- Get link
- X
- Other Apps
London was once awash with apprentices. They poured into the city from across the country: at Elizabeth I’s death, they made up over 10 per cent of the entire city population. Fifty years and a civil war later, London had doubled in size, and historians estimate that a quarter of its population had at some point served an apprenticeship.
Apprentices lived as well as trained with their apprenticeship masters. They often made trouble and quite often rioted. They also became skilled journeymen and often employers in their turn, either in London or back in the provinces. The whole system feels surprisingly like the modern university sector, in which young people move en masse across the country, seeking degrees as the passport to good jobs, and with the pull of London as strong as ever.
Or rather, the two did feel similar, until very recently. Because in today’s uncertain economy, degrees are losing their glitter. The average “graduate premium” — the amount that a degree adds to your earnings — is falling, and among young graduates, pessimism about the future is rising. But what alternative is there to university?
Jobs for young school leavers are increasingly temporary and unstable. UK youth unemployment has risen to 15.8 per cent and we have more than a million Neets — young people who are not in employment, education or training. Six in 10 of these young people have never held a job. Three in 10 are inactive due to sickness or disability. And mass apprenticeship has vanished.
A survey revealed 51 per cent of Britons would, at 18, opt for an apprenticeship, only 33 per cent for a degree
Should we — could we — go back to the future? Reviving apprenticeship is an increasingly popular idea, and not just with politicians of all parties. In a large 2024 survey, greater opportunities for apprenticeships got twice the support (76 per cent) of more opportunities to attend university (39 per cent). A 2010 report noted that 97 per cent of mothers of children born between 2000 and 2002 wanted them to go to university. But this year, YouGov reported that 51 per cent of Britons would personally, at 18, opt for an apprenticeship, and only 33 per cent for a degree.
The idea of young people learning on the job from supportive adults is heart-warming. It’s Dick Whittington and his cat, staples of Christmas pantomime: the unhappy young apprentice from the provinces, fleeing the city but turning back when church bells foretell his being “thrice Mayor of London Town”. As the real-life ex-apprentice Richard Whittington was — four times, in fact. Earnings data show that apprenticeship remains an excellent economic option. Those 18- and 19-year-olds with apprenticeships are the most upbeat group in their age cohort: happiest, least anxious and most likely to be satisfied with their lives.
But this is now a very small group. Is a major revival really feasible?
On a greenfield site outside Coventry, there are two gleaming buildings beloved of politicians in search of upbeat photo opportunities. On the right, the Manufacturing Technology Centre, developing and disseminating innovative processes to companies. On the left, MTC Training, a not-for-profit organisation with 1,000 engineering apprentices on its books, gleaming new machines and a range of intensive courses including state-of-the-art robotics.
Standing there, you don’t feel that Midlands manufacturing is on its deathbed — and nor is it. Manufacturing’s share of the economy may have declined fast, but it still employs 2.6mn people in 1,200 large and almost 250,000 small or medium-sized businesses. Specialist engineering sectors — aerospace, specialist machinery, premium cars — have been delivering a growing percentage of the UK’s goods exports. And for engineering, apprenticeship remains as central as it was to Whittington’s London.
JJ Churchill is a Midlands precision engineering company specialising in aero and turbine blades, whose apprentices attend programmes at MTC Training. “We’ve always had apprentices,” says the company’s executive chairman Andrew Churchill, whose grandfather founded the business in 1937. “We always stayed with the model, even when apprenticeships were hugely out of fashion, and we’ve reaped the reward. An apprentice costs us £100,000 to £120,000. But apprentices stay. Graduate hires aren’t sticky and they’ve no work readiness.”
Graham is 24 and two years into the core three-year programme. “I’d been in admin and merchandising for five years, and felt stagnant. I pestered the company — and my only chance was through the apprenticeship scheme.” Happy? “I wouldn’t change anything.”
Khadija found engineering rather faster. “I did one year of A-levels, but I wanted to make things. I found Churchill’s through a government website. I was quite determined!” Her three-year apprenticeship complete, she is now on a part-time manufacturing engineering degree, supported by the company.
It’s tempting to see this as a scalable blueprint. Alas not. Instead, engineering apprenticeships offer a clear picture of a system in deep trouble.
Engineering apprenticeship starts fell from 78,000 in 2016 to 45,000 in 2025, at a time of acute skill shortages. Stephen Phipson, chief executive of the manufacturers’ association Make UK, told me: “We’ve got 40,000 vacancies for skilled employees, and 20 per cent of the workforce is coming up to retirement in the next five years.” Lost apprenticeships are bound to damage the industry.
