Cameron is right to focus on quality apprenticeships

If there are ‘no votes in skills’, as the old dictum goes, there seem to be some in apprenticeships. Hence David Cameron’s call this morning for apprenticeships to become a ‘gold standard’ qualification ranking alongside degrees from the best universities. His goal is to rectify Britain’s shockingly poor performance on mid-level skills compared to world leaders such as Germany.

So how hard would it be for us to catch the Germans? The numbers speak for themselves. Of every 1,000 employed people in England 11 are apprentices; compared to 40 in Germany. Here, fewer than one in ten employers are training an apprentice; in Germany it’s roughly a third. Although the present government has done well in closing the gap, catching up would still require something like a tripling of scale.

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But Cameron is right to concentrate on making apprenticeships a ‘gold standard’ — because although we lag on quantity, we’re even worse on quality.