Meeting of the Parliament 13 May 2015
The story of my family and of what happened in the generation between my father and me is—I think—a pretty typical one for the time. My dad left school at 14 and did an apprenticeship at the SMT as a motor mechanic. His brothers did the same thing and had similar apprenticeships in engineering of one kind or another. Then, a generation later, I was the first one to go to university, to graduate and then to become a teacher—a professional career.
That is the story of so many families in the Scotland of that time, and yet it is not as simple as it seems. Although my dad was a motor mechanic, he spent his time with me teaching me maths for fun. My mother gave me a love of the written word and books, and my dad gave me a love of mathematics. It was that motor mechanic who sparked the interest in me that eventually led, if only fleetingly, to an ability at university to solve equations in Hilbert eigenspace.
My dad did that because he never stopped learning himself. When he was teaching me logarithms in the living room before bed, it was because he was working through those problems in the night-school classes that he was attending in order to continue to raise his levels of skill and qualification. As a result, he did not end his career as a motor mechanic but, rather, as a relatively senior civil servant and the manager of one of the biggest goods vehicle testing stations in Scotland. He ended up in a professional career by the route of an apprenticeship and I ended up in a professional career by the route of a university degree. We ended up pretty much in the same place, although the route was different.
That is not the only thing that was different, as there were other differences. One is that I threw it all up for this, which I think he never would have done. In terms of the other difference, the truth is that, although he was a motor mechanic, he could do much more than that: he could strip and rebuild a car his whole working life, but he could also rewire and replumb a house, and design, draw and make anything that we can conceive of in wood. As for me—I can just about change a plug.
My point is that, somewhere, someone in society somehow decided that I was better than him because he had been an apprentice and I had been to university. Somewhere, someone decided that my degree was better and worth more than his apprenticeship, which took him just as long to achieve as my degree did at university. That is nonsense, and it is a nonsense that has distorted the lives of too many young people in this country. It is a nonsense that does not exist in countries such as Germany, and it is a nonsense that we have to change. If apprenticeship week is about anything, let us not make it simply about celebrating apprenticeships; let us make it about beginning to rehabilitate them to rebuild the parity of esteem that they once had with academic qualifications.
Many things about the election disappointed me, but one of them was in the leaders’ debate when the First Minister was asked about a budget debate when we did a deal with the Scottish National Party in order to get a budget through—it was in 2009. When the First Minister was asked about what the deal was, she said that she could not remember the detail. However, the detail was an increase in the apprenticeship programme. She never forgot her university track record but she did forget that apprenticeship agreement, and that is disappointing. The truth is that it is not just time to remember apprenticeships but time to get real about them.
The cabinet secretary said that this SNP Government inherited 15,000 modern apprenticeships and now it has 25,000, but that is not true. Over 9,000 of those 25,000 apprenticeships are level 2 apprenticeships, which existed in 2007 but were not called apprenticeships. The truth is that, in 2006-07, there were 15,869 apprenticeships starts at level 3 or above and in 2013-14 there were 15,655. We have not actually increased the programme at all and the number of apprenticeships is lower than the high point back in 2004-5, when it was over 21,000. We need to get real about those apprenticeships.
When I met the previous First Minister in 2009 to negotiate that deal, he said, “We mustn’t let this become a numbers game where you pursue us about how many apprenticeships we’ve created. You have to accept my commitment to try to deliver on them.” I have never turned it into a numbers game, but the problem is that the Scottish Government itself has done that, and the numbers do not actually look that good.
It is true that all apprenticeships in Scotland are job related, but it is also true that, in England, there are 440,000 starts—far more than 10 times what we have—and there has been little or no progress on ideas such as hosted apprenticeships, agency apprenticeships or an articulated apprenticeship route.