I asked an Oral Question in the Lords today:
“To ask Her Majesty’s Government how many people from an ethnic minority background aged 16-24 are undertaking apprenticeships”
I’ve learnt that when asking a Quesion, you need to have a pretty good idea of not only what the answer may be, but also what information you are trying to elicit.
It has been long known that people from ethnic minorities are under-represented on apprenticeship schemes. Data highlighted from the Black Training and Enterprise Group last year showed that:
Of all apprentices in England in 2009/10, 7% were from an ethnic minority; 1.6% were of mixed ethnicity, 2.9% were Asian, 2% Black and 0.5% Chinese or other ethnic minority (The Data Service, 2011). In comparison, 14% of the working age population in England is from an ethnicity minority (Office for National Statistics, 2010)There has been a slight increase in these figures. But In addition, whilst some data is available in relation to diversity and apprenticeships, there are some trends which are impossible to accurately measure due to the lack of monitoring and data collection. For example, there remains a gap in the information about how many applicants for apprenticeships are from an ethnic minority, and what proportion of these are successful in comparison with overall success rates. It is crucial that this data is collected in order to understand under-representation of ethnic minorities on apprenticeship schemes.
Given the high unemployment rates of some ethnic groups, it is particularly worrying that these groups are not fairly represented on apprenticeship schemes. I quoted the current figure of 55% of economically active young Black men aged 16-24 who are currently unemployed, nearly double the figure from 2008.
Work undertaken by the Runnymede Trust showed that:
For economically active Asian people aged between16-24, unemployment has risen from 22.8% in 2008 to the current figure of 26.7%. Breaking it down by specific groups, this is 24.2% for Indian young people and 33.6% for Pakistani/Bangladeshi young people. For economically active Asian people aged between16-24, unemployment has risen from 22.8% in 2008 to the current figure of 26.7%. Breaking it down by specific groups, this is 24.2% for Indian young people and 33.6% for Pakistani/Bangladeshi young people (ONS 2012).In comparison, the White British youth unemployment rate out of those who are economically active is 20%.
Current situation
Recent provisional data (August – January 2011/12) on completed apprenticeships shows that:
Whilst approximately 16% of 16-24 year olds are from an ethnic minority, only 8% of those completing apprenticeships in 2011/12 (August – January) were from a minority ethnic background. In comparison, 90.7% of those completing apprenticeships were white.Breaking this down by ethnicity, 2.5% of apprenticeships were completed by Black people (Black Caribbean and Black African groups combined), 3.7% were completed by Asian people, and 1.8% were completed by those from a mixed ethnic background.When looking at numbers, only 10 apprenticeships were completed by people from a Gypsy or Irish Traveller background out of the total 90,600 apprenticeships completed.
It is these stark and somewhat depressing figures which prompted my Question. In various meetings I’ve attended post the riots of last August, unemployment, particulary in areas like Tottenham where the riots began, come up time and again. Officials point to the low take up of apprenticeships by young Black men in particular, but the evidence I have seen and heard is that ethnic minorities are less likely to be represented on the more prestigious apprenticeship schemes such as construction, engineering and hospitality, although there has been improvement in some areas such as childcare and business administration. Ethnic minority apprentices are also less likely not to progress to a related job after completion of their framework than other apprentices. They are also less likely than other young people not to gain an apprenticeship after completing a pre-apprenticeship course.
With these alarming figures, and the steep increase in young Black unemployment, it is clearly important and a challenge to ensure more focus and targeting of apprenticeships to ensure under-represented groups, including women, and people with a disability are given a level playing field.
Ethnic monitoring may not be to everyone’s taste, but without this it is difficult to ensure there is equal access.
There is currently a review of apprenticeships by the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills, which is welcome. However whilst I’d support the focus on apprenticeship quality in the terms of reference, there is concern that there is currently no focus in the review on how to increase the numbers of under-represented groups on apprenticeship schemes.
I was pleased that having raised this issue on the floor of the House of Lords, I received an assurance the Minister, Baroness Wilcox, that she would be happy to meet with me to explore ways of addressing this inequality.
