what he would have replied: it is because of our flexible labour market, which works much better than the insider-outsider two-tier labour markets of a country like Spain (where youth unemployment currently tops 40%, but adults with jobs for life are ruinously expensive to sack or lay off). And I would have agreed with him.

But here's the thing. The bedrock of Germany's apprenticeship system is corporatism and restricted practice. As the IPPR itself noted:

Many unregulated skilled trades and services in the UK are subject to a ‘licence to practise' in Germany, which can be gained only by successfully completing an apprenticeship. Moreover, it is illegal there for an employer to offer jobs to young people in a recognised occupation, except under the terms of a training contract... The operations of German apprenticeships are driven in large part by the 1969 Vocational Training Act which specified the regulations under which training in over 1,000 occupations – now reduced to 340 – is conducted and overseen by the Federal Institute for Vocational Training (Bundesverband der Freien Berufe ), which regulates the content and standards of the training

Now, there are broader cultural forces at work alongside the red tape of German corporatism. As the IPPR argues:

In Germany, apprenticeship is much more of an assumed ‘rite of passage' that all 800,000 German school-leavers are expected, and aspire, to pass through, with an occupational identity clearly in place at the end of it

It is also true that some professions and even trades are licensed in Britain, from medicine to law to flying a plane or fitting gas boilers. But there aren't 340 of them. And it cannot be irrelevant, when examining why British employers are so much more reluctant to hire apprentices, to note that they are not obliged to do so by law.

It is also relevant that in the British mind corporatism is associated with the grimly drab uselessness of the 1960s and 1970s, with their British Leyland strikes and Industrial Training Boards shoving young people through time-wasting training programmes.

Assuming we are not going back there, I would take ministerial praise for apprenticeships with a pinch of salt.