The march of the middle-class apprentices

Tony Blair used to joke that he could announce the start of a war during a speech on skills policy and no one would notice. Like all the best jokes, it contained more than a grain of truth. Britain — or rather educated Britain — has never been interested in the parts of our education and training system that don’t involve doing A-levels and going to university.

Blair did a great deal to entrench the social and cultural dominance of university with his aspiration that half of all school leavers should go into higher education. That was, on aggregate, the right policy for the country and its economy: the expansion of a great higher education sector has done much good for the UK.

But aggregates and averages are made up of individuals, and even while the country as a whole gained from that national focus on university, the ‘other 50 per cent’ didn’t do so well. Nor did the educational routes they followed after the age of 16. Further education has seen its budgets shrivel. Apprenticeships stumbled along, largely ignored by the people who run the country.

Yet slowly and quietly, that’s starting to change. Attitudes towards apprenticeships are finally shifting, even among the posh and privileged.

Apprenticeships in their modern form have been around since 1993, but they were given a push in 2017 with the introduction of the apprenticeship levy, a charge applied to any employer with a payroll over £3 million. That levy — much resented by some businesses — is meant to fund the training of apprentices while they learn on the job.

The levy was supposed to lead to more apprenticeships, but numbers fell after its introduction. Before 2017, around 160,000 people started an apprenticeship each year. By 2019 that was 126,000, and the first year of the pandemic saw barely 91,000. The Covid economy’s rampant demand for skilled workers drove a recovery: there were 130,000 new starters in 2020.

To a lot of people interested in social mobility, apprenticeships are a ladder to help poor kids climb up the economic scale. That’s consistent with a country divided into two educational and economic tribes. One tribe, which starts out poorer on average, leaves school for the workplace and does lower-paid, often manual work close to the place where they grew up. The other, which comes from wealthier homes, goes to university then on to (mostly) better-paid jobs that quite often entail moving away, most frequently to London.

And in that country, apprenticeships really can make a big difference to people from low-income homes. Research for the government’s Social Mobility Commission in 2020 found youngsters from those backgrounds get the biggest boost in their earnings potential from doing an apprenticeship.

But is that the country Britain wants to be? One divided into a graduate half and a non-graduate half, whose values and interests increasingly diverge? That was the future signposted by the 2016 Brexit referendum, where — even allowing for age — education was a strong predictor of a person’s vote: graduates backed the EU, non-graduates voted Leave.

What does all this policy and politics have to do with schools and schooling? The answer to that lies in a letter a friend of mine recently received from his children’s school, an independent secondary in London.

That letter, sent to mark National Apprenticeships Week, 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. And it was doing a lot.

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. The vast majority of the parents who can cover such fees are likely to be university graduates: a degree tends to be a minimum requirement for the jobs that allow you to opt for private education in the capital.

Quite a lot of them are extremely keen to make sure their offspring follow their path to one of the ‘better’ universities: this is an environment where some families are taking their kids out of private school at 16 so they can do A-levels in the state sector, because they think that maximises their chances of an Oxbridge place. Yet fixation on Oxbridge and the rest of the Russell Group of universities might just have passed the high-tide mark among ambitious, fee-paying parents. At least some of them are increasingly open to alternative routes such as apprenticeships.

Hence that school where degree-holding parents are paying tens of thousands of pounds a year to educate their kids is quite enthusiastically working to help give those children options that include not going to university. The parents seem very happy about this too: the friend who shared that letter wasn’t aggrieved but pleased. I’ve heard similar tales from elsewhere in the independent school sector, of parents positively urging their little darlings to consider apprenticeships — and demanding their schools help with that.

This isn’t a wholly new story: tales of the (upper) middle-class conquest of apprenticeships have been doing the rounds in education circles for a few years. Big employers who offer apprenticeships privately say the same: a recruiter at one of the major accountancy firms told me that the candidates applying for their apprenticeships today are often from backgrounds where a Russell Group degree would once have been the norm.

The appeal of apprenticeships to the middle classes is partly financial. Starting out as a trainee at, say, Rolls-Royce or PwC means you can get on to much the same career track as a graduate recruit but avoid tens of thousands of pounds worth of student debt. And the endorsement of those big-name firms is a powerful counter to the snobbery that sees apprenticeships as not for People Like Us.

Yet this also prompts a bit of soul-searching. After all, if the sharp-elbowed capture all the ‘good’ apprenticeships (at famous firms), then what becomes of the striving poor kids who might otherwise have benefited from those schemes?

Last year, the then-skills minister Gillian Keegan (herself a former apprentice) said she was worried about the march of the middle-class apprentices ‘squeezing out’ youngsters from poorer homes. Sir Peter Lampl of the Sutton Trust, an admirable campaigner for social mobility, has raised similar fears.

I don’t dismiss those concerns, but I think the middle-class appetite for apprenticeships is a good problem to have. It demonstrates that, at their best, in-work training schemes offer youngsters something at least as good as a degree from top universities. The best response is to make sure there are a lot more such places, both plain-vanilla apprenticeships and degree-apprenticeships which combine higher education with on-the-job training.

And more importantly, the (implicit) view that apprenticeships exist mainly for kids from the ‘other 50 per cent’ only reinforces the division of Britain into those two tribes. There will always be dividing lines, of course. For as long as we have different sorts of education and training after the age of 18, there will be different groups who follow those different routes. But there’s no reason for those groups to be selected according to parental income and background: education and training don’t have to be inherited.

Just ask Euan Blair. The son of the man who set that famous 50 per cent target for university entry created a business called Multiverse, which matches would-be apprentices with big employers. By some estimates, the firm has a value in excess of £600 million, meaning Blair Jnr is worth even more than his father.

Upward social mobility is often defined as ending up better-off than your parents, which is quite a challenge when your dad is a former prime minister and your mother a QC. But apprenticeships have allowed Euan Blair to do just that — and he’s unlikely to be the last child of middle-class parents to make that journey.