David Grailey, managing director of MTC Training, explains that reaching engineering technician standard — the end point of Graham or Khadija’s three-year apprenticeships — is “basic”: without it, you can’t maintain quality, let alone innovation.
So what is the problem? Young people are certainly not walking away from apprenticeship. On the contrary. What you’re more likely to hear is: “I’ll go to uni if I can’t get an apprenticeship.” Recent research at King’s College London, my own university, found that for every 17- or 18-year-old who landed an apprenticeship, three had tried and failed. Last year saw the smallest number of under-19s getting apprenticeships since the frozen days of Covid.
Mostly, it’s government policy. There is too much regulation and too much penny-pinching. Too many employers find apprenticeships unaffordable. And a complicated apprenticeship tax, or levy, distorts incentives and expenditures.
England regulates apprenticeship content and funds mandatory “off-the-job” training. So far, so good — that’s also true of countries such as Germany, Switzerland or Denmark, where apprenticeship is a valued, high-quality pathway for large numbers of school leavers. But UK training payments have been frozen in cash terms for years. For engineering technicians, on three-year apprenticeships, the total allocation was £26,000 in 2016 — and is £27,000 today. That’s a period when “core” inflation has increased prices by about 40 per cent, and wages for skilled occupations have risen a good deal more. Hiring trainers and instructors is difficult and many “training providers” can’t cover the fixed costs.
The system is hugely bureaucratic: tolerable for big employers with HR on call, dreadful for anyone else
In most European countries, the state commits to setting up and maintaining a stable network of training centres. In the UK, competing providers, many of them private companies, must peddle their wares. Some of them are huge, and deal almost exclusively with large employers who have sizeable apprentice groups, and where training can be largely online.
Kaplan or Multiverse are examples, specialising in accountancy and digital occupations respectively, and in 2024 they pulled in £52mn and £59mn respectively in government training payments. But many are tiny and the system is chronically unstable: almost half of private-sector providers operating in 2018 were no longer enrolling apprentices six years later. For some of the traditional crafts, such as thatching or stonemasonry, training provision is simply drying up. Hairdressing apprenticeships are nosediving to oblivion.
Apprenticeship is increasingly expensive for English employers. The government has frozen training subsidies but steadily increased national apprenticeship wages for the young, as well as the minimum wage. The Gatsby Foundation recently compared the costs faced by employers of apprentices in England, Austria and Germany. Net costs for the English, in matched trades, were far and away the highest. The system is also hugely bureaucratic: tolerable for big employers with HR on call, dreadful for anyone else.
Capital City College in London does train young apprentices from companies working in film, TV, live events: successful sectors dominated by small companies. But it does this only with an extra layer of help from Workwhile, a specialised charity. Workwhile tries “to get funds to the right place” and help small employers navigate the online bureaucracy, explains co-founder Anna Ambrose; but must also spend much of its time fundraising. The Goldsmiths’ Centre also seems to buck the trend: apprentices work with small jewellers and complete training after five years with a “masterpiece”, just as in the medieval guilds. But that’s only possible because the centre is an independent charity, supported by the deep pockets of the centuries-old Goldsmiths’ Company.
When a core part of national skills development depends on outside subsidies to function, you have a major policy failure. And yet we are raising and spending billions of pounds on apprenticeships — £3.1bn in England alone last year, £2.7bn the year before. Where is it going?
Not to the young. Instead, the typical apprentice is now an older, established white-collar employee. In 2024-25, just over half of all new apprentices were 25 or over. Barely one in five were under 19. And barely one in five was in a skill-shortage occupation either.
Why? Because of the curious design of our apprenticeship levy, a tax whose consequences were unintended and unforeseen. It’s far from the only problem. But changing it will be part of any solution.
In the UK, late-20th-century politicians embraced government training schemes, seeing apprenticeships as inefficient and outmoded. By 2000, it was obvious that the schemes did little or nothing for participants and skill shortages were rife. Governments then stuck an “apprenticeship” label on free courses offered by contracted “providers”, which were encouraged to enrol existing employees. This quickly generated large numbers and very low quality.
The levy, legislated in 2016, seemed like a big improvement. A special tax for apprenticeship is very common in Europe. It ring-fences money for training. It creates a direct link, for employers, between payment and benefit. And employers can’t be free riders, hiring away skilled employees that others have paid to train. The UK levy did get employers reinvolved. But it had and has an extremely odd design.
It is only imposed on large employers: their contributions pay for everything. They get free training for apprentices. Small employers are then funded with anything left over.