There are no easy solutions to this important issue, but in order to address it, the Government needs to be aware of the scale of the problem, before coming up with methods of tackling it.
The problem with all such schemes is that they are addressed too late in the process. Trying to encourage school leavers to apply for an apprenticeship is too late, because whatever damage the prejudices of the school system and society as a whole will have taken root.
I’m afraid this is going to turn into another rant about the school system, but much of what we become in life can be traced to attitudes encountered while passing through the education system. Even the previous Lord Speaker noted that she was recommended to learn typing, because in the ’60s, that was a required skill for most of the jobs associated with women.
Too many children find modern school irrelevant to life as they see it, especially in some areas. It’s all very well learning about William the Conqueror or the square root of minus one, and indeed, both can be interesting when set in the correct context, but for an inner-city school, such topics might be seen as boring by most children. Instead of a broad and balanced curriculum, let children concentrate more on their interests and encourage them to think for themselves and build up a attitude of can-do. Once established with a core skill set for a field of interest and self-confidence, there’s plenty of time to go and learn more about William and ‘i’. Many years ago, apprenticeships started at a much younger age, so perhaps this could be looked at for some.
When children see a reason for learning something they’re more likely to want to learn it, and will make more effort to that end. Given that core skills such as maths and English are important because they’re used everywhere, children would learn their arithmetic in an environment where they can see its relevance.
So, while not wanting to write off the current 18-24 generation, in order to avoid perpetuating the problem, perhaps a different approach is needed for the 8-14 group instead of parking them in classrooms to learn the facts needed to pass tests that aren’t relevant to many of them and aren’t much use to employers either.
Welcome to the blog. In your maiden speech you said “For someone of my background, it is a huge privilege to serve in your Lordships’ House”. Background is everything when it comes to informing the debate.
It may come as a surprise to some but I was an apprentice once in an international company with a German work ethic. I began my training at sixteen and finished at twenty one. I was the only apprentice to complete my training as the others left early for a variety of reasons two of which were the strict discipline imposed and low wages.
What our trainers wanted to see was commitment and this was tested. This at a time when most of them had left the armed forces having been conscripts during the war. One can only suppose they attempted to overlay what had moulded them onto their apprentices.
Personal discipline was the key to survival: turning up on time and when expected, doing things exactly the way you were taught and being tenacious when things got tough.
My own experience says that apprenticeship turnover will be high. Literacy and numeracy skills important. Common sense, lots and lots of common sense. And somebody to cut you a break.
Ref: Maiden Speech: Baroness Hussein-Ece. Column 781. 12:34pm
http://www.publications.parliament.uk/pa/ld201011/ldhansrd/text/100715-0001.htm
I think there is another problem with apprenticeships.
If you look back to when they were large numbers in the UK, you could crudely put young people into sets. 15% going to university, 35% doing apprenticeships, and the rest going into other work. My take is with the failure of schooling then and now, that 50% isn’t capable of doing a 5 year apprenticeship.
Now with 50% going to university of some sort, you haven’t got large numbers capable of doing an apprenticeship because of the failure of schooling.
eg. If your target is 5 GCSEs, and you don’t even make that as a school for large numbers of pupils, they have been failed.
The way I’d deal with that is to take the apprentice stream away from doing GCSEs and have them gain qualifications more based on their chosen course of study. They could still fail their apprenticeship, of course, but hopefully if they’re doing something that engages interest and enthusiasm, the pass rate will be higher.
This all sounds good but fails to hit the nail on the head. And this bright lady should know instincively what the problem is. Which has nothing whatsoever to do with race, religion or ethnicity. My goodness how they compartmentalise our people is extraordinary, when the mantra is, equality.
