State schools and the rise of posh apprenticeships

Recently, a friend forwarded me a letter he’d received from his children’s school, an independent secondary in London, to mark National Apprenticeships Week. The letter set out to parents everything the school was doing to provide children with information, options and contacts to explore apprenticeships, either in combination with or as an alternative to a university degree.

The school isn’t household-name famous, but it’s still prestigious, exclusive and, yes, expensive: a year’s fees cost something close to the national average full-time salary. My guess would be that the vast majority of the parents who can cover such fees are themselves university graduates: a degree tends to be a minimum requirement for the jobs (mainly in financial services) that allow you to opt for private education in the capital.

And the school for which those degree-holding parents are paying tens of thousands of pounds a year to educate their kids is quite enthusiastically working to help give those kids options that include not going to university.