Large companies’ attitudes to the training levy, it turns out, have a lot in common with my mother’s view of inheritance tax. They hate, with a passion, leaving any more money in the government’s pockets than they absolutely have to. And they are duly determined to use up their levy pots. One obvious way is to enrol existing employees as apprentices. Another is to prioritise higher-level apprenticeships, which take longer and have larger approved training budgets.
The NHS shows how it is done. It is the largest employer in Europe with more than 200 trusts, all with big payrolls. That makes it a very big levy payer. And it has worked very hard at spending the money.
Ollie Inwards is an apprenticeship manager for NHS East of England. “We do try to spend as much [levy] as we can,” he says. Inwards himself was a levy beneficiary, as a “degree apprentice”, studying one day a week and gaining both a degree and his current job. It is almost impossible to progress in the NHS without the right formal qualifications so “I went on to it quite cynical”, Inwards says. “I was going, ‘I just need to get this over and done with.’ But it was actually really useful, there were elements I was able to apply straight away.” That’s obviously good. But worth the £22,000 of apprenticeship money that funded it?
Rob Brooks was an apprentice project manager at Moorfields Eye Hospital in London. HR staff traditionally had little professional development. “We did genuinely develop” them, Brooks says, using higher-level apprenticeships. But that “should have created opportunities at the bottom of the ladder . . . that bit was missing”. And across the NHS, he sees apprenticeships “being used to increase volume [of spend] rather than a strategic approach”.
British politicians constantly enthuse about apprenticeships. The Tories, at the last election, promised 100,000 more apprenticeships if they won. Suella Braverman, for Reform UK, says “we need 50 per cent of young people to go into the trades”. Sir Keir Starmer pledged to “support 50,000 more young people into apprenticeships”. Prime minister-in-waiting Andy Burnham, too, is promising to expand “the supply of apprenticeships”. But none of them seems to understand that an apprentice needs an employer. Plucking numbers from the air will not deliver them.
The Starmer government has reduced the use of levy money for degree and postgraduate courses taken by older people. Otherwise, it’s been a full-on embrace of Whitehall centralism. Two years in, we have had two mammoth reorganisations of the apprenticeship bureaucracy, and the launch of some “pre-apprenticeships” called Foundation Apprenticeships, which have recruited a little over 100 people to date. We’re also getting short “apprenticeship units” for which levy money can be used, all centrally designed in Whitehall.
No one I spoke to for this article had a positive word to say about them. Most recently, a short-term cash subsidy was announced for small companies that take on a young apprentice. On past evidence this will help. But it’s a gesture of despair: a sticking plaster on an ill-functioning system.
Reviving apprenticeship unquestionably makes sense. Apprenticeship can and does thrive in advanced modern economies, such as Switzerland, Germany or Denmark. We have demand from young people, skill shortages in areas where apprenticeship is both the traditional and best way to learn, and employers who recognise this. But no system can work unless the fundamentals of finance are sorted.
Apprenticeship in premodern England was a huge success. Patrick Wallis, its foremost historian, argues that it played a key role in the “extraordinary and precocious” changes that turned the country “from an agrarian backwater to an industrial power”. And it could develop skills, and play this role, because it worked financially for all concerned.
Masters and apprentices traded food, housing, clothing and training for years of largely unpaid work. Both benefited, which was why parents sought openings. The system was also flexible and decentralised: local employers, local oversight of quality, no big central bureaucracy, no huge deadweight costs and very effective training.
Today, apprenticeship in England is hamstrung by a levy design that distorts employer incentives, and by a Whitehall system divorced from local labour markets that combines penny-pinching with bureaucratic burdens. Channelling our Jacobean forebears would be a good place for reformers to start.
Some names have been changed
Alison Wolf is professor of public sector management at King’s College London and a crossbench peer in the House of Lords
Find out about our latest stories first — follow FT Weekend on Instagram, Bluesky and X, and sign up to receive the FT Weekend newsletter every Saturday morning
Ukraine is striking Russian energy infrastructure at an unprecedented rate.
According to an FT data analysis showing that Kyiv’s intensified drone campaign is spurring Russia’s worst fuel crisis in decades.
The number of successful Ukrainian strikes against Russian refineries reached an all-time monthly record of 16 in May, data from Rochan Consulting, a Polish analytical group monitoring the war, shows.
Since the beginning of 2026, Russian refineries have been hit at least 194 times, an 11-fold increase from the same period the previous year.
Kyiv and Moscow have launched record volumes of drone and missile attacks this year as long-range warfare between the two countries has intensified to its highest level since Russia’s full-scale invasion began in February 2022.
Russia’s defence ministry says it is intercepting the vast majority of incoming Ukrainian attack drones. However, the sheer rise in frequency and quantity of projectiles has resulted in a growing number of hits on strategic energy facilities, strike and interception data show.