White boys and girls, black boys and girls and all boys and girls have been led along a path of enormous wealth from the day they were born. They have been removed from the reality of being born into a society of 1% ters. Where only 1% of the population will ever come into contact of the kind of money it costs to fill the desires of a lifestyle they are told from babies they can have if only they work hard enough. Thomas Crown is what they feed on and believe. and the story line, the rich man disatisfied robs a Monet painting from the Museum of Art and gets away with it. Goodness this scene on the saling yacht still excites the hell our of me. What of a boy of twelve.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DBj0AzryNHYor
Or, the girls who see this Pretty Woman, who is a prostitute picking up a billionaire on Hollywood Boulevard and he takes her to the opera and decides he is the one for her. And with Richard Geer as the prospective saviour, who can doubt their believing that would be a fun way to go.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GqmXja6ElME&feature=related
These kids are not idiots and they work out very quickly, I would say from age eight, that an apprenticeship is not the way to enjoy the heady thrill of your own private jet to take you to San Franscisco for an evening and night with Julia Roberts.
And that is where they feel they deserve to be. Not helping Dad cut through a plank of wood as he sweats away at it to feed him, or, getting his head under the loo bowl and find a faceful when the join comes loose.
Do your research more roundly and you will see they have no lack of ethnic diversity at the footballers junior clubs or the line up for apprentices to rock stardom. As neither of those ‘careers’ require study, hard work or deferred gratification, let alone the need for a broad vocabulary.
The failure lies in the lack of personal care these kids have from day one. They are abandoned to the State, day care, nursery care, failing schools, dumbing down, and so on. What is it you expect of them? A sense of self worth when they have been discarded on entering the world?
It all comes from their inner feeling of worthlessness. They feel, unless they can make a fortune, by whateiver means, they will go on being invisable to those they want to acknowledge them.
Why is it the modern do gooder cannot see that children abandoned to the chimney as a lifetime career, if they are lucky enough to hold on to a job with the sweep, is not what the State groomed them for. The expectations or aspirations they gleaned, via their environment, has been removed by the state, who has nothing more on the mind than selling the population the message that they are only worth adoration and acclaim when they spend big money.
Look at the role models the State uses as examples, anorexic women who spend a fortune on silly hats or handbags, and men covered in self mutilating tattoos all over their bodies. All having one thing in common, big money spending and no viewable hard work to aquire it, except football, guitar playing or marrying up. Kate Midlleton comes to mind quickly. A great example, can’t spell but know how to pull a prince. There it is, simply millions of clapping accolades for what these kids feel is doing nothing.
Add to that the spectre of no matter how hard they work at being a plumber, carpenter or hospital orderly, they will not even be able to pay their own rent without benefits, as the market for their low wages, the council house, is being systematically removed from their life as I right. and the holding down of a living wage is the culprit here.
Come on, don’t play the, we don’t know why game, of course you do. But there is no profit in admitting it. Is there?
One good way to find out how to do it, is folow a few of the lives of the Polish familes who come here and work to support their people back home. There you may find the answer to why our kids are not following suit.
And start with, the family unit, mothers at home and fathers involvement in their child’s life from the beginning. Mum stays home and papa goes to work and when the boy is old enough, he goes with him and has to chip in.
The only answwer is an old fashioned lifestyle and education, which appears to be so abhorrant to those around you, who themselves gained from it, they will not even contemplate it for our poor kids who deserve the same leg up they got. You can always look into your own lifestyle and ask what was it that worked for you? And how does that differ from all those who have been put up as a statistic for you to cite?
Apprenticeships belong to the Workplace;
whereas off-duty “Communities” including minority ethnic communities belong to the Lifeplace.
The purpose of the 25%-timeframed Workplace is to support, provide for, and protect, the 75%-timeframed Lifeplace.
//////
Consider,
how an apparent “imbalance” between a high percentage availability of workplaces for Community-A, but a low-percentage of such workplacers for Community-B
may in fact provide Community-B with golden-opportunities to effect Sustainworthy Earth-Citizenship Enablements and Personal-Developments, for individuals and mutual-groups thereof.
For instance, let me recommend, for any individual, group, minority and community with ‘time on their hands’, active individual self-enablement from the following:
“Mindfulness For Beginners” (DVDs by JK Zinn)
“Mindset” (Caroline Dweck);
“Six Thinking Hats” (Edward de Bono);
(‘)Perceptual Self-Control(‘(William Powers);
“The New Rules of Posture” (Mary Bond);
“How To Win Every Argument” (Madsen Pirie).
