Forget Labour’s Industrial Strategy Waffle. This is What Young People Need Right Now
As one who works with children who are not in fulltime education, I read the Government’s ‘Modern Industrial Strategy‘, particularly the skills chapter, with keen and hopeful interest. Afterwards I felt like Mole in the Wind in the Willows saying: “It’s all very well to talk.”
What, for instance, does this mean?
We will simplify the skills system in England to provide easier access to jobs in the IS-8 [this refers to the eight sectors the Government are backing], benefitting all. Skills England will play a critical role in addressing systemic issues by bringing coherence, simplifying the landscape and co-designing solutions to skills shortages in collaboration with businesses.
The majority of the chapter about skills seemed to rely on upskilling in the spheres of AI, green jobs and construction, and a continued excitement about immigration plugging the gaps in our workforce.
Some of the strategy seems promising: the establishment of “Defence Technical Excellence Colleges, to provide funding for courses for defence related skills”, “Recruiting and retaining high quality teachers in Further Education” and the establishment of 10 “Technical Excellence Colleges specialising in construction”. I have a terrible sense of doom though that none of these initiatives will ever materialise, or at least not quickly enough to help the now one in eight young people (aged 16-24) who are not in work or training – some of whom I work with and on whose behalf I write.
I thought it would be helpful to share some other ideas about what could be done now to upskill young people:
1. Enforce education: A massive campaign is needed to remind the population that fulltime education between the ages of five and 16 is compulsory. Shockingly, 20% of children are persistently absent from school – it is impossible to teach skills or knowledge if 1.8 million children are not in school fulltime. Fines and prosecutions must follow.
2. Map GCSE qualifications to competence in that sphere. A GCSE in food technology must teach the children how to cook, a GCSE in a foreign language must teach the student how to speak, write and understand in a foreign language, a GCSE in English literature must include the reading and understanding of full-length novels – and lots of them. Consider all the courses that retired people take in their free time: pottery, flower arranging, jewellery making – all of these courses teach the students how to do things. The same must apply to school qualifications. Children are not stupid and see the disconnect between the so-called qualification and the uselessness of its content, and understandably zone out.
3. A huge campaign to get more men into teaching. Only 35% of teachers in secondary schools are male, and 14% in primary schools. This is clearly ridiculous and must change.
4. Stop telling young people they are mentally ill. The well-intentioned bid to support people with life’s challenges has now morphed to such an extent that more than half a million people are claiming PIP support payments for anxiety. As Lisa Nandy so wisely said on BBC Today recently, the benefits system forces people to become victims in order to get support. This attitude does not help young people, who become entangled in the benefits system at an ever younger age and convince themselves they are unable to attend school or work because of misnomer of ‘mental health’.
5. Use school facilities in the summer holidays to teach short courses. The facilities are ready and waiting and are perfect to be utilised by enterprising companies to upskill the population: basic plumbing, DIY, cookery, financial management could all be taught in two-week bursts.
6. Ban smartphones for the under 16s. Children are on their phones between six and nine hours a day. The highest daily screen time I’ve come across in a girl of 15 is 18 hours a day. What skills can possibly be learned if such massive swathes of the day are taken up with scrolling?
7. Establish the equivalent of Australia’s fly-in-fly-out jobs here in the UK. Young people are motivated by money and should not have to travel to Australia to spend a gap year working in open cast mines in order to earn a decent amount of money. What with all of Angela Rayner’s house building projects, HS2, Sizewell C and so on, surely there could be a scheme whereby young people could go and work intensively for a summer, or months at a time. A big “Your country needs you!” ad campaign would follow and the health and safety executive would be made to find ways of making this possible.
More ideas welcome!
Joanna Gray is a writer and confidence coach. She is looking for a publisher for FLOURISH: How to Help the Digital Generation Leave Home and Live Happy and Prosperous Lives. Please get in touch if interested.
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Clearly the ‘Magic Upskilling Tree’ has all the answers – or may be just another myth.
How about re-launching Grammar Schools? Or is that too anti-Fabian for our current Powers That Be?
Grammar schools and technical schools so that students can see the point of what they’re learning and be qualified to enter the trades etc and also understand what those trades entail and whether or not it’s something they’re good at before they start.
Are schools the best places to learn trades?
They’re the best place to learn the underlying knowledge that is required for the application of the skills a tradesman needs.
You mean, like readin, ritin an rithmetic?
Hmmmmm – I think we used to have a system like that…
We did. The Leftwaffe planned and implemented its destruction starting in the mid-1960s.
