Future of Manufacturing

Wow, what a subject.

On one specific area - preparing people for the world of work (including the skills), my observations:-

1. Kids leaving school (at any age) are generally not prepared in any way for the real world, including turning up, basic workshop skills etc. so are useless for some months beyond menial tasks. I remember meeting university students on block release, they were 21, I was 17, they seemed like children to us, yet we were just the same a year before.

2. As pointed out by others, large employer training schemes in manufacturing are now few and far between, especially in the "craft" skills.

How do we fix this?

a. Colleges need to operate like employers not schools i.e. marks for attendance, involvement etc. as well as attainment. When I was an apprentice mumble mumble decades ago there were consequences if you didn't turn up, unlike most schools.

b. Colleges need to do the recruiting, then after some months find the employer not the other way round i.e. by that time they are more ready for work and can be useful much quicker. It removes most of the admin/risk for the small business and has an element of filtering i.e. the useless/disinterested ones have already been fired off the course. It's not always their fault, at 16/18/21 if you have never worked in a manufacturing environment for instance you don't know what it is like.

That is where the apprenticeship levy should be spent.

Just my 2p.

Roger Greenwood said:

Colleges need to do the recruiting, then after some months find the employer

Something we had long discussions about when I was on a local manufacturer's forum which included FE representatives...the problem with that is that if the college is taking the lead they are offering an apprenticeship including X months / years "industrial experience" - and if they can't find it then the college is at fault - for something they have no control over. So the colleges' views were simply "not touching that with a bargepole"!

What did start looking practical was similar, that it wasn't employer led but was "someone else led", which would mean that the work experience opportunities could be shared amongst a number of employers. But we could never work out who the "someone else" was. Which I guess is sort of where you are coming from, but as above the FE colleges were very clear it couldn't be them as they had no authority over employers or any other way of tempting them to assist.

I'm still convinced there is the germ of an idea in there though. We found that all our local companies who engaged (and it was a lot of them) wanted to support apprenticeships in principle, and were happy to provide a level of work experience, just not to the level of tying themselves to particular people.

You're correct Andy, I don't know how to do it, just that it has to be that way round. I suspect the colleges consider themselves purely academic (which of course they are) and what is needed is a training centre linked to a college, like this one https://wyms.co.uk/apprenticeships where employers can pick employees from. At the moment they don't operate like that, but they could.

Hello Roger:

Why do you call them "Colleges" when they are "Universities' which are "for profit" businesses that live on money collected from the students (as many as possible from overseas, who pay more money) and research funds for meaningless subjects.

The students end up with a lot of personal [debt and maybe a job delivering food to homes with their MBA or PHD's degrees.

Peter    

Hello Roger:

Lets ask a more basic question --- What do the parents want for their children?

That is, other them permanently out of their house, before they are 26 years old

Peter

I use the term college loosely, mainly to focus on the lower end where (historically) more manual/industrial skills were/are taught. The UK has been pushing more and more into university, and as you say many end up disappointed. Outcomes vary of course, but I still maintain that they generally don't prepare people for the real world and it doesn't have to be that way. One college I went to has turned into a university now, it's just a name to me, maybe the staff and students feel more important!

We need to be careful, in the UK there are at least 2 relevant types of colleges.

One at universities, Bowland college at Lancaster University, Oriel at Oxford, Queens in Cambridge and so on. These are in effect sub-campuses for students and academic staff, at a University that has too many students to administer as one logical unit. However the university sets the syllabus and exams, the colleges enter their students into those. Lectures and teaching in a small department may be at university level, or in a larger one devolved down to take place within the colleges. Subjects requiring substantial experimental facilities tend to be at the University level, those requiring a lecture theatre and library, tend to be in college. Students  arrive at age 18 with 3 or 4 A levels and a desire to be immersed deep into that one subject for 3 years, and ideally are supposed to leave this sort of college aged 21, to find they can fit easily into any one of hundreds of well paid roles that relate to their degree subject.
Quite likely however, especially with the more niche topics, they end up working on the checkout at a supermarket for six months, while frantically sending applications in the evenings before settling for a job that is only loosely related. 

The second type of college, and perhaps more relevant to the  sort of mass production of employment that was the original topic, is the College of Further Education. This is where folk go, aged 16, either to study A-levels their school does not offer, or more commonly any of a variety of 'vocational' subjects. Despite the misleading name, this does not mean that folk are hearing voices, except perhaps for those few studying theology, rather that their 'calling' is job or trade specific.
Here the next wave of bricklayers, car mechanics, IT technicians and perhaps the odd electrician, are formed from the raw clay of the school leavers who arrive clutching little more than their GCSE certificates and hopefully some germ of interest. The expectation is to enter the world of work aged at about 18, in the area where their college training will be immediately relevant.
Well that's the theory. Some are only there because they did not make the grade for the course they really wanted and are marking time, others realise too late that it is harder work than expected. These will fall by the wayside. Many really succeed at their chosen area and some continue carry on to pick up more esoteric qualifications as they progress throughout work.

There are other sorts of colleges such as ecclesiastical ones, but I think we can skip that for now.

Mike.

Hello Roger:

The old names were Technical Colleges or Polytechnics.

I see that in 2022 the Blair "think tank" issued a statement that 70% of young people should be going into "higher" (whatever that actually means)  education by 2040.

Peter  

Hello Roger:

The old names were Technical Colleges or Polytechnics.

I see that in 2022 the Blair "think tank" issued a statement that 70% of young people should be going into "higher" (whatever that actually means)  education by 2040.

Peter  

In the UK, Further Education (FE) is post-secondary education,  pre degree level, such as A-levels, T levels, vocational training, City and Guilds courses and apprenticeships.

Technical colleges are/were centres of FE.

Higher education (HE), on the other hand,  involves degree-level study at universities and/or  university colleges, including undergraduate degrees, also called bachelor's, (BA BSc,) and the term is sometimes extended to include post graduate qualifications (master's degrees  MPhil, MA, MSc), and Doctoral degrees (such as a PhD, DPhil, DLit)

Polytechnics always were HE and have long awarded degrees, at least since the early 20th century ( initially subject to syllabus scrutineering from BTEC and CNAA), and since 1992  consider themselves universities, and can set and award their own degree courses, albeit often ones with a less academic lean than the traditional universities.

Perhaps confusingly, many of the new 1960s polys were created by adding the extra capability to existing technical colleges, & sometimes retained the informal name of the technical college and at leat initially retained  a mix of FE and HE. Since 1992, as above, the naming situation has simplified.

Mike.