————
Remember, F
for thw 25% timeframed Workplace, including for an apprenticeship, and for a seat-in-the-Lords,
the specialist-skill you must have is chosen and set not by you but by the Employer.
Whereas in the Lifeplace you can choose amongst an longer list of personal-enablers than the above-given short, but oh! so life-enabling, one.
In the Workplace you may have to change your jobskill many times during your 50 years of “working life”
whereas lifeplace-enablements (= ‘life-skills’)
will not only last you for your lifespan of 70, 80, 90, 100 or more years
but will be exemplary to and cost-effectively emulable by other people
as they too come to find such lifeplace-sustainworthiness to be a new essential for all human-beings on Earth to grow into.
I am currently an apprentice to a painter, decorator and carpenter. I am learning fast, on my own home, and I’m 66. Does this count?
an apprentice DIYer.
One of the most valuable apprenticeships would surely be “Yoga teacher apprentice” to prevent all the diseases of posture amongst the older generation. To do that the apprentice would have to find a Guru teacher and possibly learn Hindi as well.
“Effort” (Laban & Lawrence 1947-1974)page 81:
“Apprentices in the 1920s spent seven years filing and chipping in order to become fitters”…
yet still today many qualified workers do not appreciate the difference between two efforts, sometimes having to be joined together, such as a thrusting-punch and a throwing-slash;
“Many prejudices concerning human effort are artificially inculcated into the mind and effort-habits of the unfortunate industrial apprentice”…
“still there is an idolisation of speed, against which the modern student of effort-rhythm (the apprentice too) has constantly to fight”.
“Effort” is one of the Western Leaderships that outstrip imported exotic usurpers into both workplace and lifeplace such as Tai Chi and Yoga, both holisticly and objectively;
but along with a long list of other Western Leaderships is being ignored, avoided, even deliberately repressed:
and it should be on every British citizen’s lifelong-bookshelf, let alone every educator’s and every Peer’s;
but it costs £80 online;
so better to buy “Laban For All” (Newlove & Dalby)
and simply copy into it the following which appears only in “Effort” at page 45:
(“)The over-use of one effort-element (LHS of Table)
results in the long run in an ‘impairment’ (RHS of Table):
Strength (habitually & too much) Crampedness;
Lightness (results in) Sloppiness;
Directness (ends in) Obstinacy;
Flexibility (in) Fussiness;
Sustainment (in) Laziness;
Quickness (in) Hastiness;
Free-Flow (in) Flightiness;
Bound-Flow (in) Stickiness;
and combination of two such over-used elements becomes dangerous, auch as with
Obstinate-Crampedness
or with Sloppy-Obstinacy (“).
So GH is right to ‘step outside of a box’ and suggest including “Apprentice Yoga Teacher”
but would, I believe, upgrade that skill and title to something like
“Apprentice Body-Movement Educator”
once he has become more workably familiar with the published work of such Western Leaders as Laban,
Franklin (“Inner Focus Outer Strength”)
Bond (“The New Rules of Posture”); Feldenkrais (“Awareness Through Movement”); Edward de Bono (“Six Thinking Hats”);
Dweck (“Mindset”);
WT Powers (“)Perceptual Self-Control”(“); Williams (“Mindfulness Meditation”);
and Others.
———–
“The struggle for the technical mastery of our environment fascinates the spectator to such a degree that the importance of individual effort is often forgotten”
(Rudolf Laban in “Effort” page 1).
Meanwhile over in China, Zhu had to “smash” the “Iron Rice Bowl” legislated by first Mao then more recently Deng, in the name of
as it were (‘)individual efficiency in the lifeplace and of productivity in the workplace(‘).
It comes down to (in my words)
(“)If you want a successful team and Nation, you must first ensure Individual Human Development and a lifelong-new-learning environment, for & by every level of The People(“)
We need such Apprenticeships as GH suggests, to help the Lifeplace as much as, even more than, the Workplace;
and such would greatly reduce the numbers and seriousnesses of such faults as “diseases of posture amongst the older generation”;
and would be doing so through much better Western Leaderships
than for instance the Indian “guru classes” possibly speaking the original Hindi,
and than the Chinese possibly delivering the original Tai Chi world-wide in Mandarin.