Ah, we love ‘modern’; secondary modern, modern industrial strategy, modern slavery……
This ‘Strategy’ thingy is all very Fabianesque, to my mind; ”Jonathan Reynolds and Sarah Jones have proudly unveiled what they’re calling the UK’s “Modern Industrial Strategy” — a plan they claim will create over a million new jobs and deliver economic growth across every part of the country. But anyone familiar with the Fabian Society will immediately recognise the fingerprints all over it, because this is not simply a government plan for growth — it is a textbook Fabian framework for state-controlled economic and social engineering, dressed up as opportunity. Jonathan Reynolds has a long and well-documented history with the Fabian Society. He has contributed to Fabian pamphlets, spoken at their conferences, and frequently aligned himself with their broader ideological aims, which include expanding state oversight under the guise of fairness, sustainability, and progress. Sarah Jones is no different — she has appeared at Fabian Society panels, particularly on issues surrounding “reforming” public services and restructuring the UK economy in line with Labour’s central planning ambitions. These are not fringe affiliations. They are openly supportive members of the Society, and their policy positions consistently reflect Fabian thinking.this so-called Industrial Strategy is. It is not about unleashing the potential of British… Read more »
Is it just me that thinks this is both bizarre and genuinely unnecessary? Or do such segregated places built for specific communities already exist in other parts of the UK? This is 80 new homes being built, here;
”The UK’s first LGBTQ+ majority older person’s housing is now on site in Whalley Range providing more options for older LGBTQ+ to live with dignity and with some care needs met on site.”
https://x.com/ManCityCouncil/status/1937405678596866313
Neither Reynolds nor Jones have run a business so have no knowledge that is of any help.
Do either understand the rigour required to learn a discipline, either a trade, a wealth creating academic subject or job?
And have they experienced it?
You can educate kids all you like but if there’s no proper jobs – and by that I mean actually making stuff like steel, cars, ships, engineering products, computer chips – yes we were once world leaders -what’s the point.
Just illustrates the fact that since the 80’s a succession of unimaginably inept and stupid governments have consistently given away the family silver just for short term gains to appease their masters.
Explains why this country and more importantly its youth has been well and truly f++++d.
So instead HMG celebrates when foreign manufacturers invest here, but guess who gets the actual profits..
Our energy is largely owned by foreign companies.. We have no car industry of our own and we celebrate when some former colony country “rescues” one of our basic industries.
The UK is a basket case – our only viable industry seems to be one of making weapons.
And it is not the fault of our children,but they are the ones who will suffer.
All hail Globalisation. Lol.
I do apologise.
I forgot to mention that we are in actual fact world leaders in mmRNA vaccines ( not really though it was biontech I believe) also the OXFORD AZ Vaccine developed by the saintly Sarah Gilbert – she who was honoured no less,
Said jabs have save at least 8 million lives…
Small oblate spherical objects, with knobs on.
I thought it was ridicule …
I thought it was ridicule … When voters want all their children to go to university, even if they end up reading wealth destroying subjects that inhabit the Arts and Humanities departments, and then work in an office and not in a factory or outdoors, ever, then the result is what we have. When it’s OK for pop singers, actors, footballers, sports pundits, and other celebrities to amass tens of millions of pounds, yet businessmen and women, many with additional skills and experience in their own industries, are looked down upon as not deserving, even though they probably create more and better jobs for others, then the results is what we have. As an example, the UK had a prosperous car industry, then the government interfered. It put the dysfunctional on life support, and taxed the successful. Then they added more and more regulations, ending up with the idiotic NET Zero policies, which played into the hands of the Chinese. And all the time, the top graduate engineers left university knowing that British Industry, with union mentality, was the last place to start a career. So they did something else, like work in the City, work abroad, or work in… Read more »
I went to Tech College in the 1970s and read the Designer Magazine. This would various designers from Industrial Design to Graphics to Fashion. There were regular articles from all disciplines that complained about how UK companies treated designers. Here is one example: DESIGNER NOVEMBER 1981 (Magazine) THE UK DESIGN PARADOX There is a growing recognition that Britain’s distressed economy can be partly attributed to a failure of management to make proper use of design as a business resource. Companies which pride themselves on other aspects of their management expertise have failed to brief themselves in this field, and adopt a policy which is at best naive and at worst self-defeating. Six leading designers here share a platform in order to put forward an informed view of the use of design by industry. They are people of considerable status and experience, evinced by the fact that they have all been honoured recently for their contribution to the commercial and industrial life of the country. David Mellor received an OBE in the Birthday Honours List; Deryck Healey was awarded the Bicentenary Medal of the Royal Society of Arts; and Quentin Blake, Nick Butler, Matthew Carter and Martin Hunt have been designated… Read more »
Until the costs of running a manufacturing business in this country are reduced nothing will change. Blackout news keeps you up to date with how Germany’s politicians along with the EU are slowly strangling their manufacturing to death with costs and regulation.
Cameron cancelled Nimrod when it was at an advanced stage blaming cost overruns and a long snag lists. Pilots said it was excellent. The Nimrod MRA4 programme cost nearly £4 billion and the cancellation threw all that knowledge and expertise away. The aircraft were broken up soon after, behind screens. The government then bought a Boeing replacement for £3.87 billion. Therefore we spent nearly £8 billion to scrap a key part of our aviation industry. Boeing said they were investing in the local community and we paid them to do so.
Not long after Brexit Johnson allowed ARM to be sold to a foreign buyer, ARM being a major computer chip designer.