The campaign on Russian energy infrastructure has brought Vladimir Putin’s war closer to home than ever and forced more than half of the country’s regions to impose strict limits on fuel sales, while residents have been queueing for hours at petrol stations.
Among other attacks, in June Ukraine hit Moscow’s sole oil refinery several times, sparking huge fires that sent clouds of smoke billowing over the capital, which has not been spared from petrol shortages.
Analysts attribute the growing success of Ukraine’s drone campaign to its ability to significantly increase production, as well as improved management.
American intelligence assistance has also played a role, aiding Kyiv in charting the best paths for its drones and helping to skirt air defences, senior Ukrainian officials told the FT.
“Ukraine has had a technological breakthrough, which allowed them to produce more long-range drones and increase overall mass production,” said Stefan Meister, the head of the Eurasia programme at the German Council on Foreign Relations.
Official figures published by the Russian defence ministry show that at least 63,933 of Kyiv’s drones were intercepted over Russia and occupied Ukrainian territories in the first six months of 2026.
Half of all claimed interceptions took place in the past two months, when Russia reported downing 14,195 drones in May and 17,832 in June. By comparison, the monthly totals for January and February did not exceed 6,000, according to the data.
The findings suggest that the intensification of Kyiv’s aerial campaign is putting Russia’s air defences under unprecedented strain, making it harder for Moscow to defend the critical energy and military assets that support its war machine.
The Ukrainian strikes have also destroyed the Kremlin’s carefully maintained illusion that normal life in Russia has carried on during the war, said Ruslan Pukhov, director of the Centre for Analysis of Strategies and Technologies, a Moscow defence think-tank.
“At a fundamental level, we can see Putin has made another fatal strategic error in this war, thinking for some reason that time was only on his side. He couldn’t get Ukraine to capitulate, but he gave them enough time to develop mass production of ‘deep strikes’,” Pukhov said.
Russia will have to spend considerable resources on improving its air defences and may struggle to produce enough systems and interceptors, Pukhov added.
Kyiv is increasingly able to strike at longer distances and to attack the same target with more drones, wearing down Russian defences. The push has been helped by the appointment of a new digital technology minister in January.
“Ukraine is not simply conducting more strikes than it did a year ago. The campaign has evolved from a relatively narrow effort against oil infrastructure into a broader strategic interdiction campaign aimed at degrading Russia’s energy, logistics, industrial and export systems simultaneously,” said Konrad Muzyka, director of Rochan Consulting.
The intensification comes as Volodymyr Zelenskyy signalled that his forces would make a concerted push this summer to try to compel his Russian counterpart to end his years-long war of aggression.
The Ukrainian leader said last week that Kyiv was embarking on “a 40-day influence operation” to be carried out by its long-range strike units.
However, Putin has shown no sign that Ukraine’s latest campaigns will force him to the negotiating table. Instead, he has doubled down, insisting that Russia is winning the war and that its military goals are still achievable.
His Russian negotiators have told the American side that it needs to get Kyiv to agree to sweeping concessions, senior Ukrainian officials involved in the peace negotiations told the FT. Those officials said the US-brokered trilateral peace talks were unlikely to resume until after the summer.
Russia’s focus on Putin’s maximalist goals means Moscow is unlikely to take part in any meaningful talks before February next year, another person in Moscow involved in back-channel talks to end the war said.
“The preferred option of the Russians so far remains that the Americans will ‘deliver’ Ukraine for us,” the person said. “They are not hinting at any concessions. They keep repeating the same objectives . . . Their basis for negotiations essentially means there is no basis for negotiations.”
Even as Russia’s ground offensive has slowed to a grinding and costly creep, Putin has ordered his troops to capture the remainder of the eastern Donetsk province by the end of the year, according to Zelenskyy, a Ukrainian intelligence assessment seen by the FT and two people who speak to the Russian president.
In a state television interview on June 28, Putin admitted that the Ukrainian strikes were causing “problems” but argued that Russia’s troops still had the upper hand.
The Russian president has also increasingly relied on air power to hit at Ukraine, with the scale of Russia’s missile and drone attacks increasing in recent months.
The combined number of Russian missiles and drones launched on Ukraine has exceeded 5,000 per month since February, according to Ukrainian government data.
On Thursday, Russian forces launched 74 missiles and nearly 500 drones at Kyiv. At least 30 people were killed and more than 90 injured, according to Zelenskyy. Ten people were still unaccounted for late on Friday as rescuers searched through debris at three strike locations, he said.
- Get link
- X
- Other Apps
Comments
Post a Comment