My memories of playing Monopoly are that if you don’t own any properties and you don’t develop with hotels you are out of the game.
If you own hotels in the real world, you are guaranteed top income from the gubmint for housing certain people.
But helping to pay the rent helps the poor, doesn’t it? 🙂
Okay. I’ll bite. I was talking to our painter and decorator last week. “When I was at school,” I said, “maybe about one third of people stayed on to the sixth form. The rest of them by then were bored out of their skull.” “That was me,” he agreed, adding that at 16 he wanted to get out, make some money, buy a car or a motorbike and pick up women. Luckily he was able to get apprenticed to a painter and acquire a useful skill. By the age that modern students are being disgorged out of the holding pen into the unemployment statistics with nothing to show for it but a worthless degree (thanks Mr Blair) and a colossal debt, he had the muscle memory of skill in his hands, contacts, the respect of older men who had taught him to show up to work and not mind if he got repeatedly slagged off. Since then, he told me he’d had 9 apprentices of which “about 3 worked out.” “It’s getting harder,” he said. Not only because the worthless ones bunk off, smoke weed on site, have to be got out of bed by their Mum, want a job… Read more »
Deliberately de-industrializing was a disaster.
That’s the point.
The multi-skilled Handyman who carries out a variety of jobs in my immediate area (a community of mostly, but not exclusively, elderly people) has a similar background.
He and his wife also foster children and he sometimes turns up with a young lad (aged around 14/15) in tow and patiently explains to him what he is doing as the lad hands him the relevant tools for the job he is doing that day.
I do wonder how much of the “missing link” between school and work for those who aren’t academically inclined is the absence of a father / father figure to give them the basic practical skills which might lead to a trade.
I don’t know about using school facilities but I did short courses in bricklaying and plastering at my local technical on Saturday mornings and the lecturers really enjoyed the experience as we were all keen to learn.
1. Enforce education: it is impossible to teach skills or knowledge if 1.8 million children are not in school fulltime. Perhaps. However, my father spent a lot of time absent from school and in the 1930s there were no O-Levels or qualifications. He started work as a bell boy in a department store and then got an electrical apprenticeship in Peckham. From there he worked on electrifying houses, then Olympia, then degaussing boats in preparation for war. When his boat was destroyed in Surrey Docks he got work at De-Havilland working on the Mosquito and Vampire prototype. Then post war a bunch of prototypes while becoming an electrical inspector on various passenger jet production lines including the prototype Concorde and all the production models. He was self taught in maths, and unlike Boeing, where there are a lot of ‘educated’ people, there were no electrical fires on any of the planes he worked on. My father was trained, often on the job, which is vastly different to being ‘educated’. The UK adopted the exam type system from China and the purpose of their system was to select Bureaucrats and we adopted it to run the empire. https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-23376561 The problem is the… Read more »
Having skills or knowledge: are those the only possible meanings of ‘educated’?
They are required, but there’s plenty else to learn. Though much of that else doesn’t stand up on its own.
There’s nothing worse than someone with good communication skills that has nothing worthwhile to say. They can end up in charge and pretend, VERY SUCCESSFULLY, that they know what to do.
I read a post that said it all: my manager treats every technical problem as a management problem. Obviously Technology, let alone the other disciplines in STEM, were unknown to his manager.
Yes, I agree. Having things to say worth saying isn’t a skill; and isn’t ‘knowledge’ either, not of the kind that can be authoritatively put into a text book and learned up. There’s knowing the difference between what is and isn’t worth saying; and doesn’t that come closer to what it is to be educated than either ‘skills’ or ‘knowedge’?
I like your thinking.
I agree with item 1 in principle, but the state should not be mandating that all 5 to 16 years old’s must be “educated” in one of their indoctrination centres.
As long as that age group is learning, particularly the 3 R’s. A “Core” curriculum is maybe a sound principle, but probably not the one we have. Maybe one that is wider in scope, we all know children have different skill sets, not all are academic, some are sporty, some are more hands on, and these become more evident as they get older.
Use primary education to teach the basics and identify how the children are developing, use that knowledge to direct them to secondary schools that still have sound grounding but “specialise” as academic centres, sporting academies or “tech” centres.
Also remembering to identify those with learning difficulties and providing the help and guidance they will need.
‘Enforce education…’ is that an educated use of either word?
Is no one going to reply? (Not Ms Gray?) Isn’t the idea of education as something that can be enforced a step beyond even Gradgrind’s “Facts alone are wanted in life”?
I recall Dicken’s Hard Times and his take on schools. I recall the teacher, Mr Gradgrind picking on a Gypsy girl from the circus and asking her to describe a horse. She fails in describing it as Mr Gradgrind wished, which is a Ruminating Quadruped or similar. I don’t know if Dickens was pointing out the inconsistency of telling off a gypsy girl that can ride horses for not being able to classify what a horse is. Taming horses was one of humanities great advances and I’m certain this was not achieved through an academic description of a horse.